E.O. Wilson | Britannica

E.O. Wilson

Websites : E.O. Wilson Foundation, E.O. Wilson's TED Talks

E.O. Wilson is a noted contributor to Encyclopaedia Britannica online. Read Britannica's biography of E.O. Wilson

BIOGRAPHY

Edward O. Wilson, one of the world’s most distinguished biologists and naturalists and the foremost expert on ants, was professor emeritus and honorary curator in entomology at Harvard University.

His seminal works include Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975); On Human Nature (1978), for which he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1979; The Ants (1990; with Bert Hölldobler), which also won a Pulitzer; Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998); and Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life (2016), about our plummeting biodiversity.

In 1990 Wilson and American biologist Paul Ehrlich shared the Crafoord Prize, awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to support areas of science not covered by the Nobel Prizes.

Primary Contributions (1)

Mass Extinction

A realistic prediction of the future depends upon recognition that humanity originated in Africa by a series of accidents bordering on the bizarre. The unique winning combination was, first, a relatively immense body size, roughly over 10 kilograms, attained by fewer than 1 in 10,000 species in the…

Publications (8)

Half-Earth Our Planet's Fight for Life (April 2017)

By Edward O Wilson

"An audacious and concrete proposal…Half-Earth completes the 86-year-old Wilson’s valedictory trilogy on the human animal and our place on the planet." —Jedediah Purdy, New Republic

In his most urgent book to date, Pulitzer Prize–winning author and world-renowned biologist Edward O. Wilson states that in order to stave off the mass extinction of species, including our own, we must move swiftly to preserve the biodiversity of our planet. In this "visionary blueprint for...

The Origins of Creativity (October 2017)

By Edward O Wilson

An eloquent exploration of creativity, The Origins of Creativity grapples with the question of how this uniquely human expression—so central to our identity as individuals and, collectively, as a species—came about and how it has manifested itself throughout the history of our species.

In this profound and lyrical book, one of our most celebrated biologists offers a sweeping examination of the relationship between the humanities and the sciences: what they offer to each other,...

The Meaning of Human Existence (September 2015)

By Edward O Wilson

New York Times Bestseller
Finalist for the National Book Award (Nonfiction)

How did humanity originate and why does a species like ours exist on this planet? Do we have a special place, even a destiny in the universe? Where are we going, and perhaps, the most difficult question of all, "Why?"

In The Meaning of Human Existence, his most philosophical work to date, Pulitzer Prize–winning biologist Edward O. Wilson grapples with these and other existential...

The Social Conquest of Earth (April 2013)

By Edward O Wilson

Sparking vigorous debate in the sciences, The Social Conquest of Earth upends “the famous theory that evolution naturally encourages creatures to put family first” (Discover). Refashioning the story of human evolution, Wilson draws on his remarkable knowledge of biology and social behavior to demonstrate that group selection, not kin selection, is the premier driving force of human evolution. In a work that James D. Watson calls “a monumental exploration of the biological origins of...

Anthill A Novel (April 2011)

By E O Wilson

The two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning biologist delivers "an astonishing literary achievement" (Anthony Gottlieb, The Economist).

Winner of the 2010 Heartland Prize, Anthill follows the thrilling adventures of a modern-day Huck Finn, enthralled with the "strange, beautiful, and elegant" world of his native Nokobee County. But as developers begin to threaten the endangered marshlands around which he lives, the book’s hero decides to take decisive action. Edward O. Wilson—the...

On Human Nature Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition, With a New Preface (October 2004)

By Edward O. Wilson

In his new preface E. O. Wilson reflects on how he came to write this book: how The Insect Societies led him to write Sociobiology, and how the political and religious uproar that engulfed that book persuaded him to write another book that would better explain the relevance of biology to the understanding of human behavior.

Sociobiology The New Synthesis, Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition (2000)

By Edward O. Wilson

When this classic work was first published in 1975, it created a new discipline and started a tumultuous round in the age-old nature versus nurture debate. Although voted by officers and fellows of the international Animal Behavior Society the most important book on animal behavior of all time, Sociobiology is probably more widely known as the object of bitter attacks by social scientists and other scholars who opposed its claim that human social behavior, indeed human nature, has a biological...

The Ants (1990)

By Bert Hölldobler, Edward O. Wilson

This landmark work, the distillation of a lifetime of research by the world's leading myrmecologists, is a thoroughgoing survey of one of the largest and most diverse groups of animals on the planet. Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson review in exhaustive detail virtually all topics in the anatomy, physiology, social organization, ecology, and natural history of the ants. In large format, with almost a thousand line drawings, photographs, and paintings, it is one of the most visually rich and all-encompassing...

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