Lest darkness fall: E. O. Wilson in 2009 with Alice Dreger
In 2015 Alice Dreger published Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and One Scholar’s Search for Justice in 2015, and writing now in almost-in-2022 I feel there’s a Cassandra-like character to […]
E. O. Wilson, 1929-2021
Hopi Hoekstra has announced that E. O. Wilson has died. Not on Wikipedia yet as of this writing, but she would know. The obituaries will come flowing in. Wilson was […]
E. O. Wilson in The Atlantic
The Atlantic has a huge profile of E. O. Wilson up. The main course is his new book, The Social Conquest of Earth. It seems to be an elaboration of some of the ideas in the infamous Martin Nowak paper which resulted in a huge counter-response from biologists. But this part was kind of fun: […]
E. O. Wilson against Hamiltonian inclusive fitness
There is a new paper in Nature which is a full frontal attack on the utility of William D. Hamilton’s inclusive fitness framework in explaining eusociality. Martin A. Nowak, Corina E. Tarnita, & Edward O. Wilson are the authors. Wilson is famous in large part for his authorship of Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, and is […]
Ant fiction
Steve points me to an except from E. O. Wilson’s new ant novel in The New Yorker. In the late 1990s I read Empire of the Ants, which had a significant ant-centric aspect. A friend who later went on to do graduate work in entemology borrowed it from me,…