Naturalist 25th Anniversary Edition Read online

  Praise for NATURALIST

  “A wise personal memoir … A mixture of loneliness, amusement, curiosity and intellectual rigor makes the voice of this thoughtful man unforgettable.”

  —THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

  “Vividly, often beautifully written. Wilson emerges not only as a gifted scientist, but also as a likable, passionate, eloquent person.”

  —JARED DIAMOND in The New York Review of Books

  “What distinguishes Wilson’s story is its handsome prose, honed by years of practice into a concise and sly discourse. Among literary scientists, no one since Rachel Carson has more effectively joined humble detail to a grand vision of life processes and structures.”

  —WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD

  “In this exquisitely written memoir, the famed Harvard scientist looks back at his childhood in the South as well as his career as a groundbreaking thinker in the field of evolutionary biology. Truly, here is the irrefutable proof that scientists have souls.”

  —USA TODAY

  “Naturalist reads like a classic hero’s tale.”

  —BLOOMSBURY REVIEW

  “[Naturalist] is a sunlit story of the warm south: Mark Twain rather than Tennessee Williams, complete with drive, wit, love, pride, hope and so on …beautifully written …a profound and increasingly thoughtful love affair with life itself: all life.”

  —THE GUARDIAN

  A Shearwater Book

  Published by Island Press

  Copyright © 1994 Island Press

  Illustrations copyright © 1994 Laura Simonds Southworth

  Afterword copyright © 2006 Edward O. Wilson

  First Island Press cloth edition: August, 1994

  First Island Press paperback edition: April, 2006

  The excerpt from “Daybreak in Alabama” is from Selected Poems by Langston Hughes, copyright © 1948 by Alfred A. Knopf Inc., and renewed 1976 by The Executors of the Estate of Langston Hughes.

  Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 1718 Connecticut Ave., NW, Suite 300, Washington, DC 20009.

  SHEARWATER BOOKS is a trademark of The Center for Resource Economics.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Wilson, Edward Osborne, 1929–

  Naturalist / Edward O. Wilson

  p. cm.

  Includes index.

  ISBN 1-55963-288-7 (cloth) — 1-59726-088-6 (pbk)

  1. Wilson, Edward Osborne, 1929– 2. Naturalists—

  United States—Biography. I. Title.

  QH31.W64A3 1994

  508’.092—dc2094-12111

  British Cataloguing-in-Publication data available.

  Printed on recycled, acid-free paper

  Design by Dave Bullen Design.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

  Island Press’ mission is to provide the best ideas and information to those seeking to understand and protect the environment and create solutions to its complex problems. Click here to get our newsletter for the latest news on authors, events, and free book giveaways. Get our app for Android and iOS.

  FOR RENEE AND CATHY

  contents

  Prelude

  PART 1 DAYBREAK IN ALABAMA

  CHAPTER ONE Paradise Beach

  CHAPTER TWO Send Us the Boy

  CHAPTER THREE A Light in the Corner

  CHAPTER FOUR A Magic Kingdom

  CHAPTER FIVE To Do My Duty

  CHAPTER SIX Alabama Dreaming

  CHAPTER SEVEN The Hunters

  CHAPTER EIGHT Good-Bye to the South

  CHAPTER NINE Orizaba

  PART 2 STORYTELLER

  CHAPTER TEN The South Pacific

  CHAPTER ELEVEN The Forms of Things Unknown

  CHAPTER TWELVE The Molecular Wars

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN Islands Are the Key

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN The Florida Keys Experiment

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN Ants

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN Attaining Sociobiology

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN The Sociobiology Controversy

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Biodiversity, Biophilia

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  prelude

  I HAVE BEEN, AS THE PHYSICIST VICTOR WEISSKOPF ONCE said of himself, a happy man in a terrible century. My preoccupation was not, however, with nuclear swords and breathtaking technological advances, but of a wholly different kind: I have served as a close witness to fundamental changes in Nature.

  Nature, with a capital N, the concept: for me it holds two meanings. When the century began, people could still easily think of themselves as transcendent beings, dark angels confined to Earth awaiting redemption by either soul or intellect. Now most or all of the relevant evidence from science points in the opposite direction: that, having been born into the natural world and evolved there step by step across millions of years, we are bound to the rest of life in our ecology, our physiology, and even our spirit. In this sense, the way in which we view the natural world, Nature has changed fundamentally.

  When the century began, people still thought of the planet as infinite in its bounty. The highest mountains were still unclimbed, the ocean depths never visited, and vast wildernesses stretched across the equatorial continents. Now we have all but finished mapping the physical world, and we have taken the measure of our dwindling resources. In one lifetime exploding human populations have reduced wildernesses to threatened nature reserves. Ecosystems and species are vanishing at the fastest rate in 65 million years. Troubled by what we have wrought, we have begun to turn in our role from local conquerer to global steward. Nature in this second sense, our perception of the natural world as something distinct from human existence, has thus also changed fundamentally.

  Because my temperament and profession predispose me, I have followed these changes closely. As a younger scientist and naturalist, my own worldview shifted in concert with the advances of evolutionary biology and the decline that practitioners of this science perceived to be occurring in the natural environment. From childhood into middle age, my ontogeny repeated the larger phylogeny. Nature metamorphosed into something new.

  My childhood was blessed. I grew up in the Old South, in a beautiful environment, mostly insulated from its social problems. I became determined at an early age to be a scientist so that I might stay close to the natural world. That boyhood enchantment remains undiminished, but it exists in a Heraclitean stream in which everything else has changed, all that I first thought about how the world works and all that I believed of humanity’s place in the world. I have written this account to learn more fully why I now think the way I do, to clarify the elements at the core of my beliefs to you and to myself, and perhaps to persuade.

  PART 1

  DAYBREAK IN ALABAMA

  When I get to be a composer

  I’m gonna write me some music about

  Daybreak in Alabama

  And I’m gonna put the purtiest songs in it

  Rising out of the ground like swamp mist

  And falling out of heaven like soft dew.

  LANGSTON HUGHES

  chapter one

  PARADISE BEACH

  WHAT HAPPENED, WHAT WE THINK HAPPENED IN DISTANT memory, is built around a small collection of dominating images. In one of my own from the age of seven, I stand in the shallows off Paradise Beach, staring down at a huge jellyfish in water so still and clear that its every detail is reveale
d as though it were trapped in glass. The creature is astonishing. It existed outside my previous imagination. I study it from every angle I can manage from above the water’s surface. Its opalescent pink bell is divided by thin red lines that radiate from center to circular edge. A wall of tentacles falls from the rim to surround and partially veil a feeding tube and other organs, which fold in and out like the fabric of a drawn curtain. I can see only a little way into this lower tissue mass. I want to know more but am afraid to wade in deeper and look more closely into the heart of the creature.

  The jellyfish, I know now, was a sea nettle, formal scientific name Chrysaora quinquecirrha, a scyphozoan, a medusa, a member of the pelagic fauna that drifted in from the Gulf of Mexico and paused in the place I found it. I had no idea then of these names from the lexicon of zoology. The only word I had heard was jellyfish. But what a spectacle my animal was, and how inadequate, how demeaning, the bastard word used to label it. I should have been able to whisper its true name: scyph-o-zo-an! Think of it! I have found a scyphozoan. The name would have been a more fitting monument to this discovery.

  The creature hung there motionless for hours. As evening approached and the time came for me to leave, its tangled undermass appeared to stretch deeper into the darkening water. Was this, I wondered, an animal or a collection of animals? Today I can say that it was a single animal. And that another outwardly similar animal found in the same waters, the Portuguese man-of-war, is a colony of animals so tightly joined as to form one smoothly functioning superorganism. Such are the general facts I recite easily now, but this sea nettle was special. It came into my world abruptly, from I knew not where, radiating what I cannot put into words except—alien purpose and dark happenings in the kingdom of deep water. The scyphozoan still embodies, when I summon its image, all the mystery and tensed malignity of the sea.

  The next morning the sea nettle was gone. I never saw another during that summer of 1936. The place, Paradise Beach, which I have revisited in recent years, is a small settlement on the east shore of Florida’s Perdido Bay, not far from Pensacola and in sight of Alabama across the water.

  There was trouble at home in this season of fantasy. My parents were ending their marriage that year. Existence was difficult for them, but not for me, their only child, at least not yet. I had been placed in the care of a family that boarded one or two boys during the months of the summer vacation. Paradise Beach was paradise truly named for a little boy. Each morning after breakfast I left the small shorefront house to wander alone in search of treasures along the strand. I waded in and out of the dependably warm surf and scrounged for anything I could find in the drift. Sometimes I just sat on a rise to scan the open water. Back in time for lunch, out again, back for dinner, out once again, and, finally, off to bed to relive my continuing adventure briefly before falling asleep.

  I have no remembrance of the names of the family I stayed with, what they looked like, their ages, or even how many there were. Most likely they were a married couple and, I am willing to suppose, caring and warmhearted people. They have passed out of my memory, and I have no need to learn their identity. It was the animals of that place that cast a lasting spell. I was seven years old, and every species, large and small, was a wonder to be examined, thought about, and, if possible, captured and examined again.

  There were needlefish, foot-long green torpedoes with slender beaks, cruising the water just beneath the surface. Nervous in temperament, they kept you in sight and never let you come close enough to reach out a hand and catch them. I wondered where they went at night, but never found out. Blue crabs with skin-piercing claws scuttled close to shore at dusk. Easily caught in long-handled nets, they were boiled and cracked open and eaten straight or added to gumbo, the spicy seafood stew of the Gulf coast. Sea trout and other fish worked deeper water out to the nearby eelgrass flats and perhaps beyond; if you had a boat you could cast for them with bait and spinners. Stingrays, carrying threatening lances of bone flat along their muscular tails, buried themselves in the bottom sand of hip-deep water in the daytime and moved close to the surf as darkness fell.

  One late afternoon a young man walked past me along the beach dangling a revolver in his hand, and I fell in behind him for a while. He said he was hunting stingrays. Many young men, my father among them, often took guns on such haphazard excursions into the countryside, mostly .22 pistols and rifles but also heavier handguns and shotguns, recreationally shooting any living thing they fancied except domestic animals and people. I thought of the stingray hunter as a kind of colleague as I trailed along, a fellow adventurer, and hoped he would find some exciting kind of animal I had not seen, maybe something big. When he had gone around a bend of the littoral and out of sight I heard the gun pop twice in quick succession. Could a bullet from a light handgun penetrate water deep enough to hit a stingray? I think so but never tried it. And I never saw the young marksman again to ask him.

  How I longed to discover animals each larger than the last, until finally I caught a glimpse of some true giant! I knew there were large animals out there in deep water. Occasionally a school of bottlenose porpoises passed offshore less than a stone’s throw from where I stood. In pairs, trios, and quartets they cut the surface with their backs and dorsal fins, arced down and out of sight, and broke the water again ten or twenty yards farther on. Their repetitions were so rhythmic that I could pick the spot where they would appear next. On calm days I sometimes scanned the glassy surface of Perdido Bay for hours at a time in the hope of spotting something huge and monstrous as it rose to the surface. I wanted at least to see a shark, to watch the fabled dorsal fin thrust proud out of the water, knowing it would look a lot like a porpoise at a distance but would surface and sound at irregular intervals. I also hoped for more than sharks, what exactly I could not say: something to enchant the rest of my life.

  Almost all that came in sight were clearly porpoises, but I was not completely disappointed. Before I tell you about the one exception, let me say something about the psychology of monster hunting. Giants exist as a state of the mind. They are defined not as an absolute measurement but as a proportionality. I estimate that when I was seven years old I saw animals at about twice the size I see them now. The bell of a sea nettle averages ten inches across, I know that now; but the one I found seemed two feet across—a grown man’s two feet. So giants can be real, even if adults don’t choose to classify them as such. I was destined to meet such a creature at last. But it would not appear as a swirl on the surface of the open water.

  It came close in at dusk, suddenly, as I sat on the dock leading away from shore to the family boathouse raised on pilings in shallow water. In the failing light I could barely see to the bottom, but I stayed perched on the dock anyway, looking for any creature large or small that might be moving. Without warning a gigantic ray, many times larger than the stingrays of common experience, glided silently out of the darkness, beneath my dangling feet, and away into the depths on the other side. It was gone in seconds, a circular shadow, seeming to blanket the whole bottom. I was thunderstruck. And immediately seized with a need to see this behemoth again, to capture it if I could, and to examine it close up. Perhaps, I thought, it lived nearby and cruised around the dock every night.

  Late the next afternoon I anchored a line on the dock, skewered a live pinfish on the biggest hook I could find in the house, and let the bait sit in six feet of water overnight. The following morning I rushed out and pulled in the line. The bait was gone; the hook was bare. I repeated the procedure for a week without result, always losing the pinfish. I might have had better luck in snagging a ray if I had used shrimp or crab for bait, but no one gave me this beginner’s advice. One morning I pulled in a Gulf toadfish, an omnivorous bottom-dweller with a huge mouth, bulging eyes, and slimy skin. Locals consider the species a trash fish and one of the ugliest of all sea creatures. I thought it was wonderful. I kept my toadfish in a bottle for a day, then let it go. After a while I stopped putting the line out for the
great ray. I never again saw it pass beneath the dock.

  Why do I tell you this little boy’s story of medusas, rays, and sea monsters, nearly sixty years after the fact? Because it illustrates, I think, how a naturalist is created. A child comes to the edge of deep water with a mind prepared for wonder. He is like a primitive adult of long ago, an acquisitive early Homo arriving at the shore of Lake Malawi, say, or the Mozambique Channel. The experience must have been repeated countless times over thousands of generations, and it was richly rewarded. The sea, the lakes, and the broad rivers served as sources of food and barriers against enemies. No petty boundaries could split their flat expanse. They could not be burned or eroded into sterile gullies. They were impervious, it seemed, to change of any kind. The waterland was always there, timeless, invulnerable, mostly beyond reach, and inexhaustible. The child is ready to grasp this archetype, to explore and learn, but he has few words to describe his guiding emotions. Instead he is given a compelling image that will serve in later life as a talisman, transmitting a powerful energy that directs the growth of experience and knowledge. He will add complicated details and context from his culture as he grows older. But the core image stays intact. When an adult he will find it curious, if he is at all reflective, that he has the urge to travel all day to fish or to watch sunsets on the ocean horizon.

  Hands-on experience at the critical time, not systematic knowledge, is what counts in the making of a naturalist. Better to be an untutored savage for a while, not to know the names or anatomical detail. Better to spend long stretches of time just searching and dreaming. Rachel Carson, who understood this principle well, used different words to the same effect in The Sense of Wonder in 1965: “If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow. The years of childhood are the time to prepare the soil.” She wisely took children to the edge of the sea.