Scientist by Richard Rhodes

Author:Richard Rhodes [Rhodes, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-11-09T00:00:00+00:00

Altmann had warned Wilson to move carefully around the macaque infants or risk attack. If you’re challenged, Altmann cautioned, don’t stare at the challenger; like most wild animals, macaques interpreted a stare as a threat. Bow your head and look away. Wilson needed the advice. On the second day of his visit, he moved too quickly near a young monkey, which shrieked its distress. “At once the number two male ran up to me,” Wilson recalls, “and gave me a hard stare, with his mouth gaping—the rhesus elevated-threat expression. I froze, genuinely afraid. Before Cayo Santiago I had thought of macaques as harmless little monkeys. This individual, with his tensed, massive body rearing up before me, looked for the moment like a small gorilla.” Wilson lowered his head and looked away. Eventually, the macaque accepted the gesture of submission and moved off.

Back on mainland Puerto Rico in the evenings—Cayo Santiago is less than a mile offshore—Wilson and Altmann discussed the social behaviors they studied, looking for connections. To Wilson’s frustration, they found very few: “Primate troops and social insect colonies seemed to have almost nothing in common.” Macaques were organized in dominance orders, each individual known and recognized. Social insects, anonymous and short-lived, flourished in caste-based harmony. In 1956, neither Wilson nor Altmann had the conceptual tools to map out much more than superficial connections, if any. Altmann got busy working on his doctoral dissertation on the Cayo Santiago macaques; Wilson returned to teaching and fighting off the molecular biologists.

Ironically, it was partly Wilson’s struggle with the molecular biologists that led him to the approach to a unifying theory that he was looking for. That ongoing challenge had threatened to engulf evolutionary biology and continued to model a more formal and mathematical science. Wilson had titled the final chapter of The Insect Societies “The Prospect for a Unified Sociobiology.” Though the term “sociobiology” had been used in other contexts as far back as 1912, Wilson appropriated it as a term of art meaning “the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior.” Sociobiology, he thought, would grow out of population biology as a counterweight to molecular biology, because not everything in biology could be reduced to the molecular level. He had come to believe that “populations follow at least some laws different from those operating at the molecular level, laws that cannot be constructed by any logical progression upward from molecular biology.”

To that end, he studied population biology in the late 1960s even as he worked out the observational and theoretical scientific record of the social insects. Not one to waste such an effort, he and his Harvard colleague William H. Bossert, a biologist and applied mathematician, wrote A Primer of Population Biology, publishing the densely mathematical book the same year as The Insect Societies, 1971.

If none of his colleagues who were vertebrate specialists were prepared to write about the social behavior of the vertebrates, he would have to do that work himself: he was, as he says, a “congenital synthesizer.

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