By Steve Sailer
12/27/2021
Edward O. Wilson, the famous naturalist who wrote Sociobiology, is said to have died today at 92.
In order to withstand the onslaught of his Harvard Biology department colleague Stephen Jay Gould, Edward O. Wilson taught himself in the mid-1970s how to write like a literary intellectual. He immediately won a Pulitzer Prize for On Human Nature.
E.O. Wilson’s whole life was like that. As Bill & Ted would say: Triumphant.
Here’s my review in 2000 of the 25th anniversary edition of Sociobiology.
Here’s my review of his 2010 novel Anthill.
Edward O. Wilson’s new book, Anthill: A Novel, is, in many ways, a traditional first novel: it’s primarily a quasi-autobiographical fictional retelling of the author’s childhood and young manhood. Anthill is the tale of Wilson’s alter ego, a bug-loving Eagle Scout with the venerable Southern name of Raphael Semmes Cody, who grows up exploring nature in an old growth wilderness outside Mobile, Alabama.
On the other hand, most first-time novelists aren’t octogenarians. Nor are they, typically, the world’s top expert on ants. They haven’t been famous / notorious since the 1975 publication of their scientific masterwork, Sociobiology, either. Nor are they the chief inventor of the influential cause of preserving biodiversity.
And, generally speaking, autobiographical novels don’t include a 73-page centerpiece narrating the genocidal wars between ant colonies that young Raff tracks for his Insect Study merit badge. Or at least they don’t recount them from the ants” point of view, with dialogue exchanged via chemical secretions: “The signals now proclaimed, Food, food. I have found food, follow my trail!”…
And while many novelists are nostalgists, few are as thoroughly pro-conservative as E. O. Wilson. When it comes to sympathetic portrayals of white Republican Southerners, Wilson’s Anthill makes the recent Sandra Bullock hit movie The Blind Side seem like a Paul Krugman op-ed.
Particularly moving is the depiction in the first third of the book of the often-tense marriage between Raff’s redneck father, who works to instill in his son the best aspects of the good ole boy code of honor, and his old money mother, who names him after the Confederate admiral in her genteel family tree. …
Wilson was a nature-loving Gulf Coast boy back during the Depression, a story he told wonderfully in his autobiography Naturalist: “Most children have a bug period, and I never grew out of mine.” In Anthill, though, he has moved his protagonist’s birth up to the Jimmy Carter era. This both makes the story more relevant and lets Wilson avoid the usual ritual groveling over Jim Crow.
Tom Wolfe famously called Wilson “the new Darwin.” That’s a bit overstated, but it reflects the affinity between the Virginian Wolfe and the Alabaman Wilson as proud Sons of the South.
Wilson is heir to a long Anglo-American tradition of evolutionary theory founded largely by other intellectual country boys, such as Thomas Malthus, Charles Darwin, and Francis Galton. In contrast, Wilson’s bitter enemies in the Harvard biology department were two city boys: the Chicagoan James D. Watson and the New Yorker Stephen Jay Gould. (The acerbic Watson and the gentlemanly Wilson have since reconciled.)
In Britain, it has been common for conservative writers such as J.R.R. Tolkien (Lord of the Rings) and Richard Adams (the great talking rabbit novel Watership Down) to be skeptical of development out of their Tory love for the countryside. In America, though, conservatism is associated with boundless building. …
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