Edward o wilson autobiography vs biography

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  • What did edward o wilson discover

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    Naturalist

    June 28, 2020
    For a scientist's memoir, there was disappointingly little science. I suspect Wilson wanted to avoid repeating what he had already said in his other popular books. (My favorite Wilson books were coauthored with Bert Hölldobler, though, and maybe I just prefer Hölldobler's style.) Too little science, and too much academic politics! It was interesting to hear Wilson's description of his conflict with James Watson (who after proposing the DNA double helix structure in 1953 joined Harvard's biology department in 1956 and championed a reorientation toward molecular biology). But some of the politics is just obscure, and I don't care how or why somebody became Such-and-Such Named Chair at X University. The ending is also pretty weak; Wilson just gets very defensive about sociobiology applied to humans (without actually describing *any* of the science), and about his lack of an environmental record.

    Still, there are a good number of worthy anecdotes, especially from his younger years before he had settled in at Harvard. His description of his childhood, already fascinated with discovering and classifying species, is very cool (though old news). I most liked his too-brief story of studying insect repopulation after fumigation of tiny Florida islets.

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    Edward O. Physicist, Ph.D.

    Considering county show much command were quoted out spick and span context, extend might arrange have feeling much depict a difference.

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  • edward o wilson autobiography vs biography

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    9-minute read
    keywords: ecology, entomology, history of science

    The recent loss of famous entomologist and brilliant mind Edward O. Wilson shook me. In an attempt to find some solace I turned to Richard Rhodes’s recent biography, published only a month before. I already had this lined up for review and was looking forward to it, but this must be the saddest possible reason to prioritise reading a book. Fortunately, I found a warm and respectfully written biography that, as the title suggests, focuses foremost on the scientific achievements of Wilson.

    Rhodes opens his biography, unexpectedly, with a 25-year-old Wilson collecting ants throughout the South Pacific for the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Harvard. The next chapter covers Wilson’s itinerant childhood—with the divorce of his parents and his father’s frequent work-related moves going some way towards explaining the solace he found in nature. These first two chapters are easily the most private. They feature the infamous fishing accident that permanently damaged Wilson’s eyesight, his father’s shocking suicide, and a young man’s letters to his waiting fiancée. But also his early commitment to entomology, to “the small things that run the world”, as he famously said. In Wilso