all Edward Osborne Wilson stories

Edward O. Wilson awarded 2007 Catalonia International Prize

404132862 — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 15:42:44 -0500

Edward O. Wilson, Pellegrino University Professor Emeritus, has been selected from a pool of 235 nominees, from 227 institutions in 27 countries, to receive the 2007 Catalonia International Prize.

Wilson was cited by the selection jury for the courage and honesty he has shown while defending his theories, "when it was and was not politically correct" to do so.

The Catalonia award is presented annually by the Catalan government to acknowledge contributions to the development of cultural, scientific, or human values around the world.

Yale honors E. O. Wilson with Verrill Medal

404132862 — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 14:58:23 -0400

Yale honors Wilson with Verrill Medal

Pellegrino University Professor Emeritus E.O. Wilson received the Addison Emery Verrill Medal from Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History on Wednesday (Oct. 17) in New Haven, Conn. Awarded by the curators and trustees of the museum, the medal was established in 1959 to honor “some signal practitioner in the arts of natural history and natural science.” Wilson was given the award for his career-spanning efforts to educate the public about the ecological consequences of human behavior.

Biologists remember landmark theory

404132862 — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 17:12:41 -0400

Forty years ago, Edward O. Wilson and Robert H. MacArthur described how size and isolation determine how many species an island can support. Last week, biologists gathered to mark the theory’s anniversary, calling it a “pivotal point” in ecology’s relatively short history.

Professor Lord Robert May of Oxford University said the word “ecology” — which describes the interaction between an organism and its environment — was coined just a little more than a century ago. By the 1960s, he said, the science of ecology was still mainly a descriptive one, lacking theories to tie together the observations by scientists in the field.

Leading scientists announce creation of Encyclopedia of Life

50443248 — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 12:00:45 -0400

Realizing a dream articulated in 2003 by renowned biologist E.O. Wilson, Harvard and four partner institutions have launched an ambitious effort to create an Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), an unprecedented project to document online every one of Earth's 1.8 million known species. For the first time in history, the EOL would grant scientists, students, and others multimedia access to all known living species, even those just discovered.

The effort, announced today (May 9), will be supported by a new $10 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and $2.5 million from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Wilson urges alliance to save species

50443248 — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 10:01:31 -0400

Edward O. Wilson sees a future in which science and religion join forces to save the natural world.

Without such an alliance, said the legendary Harvard biologist and author, an alternative future is in store for the human race: one of accelerating environmental cataclysm fueled by overpopulation, deforestation, declining fisheries, and climate change.

If nothing is done, by the end of the century one-half of all species will be gone, or nearly gone, said Wilson, Pellegrino University Professor Emeritus. In the next 50 years, a quarter of those species will become extinct because of climate change alone. That's a fast blow to Earth's biodiversity, which took 3.5 billion years to evolve.

Dominican insects, digitized

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:25:41 -0400

It's the brilliant colors and otherworldly shapes of the Dominican insects that catch the eye and draw a viewer in. It's the alien forms magnified for all to see clearly that keeps one standing before the images hung at the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center, studying them. The digital images are one-third of the center's show "Tre: Dominican Contemporaneity," which is the result of a collaboration by three Dominican artists, sociologist Soraya Arecena, and Harvard entomologist Brian D. Farrell, professor of biology and curator of entomology in the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ).

Farrell's images are just the tip of a digital iceberg, a growing catalog of the Dominican Republic's insect life that Dominican and Harvard students have been compiling for four years and that stands now at 40,000 images representing 6,000 species.

"This is the front end of a growing encyclopedia of life of the Dominican Republic," said Farrell on a walk-through of the gallery.

Farrell's project to catalog Dominican biodiversity began with a student field trip in his insect biology course in 2002. Students on that excursion fogged trees and collected the insects that fell onto cloth sheets slung below. The students helped identify 500 insects, including many new species, which were then digitally scanned and entered into a database.

Since then, Farrell has enlisted a growing corps of both U.S. and Dominican scientists and students from museums and universities in both countries.

The students, directed by the scientists, continue to collect, catalog, and scan insects. They occasionally make significant finds, such as the discovery last year of a citrus tree pest previously unknown in the Dominican Republic and responsible for millions of dollars of losses elsewhere.

Taking a look at how ant (and human) societies might grow

50443248 — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 13:47:56 -0400

Edward O. Wilson has learned a great deal about life by studying ant societies. In this knowledge, he finds parallels between the social interactions of insects and those of birds, lions, monkeys, apes, and even humans. The last parallel got him into trouble in the late 1970s, but he now enjoys credit for establishing a new field of science - sociobiology, the influence of biology on human behavior.

How ant (and human) societies might grow

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:22:31 -0400

Pellegrino University Professor Emeritus Edward O. Wilson remains fascinated with the highly organized societies of ants, bees, wasps, termites, and humans. He and Bert Holldobler, with whom he shared a Pulitzer Prize for their book "The Ants," have published a paper about how such societies originate, which appears in the Sept. 20, 2005 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The original colonies of humans, like those of ants and termites, they propose, could have arisen in much the same way.

Both ants and humans have achieved "spectacular ecological success," they write. For humans, this includes winning out over competing forms of humanlike creatures who evolved from apelike ancestors.

Solving the mystery of a centuries-old plague

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:36:16 -0400

Edward O. Wilson identified two different ant species in investigating the mystery of centuries-old plagues, a tropical fire ant in the early 1500s and an introduced African ant in the late 1700s. Both ant plagues came with widespread crop destruction that Wilson blames on the arrival of sap-sucking insects that are tended by the ants in exchange for a sweet honeydew secretion. "This was the first recorded environmental crisis of the New World," Wilson said. "The problem with invasive species has been as old as the appearance of the first invasive species to the New World — the Europeans. That first invasive species [Europeans] became tormented by the second [ants]." Wilson, Pellegrino University Professor Emeritus, said he became interested in accounts of the plague ants during research on West Indian ant species that he began in the 1980s. As he became more familiar with the ant fauna of the area, particularly in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Wilson began to comb through historical material looking for clues to the plague ants' identity. Wilson uncovered several historical accounts of the two plagues, which occurred on several Caribbean islands from 1518 to 1519 and from 1760 to 1770. Settlers of the time assumed that the crop destruction came from the ants but Wilson doesn't believe that was the case. A second insect, unnoticed among the swarming ants, destroyed the crops.

A voice for the wilderness

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:18:42 -0400

Famed Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson is blunt about the dangers facing the world. He describes a 50-year "bottleneck" during which the Earth's human population will continue to grow -- perhaps to as high as 10 billion. During that time, humanity's increasing numbers will increase the pressure to convert the world's undeveloped areas to farmland, to log its forests or mine its wild places for resources, or to scour the remaining wilderness for animals to eat. But Wilson also sees room for hope. He points out that grassroots environmental awareness is rapidly increasing, as evidenced by the swelling memberships of nongovernmental conservation organizations.