He discovered more than 400 species of ants and proposed to conserve half of the land and the sea to fight against climate change
With great desolation we have received in the scientific community the sad news of the death of Professor Edward O. Wilson, just the day after learning of the loss of Thomas Lovejoy, another giant of ecology, conservation biology, and the study of Biodiversity . . Both were united by their interest and pioneering work in developing the concept of biodiversity, but also by their titanic effort in the conservation of our planet. Wilson is, to paraphrase Sir Isaac Newton, one of “those giants on whose shoulders we walk in order to be able to see beyond.”
Professor at Harvard University from 1956-to 1996, where he also directed for years the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Wilson’s work is immense, with more than 30 books and 430 papers enormously influential in the development of ecology as a science.
His theory of island biogeography stands out, according to which the biodiversity of the islands is due to balances between colonization and extinction processes, which has been the conceptual basis for, for example, the design of conservation areas and the analysis of the effects of devastating effects of forest loss. In 1975 with his book Sociobiology: ‘ The New Synthesis ‘ he created the new discipline of sociobiology, to understand the origin and evolution of animal societies, including the human, not exempt from debate and criticism. In recent years his contributions to the thought on the conservation of nature place him among the great humanists and thinkers of the s. XX: the ideas of ‘ Biophilia ‘, the deep reflection, in his book ‘ On Human Nature‘ (Pulitzer Prize for Non-fiction, 1978), on the role of biology in the origin and evolution of human culture, or his visionary ‘Half-Earth’ proposal for the conservation of half the planet, or his reflections on human nature and our place on Earth constitute an enormous intellectual legacy for future generations. That ultimate responsibility that we humans have towards our planet stems from the close, though not widely appreciated, the link between the natural sciences and the social sciences. The problem was addressed by Wilson in one of his last books, ‘ Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge ‘.‘ (1998) defending the powerful tool of scientific humanism, a worldview compatible with growing scientific knowledge of the real world and of nature, and based on reason, secular ethics, and philosophical naturalism.
Wilson was a naturalist. He always defended the importance of taxonomic knowledge of species (the idea of cataloging the planet’s Biodiversity) and how we are losing the experts capable of such cataloging due to the lack of adequate funding for the maintenance of museums and herbariums. Such knowledge is essential to know the scope and extension of the accelerated extinction of species that we are witnessing. Wilson’s naturalistic foundation inspired all of his work and transcended beyond his disciplines of zoology and ecology. The foundation of this naturalistic base was his passionate interest in ants and, in general, in insects, as shown in his fabulous autobiography ‘ Naturalist ‘ (1994) and which he would later develop in his monumental work ‘ The Ants ‘ (1990). ).
Among more than 150 distinctions received, one of the most significant was the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award (2010). I remember that the day after the ceremony I had arranged to meet him to accompany him to the Royal Botanic Garden and visit the library and herbarium, something that we had already discussed on a couple of previous visits that I had made to his laboratory at Harvard. Like a small child, he enjoyed seeing the originals of Mutis’ plates and, above all, the original writings of descriptions of ant species that he had later studied in Colombia and Peru and that he would later highlight in his book ‘ Kingdom of Ants: José Celestino Mutis and the Dawn of Natural History in the New World‘ (2010). As we walked through the garden he would stop at each flowering plant and identify the insects that visited the flowers; his naturalistic knowledge of him was portentous. His immense intellectual legacy, his ability to build bridges between areas of knowledge, from biology to the social sciences and the humanities, and his empathy with the defense of life in all its forms will remain with us forever.
