Matthew said that Edward O. Wilson, known to all of us as "Ed", died yesterday at the age of 92. He died at the same age as my mentor, Dick Lewontin, who was born in 1929.
Ed was a polymath who was a Harvard professor for 46 years before retiring, so I will leave the details of his career and accomplishments to the formal obituaries and to Wikipedia. He was working very hard up to his death, like his colleague, who died at 100.
Lewontin's lab was one floor below Ed's lab in the fourth floor of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. They were light years apart, for Lewontin was intensely disliked by Ed, and the feeling was mutual. Ed had less rancor, he was more or less surprised when Lewontin and Steve Gould attacked him as a reactionary biological determinist after Ed published his landmark book, Sociobiology.
I didn't share Dick's dislike of Ed. You could not dislike Ed if you knew him as a person. Dick and Steve had an animus based on politics. I wrote about how Ed got me into Harvard as a graduate student in a single day, an act of generosity I will never forget. I was a friend of some of the people in Ed's lab and taught two semesters of Bio 1 under him. I spent a fair amount of time on the fourth floor, but never on the third floor in my six years at Harvard.
He was near Lewontin only once. Ed joined me in the elevator when I was waiting with Dick for the elevator to the third floor. The tension became very intense. The ride up three floors was silent and uncomfortable, and not a word was exchanged between the two Harvard professors.
Ed wrote a number of books and papers about group selection, which he believed to be an explanation for the differences between insects and humans. This view was almost surely wrong, but Ed was tenacious in clinging to it. I think he made the only big mistake in his career. I had to review one of his books and panned it.
When I interviewed Dick a few years ago about his own career, he had nothing nice to say about Wilson; in fact, that was the one time he made me turn the tape off, and you can imagine what he said during the hiatus, though I am not at liberty to reveal it Dick mourned the loss of the great evolutionary biologists who ruled when he was a student. Dick said there were no great ones left. Where are the great ones?
He was wrong. Ed was a great one. Evolutionary biology, ant biology, and conserve biology will be poorer without him. He was a great guy, rare for someone who was so famous. Ask people who knew him.
I took two photos of Ed at a lunch at Naomi Pierce and Andrew Berry in Cambridge in October of 2007, though I don't remember what it was about.
Talking to someone.
