A CUE FROM ANTS

It is a space that holds the world’s largest collection of ants, some 14,000 species. Curators are checking the drawers, dominated by the tall figure of Dr. Wilson, who is trying to contain his excitement: the 14,001st ant species has just been discovered in the soils of a Brazilian forest. He steamrolls any incipient skepticism about the ant’s uniqueness — the new species is a living coelacanth of ants, a primitive throwback to the first ant, a wasp that shed its wings and assigned all its descendants to live in earth, not their ancestral air. The new ant is so alien, Dr. Wilson explains, so unlike any known to earthlings, that it will be named as if it came from another planet.

Ants are Dr. Wilson’s first and enduring love. But he has become one of the world’s best-known biologists through two other passions, his urge to create large syntheses of knowledge and his gift for writing. Through the power of his words, he champions the world’s biodiversity and regularly campaigns for conservation measures.

Though he celebrated his 79th birthday last month, Dr. Wilson is generating a storm of literary output that would be impressive for someone half his age. The Superorganism, with Bert Hölldobler, a new book with information on termites, wasps, bees and updates to their encyclopedic work on ants, will be published in November. He is preparing a treatise on the forces of social evolution, which seems likely to apply to people the lessons evident in ant colonies.

Beneath his gentle manner and Southern charm, Dr. Wilson is a scrapper. He grew up in Alabama and Florida, where the local custom with respect to fistfights was that one could prevail or get knocked out, with no third option. He was not picking a fight when he published Sociobiology in 1975, a synthesis of ideas about the evolution of social behavior. He asserted that many human behaviours had a genetic basis, an idea then disputed by many social scientists and by Marxists intent on remaking humanity. Dr. Wilson was amazed at what ensued, which he describes as a long campaign of verbal assault and harassment with a distinctly Marxist flavour led by two Harvard colleagues, Richard C. Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould.

The new fight is one Dr. Wilson has picked. It concerns a central feature of evolution, one with considerable bearing on human social behaviours. The issue is the level at which evolution operates. Many evolutionary biologists have been persuaded, by works like The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, that the gene is the only level at which natural selection acts. Dr. Wilson, changing his mind because of new data about the genetics of ant colonies, now believes that natural selection operates at many levels, including at the level of a social group.

It is through multilevel or group-level selection—favouring the survival of one group of organisms over another—that evolution has in Dr. Wilson’s view brought into being the many essential genes that benefit the group at the individual’s expense. In humans, these may include genes that underlie generosity, moral constraints, even religious behaviour. Such traits are difficult to account for, though not impossible, on the view that natural selection favours only behaviours that help the individual to survive and leave more children. “I believe that deep in their heart everyone working on social insects is aware that the selection that created them is multilevel selection,” Dr. Wilson said.

Last year he and David Sloan Wilson, a longtime advocate of group-level selection, laid out a theoretical basis for this view in an article in the Quarterly Review of Biology. Their statement evoked a heated response from Dr. Dawkins in New Scientist; he accused them of lying on a minor point and demanded an apology.

Proposing an idea heretical to many evolutionary biologists is one of the smaller skirmishes Dr. Wilson has set off. In his 1998 book Consilience, he proposed that many human activities, from economics to morality, needed to be temporarily removed from the hands of the reigning specialists and given to biologists to work out a proper evolutionary foundation.

Dr. Wilson’s treatise, on the shaping of social behaviour, seems likely to tread firmly into this vexed arena. Morality and religion, he suspects, are traits based on group selection. “Groups with men of quality—brave, strong, innovative, smart and altruistic—would tend to prevail, as Darwin said, over those groups that do not have those qualities so well developed,” Dr. Wilson said.

“Now that, obviously, is a rather unpopular idea, very politically incorrect if pushed, but nevertheless Darwin may have been right about that. Undoubtedly that will be another big controversy,” he said without evident regret, “and that will be my next book, when I get through my novel.” (New York Times)