Credit: Mark Mahaney
"Let the waters teem with countless living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of heaven.'" E.O. Wilson is quoting from the biblical account of the fifth day of creation. "Isn't that lovely?" he asks, his voice lilting with pleasure. "Whether you believe that there is a god who touched the universe with a magic wand or not, it's a command—[one] I think scientists could respond to as well as religious folk."
Wilson sits in his office on the fourth floor of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, across the hall from the university's world-famous ant collection. His hands move in animated gestures, his shoulders falling forward into a natural hunch—the "lifetime posture" he developed by his late teens from stooping low to the ground to inspect small creatures.
The reference to biodiversity in the seminal text of Judeo-Christian culture resonates deeply with Wilson. Raised a Baptist and "born again" as a teenager, he has championed biodiversity as an academic and a writer for more than 50 years. His new book, The Creation, is an appeal to the religious right to "consider forming an alliance to do something that science and religion, the most powerful social forces in the world, are uniquely prepared to do: save the creation."
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Wilson, who is Harvard's Pellegrino University Professor Emeritus, has built a legacy so elaborate that it's difficult to identify which field of science he has most influenced. His achievements in science are staggering. Monikers such as "modern-day Darwin" and "guide for humanity" are frequently used to describe him. At his core, however, he is an entomologist. In the late 1950s, Wilson discovered pheromones as the basis of chemical communication in ants. He identified 624 ant species in one genus and named 337 of them (19 percent of all ant species in the Western hemisphere). He established evolutionary biology as an esteemed pursuit in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a time when the discovery of the double helix and the molecular revolution it unleashed were eclipsing more traditional scientific disciplines. His work with Robert MacArthur on island biogeography is a seminal text in ecology. He's been recognized internationally for contributions to science and the humanities and has received numerous awards including the National Medal of Science and Japan's International Prize for Biology. He's won two Pulitzers. And if Rachel Carson is the mother of the modern-day environmental movement, Edward O. Wilson is quite arguably its father. Indeed, those who know him call this work his mission.
Even with these considerable accomplishments, 60 years of research and more than 400 published papers, it is not a work of scientific discovery for which Wilson will be best remembered in 100 years. In 1998, Wilson came out with Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, an attempt to demonstrate that all knowledge is intrinsically linked, both within the sciences and between science and the humanities. Reduced to such a summary it can seem obvious, but the idea of consilience is radical. Wilson's vision imagines absolute unity through a glorious and harmonious logic between fields as seemingly dissociated as musicology and neuroscience, physics and consciousness, genetics and culture. Wilson calls this intellectual linkage "the greatest enterprise of the mind," not yet a science but rather an emerging and visionary ethos. It's at the intersection of these domains where most real-world problems exist, writes Wilson, yet "few concepts serve to guide us."