A great storyteller, Edward O. Wilson, died at age 92

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On December 27, 2021 at NPR there was an article by Scott Neuman titled E. O. Wilson, famed entomologist and pioneer in the field of sociobiology, dies at 92. That article mentioned he won two Pulitzer Prizes. His Wikipedia page says they were for the non-fiction books, On Human Nature (1979), and The Ants (1991).

 

In a video preview on YouTube titled Reflections on a Life in Science he said:

 

“The scientist is much more of a storyteller and a myth maker than I think most scientists realize, or at least care to admit. I’ve always been taken by the formula suggested by the film maker Howard Hawks who said if you’re a storyteller, find a good story and tell it. The scientist is in fact a storyteller looking for a story to tell, not of fiction but certainly a product of the imagination passed through the crucible of testing in the real world.

 

But his whole aim as a social being is to imagine this new thing, maybe stimulated by an observation or an idea of some relationship, a metaphor, an analogy or whatever. To imagine it, to see if it could be true, to explore its implications, to generate a paradigm experiment, an experiment which demonstrates it in some dramatic way.

 

The scientists then use the term elegant as a highly approving expression. That means you can show what you are trying to show, you can tell your story, in a way that is startling, new, and convincing, and easily understood, and transparent. And then your aim is to return to the public at large, preferably your colleagues, who have the ability to appreciate or willingness to appreciate what you’ve done, and you tell that story.”             

 

There is another 7-1/2-minute YouTube video at Big Think titled E. O. Wilson on pheromones and the hidden world of other senses. We and birds are audio/visual communicators; other species are not. A 28-minute BBC Sounds audio at The Life Scientific titled EO Wilson on ants and evolution briefly describes how (starting at 11:00) he discovered, via careful dissection, that fire ants used pheromones for chemical communication. Chapter 11, How we broke the pheromone code, in his 2020 book Tales from the Ant World tells that story in more detail. He used an extremely sharp tip of a Dumont No. 5 tweezers to dissect the Dufour’s gland, and then the tip of a sharpened wooden applicator stick to draw trails for the fire ants to follow from their nest entrance. But then he needed help from chemists to identify the substance using Gas chromatography-massspectrometry (GCMS). That was tedious, since they needed to collect the pheromone from thousands of ants in order to get a large enough sample.

 

There is an article by Wilson in the Spring 2002 issue of American Educator titled The Power of Story. Another article by him in the New York Times on August 21, 2020 is titled The Zombie Ants (When ants are accidentally marked as dead, they find a way to rejoin the living). Back on October 4, 2013 I blogged about Edward O. Wilson on storytelling and the creative process.

 

The 1884 painting by Albert Anker of grandfather telling a story (from Wikimedia Commons) has been flipped, cropped, and Photoshopped. I previously used it on April 25, 2010 for a post titled Glory of a story: Craig Harrison.