In news–Scientist, E.O Wilson, naturalist dubbed ‘modern day Darwin has died recently.
About Edward Osborne Wilson-
- He was an American biologist, naturalist, and writer.
- He was born on June 10, 1929 in Birmingham.
- He was an influential biologist who on numerous occasions had been given the nicknames “The New Darwin”, “Darwin’s natural heir” or “The Darwin of the 21st century“.
- He was a longtime Harvard University research professor, considered the world’s leading authority on ants and their behavior.
- His biological specialty was myrmecology, the study of ants, on which he was called the world’s leading expert, and he was nicknamed Ant Man.
- In 1955 he completed an exhaustive taxonomic analysis of the ant genus Lasius.
- He was the author of hundreds of scientific papers and more than 30 books, two of which won him Pulitzer Prizes for nonfiction: 1978’s On Human Nature, and The Ants in 1990.
- He has been called “the father of sociobiology” and “the father of biodiversity” for his environmental advocacy, and his secular-humanist and deist ideas pertaining to religious and ethical matters.
- Among his contributions to ecological theory is the theory of island biogeography (developed in collaboration with the mathematical ecologist Robert MacArthur).
- In collaboration with W.L. Brown, he developed the concept of “character displacement,” a process in which populations of two closely related species, after first coming into contact with each other, undergo rapid evolutionary differentiation in order to minimize the chances of both competition and hybridization between them.
- He also believed science and religion “should come together to save the creation” and published a series of letters to an imaginary Baptist, calling for an alliance to preserve the Earth’s ecosystem.
- Wilson was instrumental in launching the Encyclopaedia of Life, a free online database documenting all 1.9 million species on Earth recognised by science.
Source: The Indian Express
