E.O. Wilson has died
reuters.com
reuters.com
>“A colony of ants is more than just an aggregate of insects that are living together. One ant is no ant.”
Many publications and articles on the topic of actors reference it at some point.
I mean in terms of people using it to advance some kind of racial politics it's actually obvious why it's offensive but one of the funnier E.O. Wilson moments I recall is a Youtube video where one commenter accused him of promoting communism by means of teaching about eusociality in ants.
Just sharing because I really liked this, he comes across as a really lovely man.
He came up in casual conversation yesterday, re science and learning math, as well as how tough learning math can be once you're older. (He famously attempted to learn calculus in his 30s, and had a struggle, despite already being a Harvard professor, and world-class scientist)
Be aware that Wilson's group selection theory is not generally accepted by other evolutionary biologists. Read about Wilsion-Dawkins kin selection vs. group arguments and debates.
ps. There are two Wilson's in the group selection side (David Sloan Wilson and E. O. Wilson) it's easy to mix them if you don't read carefully.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-Earth
A great read, I think we should make real his proposal. I believe we will eventually.
E.g., Barbara Streisand lives on a mansion on the coast. And she also supports an NGO that is focused on preventing any new construction on the coast. For the environment.
-- E.O. Wilson
Much like visual artists need to master the brush or the pencil, but this technical mastery isn't enough to produce lasting Art, the method itself does not produce good Science.
Maybe the long list given by Wilson is too long (there are definitely extroverted scientists out there), but at the very least, a good scientist needs to be curious.
— E.O. Wilson
https://news.mongabay.com/2021/12/tom-lovejoy-prominent-cons...
https://www.amazon.com/Scientist-Wilson-Life-Nature/dp/03855...
Rhodes is famous for this book, that’s often mentioned on HN
Making of the Atomic Bomb: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1451677618/
— Edward O. Wilson
I know some biologists, and they often wish that the world should be "rich" from a biologist's perspective even if the biologist isn't there to observe it.
It's a curious perspective to me. If you don't exist, why would it matter whether the world is (a) green and buzzing with insects, or (b) reduced to grey goo or strange matter? Why would your aesthetic preferences be relevant in a world that you don't exist in? It's not like you're going to get to watch this universe through a viewport.
It's not about "biology". It's about roles in the ecosystem.
A direct question would be easy to answer. As it is, I'm sorry to hear about your confusion :-)
An aesthetic preference is essentially an ideal against which we compare our experience. Whether we expect to meet that ideal does not diminish its power. In fact if it was easily met, it would not be much of an ideal.
“Rich” refers to the variety and abundance of living things. The total biomass of living things has declined (there’s less overall) and what is left is concentrated into far fewer species than previously.
Just taken as a store of information, the loss is staggering. But from a practical perspective we are less rich; it’s far harder today to catch fish than it used to be, for example.
An icy comet circling way out beyond Neptune is an example of a system somewhat near equilibrium.
[0] https://cosmosmagazine.com/earth/sustainability/chernobyl-is...
E O Wilson gives us perspective by seeing the world not as a bauble in a real estate store, but as a canvas for all of biology.
http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Debate/CEP_Gould.html
Btw, Wilson was well aware that humans are not insects. He is the one who said of socialism for humans, "Great idea, wrong species".
The letter signers you posted say they are from the center for evolutionary psychology, departments of anthropology and psychology. This is the whole problem, they have one foot (if not both feet) outside of science and in social science.
Yes, he said that, but he said it in the context of giving descriptions of what those evolutionary biologists were doing that were completely disconnected from reality.
> The letter signers you posted
Are an anthropologist and a psychologist, yes. But the criticisms of Gould that they describe are by no means limited to those fields. The names they list in footnote 2, for example, are a roll call of major evolutionary biologists of the 20th century. Those people are not "outside of science"; they are right in the middle of the scientific field that Gould portrayed himself as an expert on, and they all say Gould's claims are nonsense.
My original reasons for writing The Mismeasure of Man mixed the personal with the professional. I confess, first of all, to strong feelings on this particular issue. I grew up in a family with a tradition of participation in campaigns for social justice, and I was active, as a student, in the civil rights movement at a time of great excitement and success in the early 1960s. (p. 36)Wilson specifically used the term "socialism". The full quote is given here:
The two terms were more or less synonymous when Marx wrote. Later ideologues have attempted to differentiate them; whether or not they have succeeded is a matter of opinion.
It seems that what Marx called socialism is basically communism.
By 1888, Marxists employed socialism in place of communism as the latter had come to be considered an old-fashioned synonym for socialism. It was not until after the Bolshevik Revolution that socialism was appropriated by Vladimir Lenin to mean a stage between capitalism and communism.
Many people (including me) would say that there isn't any meaningful difference between the two, whether we are talking about Marx's time or any time since. I don't know whether Wilson thought there was any meaningful difference between the two; as far as I know nobody asked him.
That probably "feels right" to say, but is it backed up with data? DNA is a real thing, not a social construct.
>"I believe that ALL "traits" can be explained by social environment rather than by biology."
Now I can definitely understand the controversy of taking the position that all human behavior is a product of genetic determination, but the polar opposite that all human behavior is explained socially/with learned behavior to be just as wrong. I know it's not particularly insightful to admit that it is a combination of both, though.