TV Program Description
Original PBS Broadcast Date: May 20, 2008
At age 78, E.O. Wilson is still going through his "little savage" phase
of boyhood exploration of the natural world. In "Lord of the Ants,"
NOVA profiles this soft-spoken Southerner and Harvard professor, who is an
acclaimed advocate for ants, biological diversity, and the controversial
extension of Darwinian ideas to human society.
Actor and
environmentalist Harrison Ford narrates this engaging portrait of a ceaselessly
active scientist and eloquent writer, who has accumulated two Pulitzer Prizes
among his many other honors. Says fellow naturalist David Attenborough:
"He will go down as the man who opened the eyes of millions 'round
the world to the glories, the values, the importance of—to use his
term—biodiversity."
Wilson is
also renowned for two seemingly unrelated roles. First, he is the "ant
man," whose infectious enthusiasm for his scientific specialty has
encouraged many house dwellers to reach for a magnifying glass instead of ant
traps when faced with these tiny invaders. NOVA films Wilson exuberantly
plunging his hand into a fire-ant bed and then calmly observing that each of
the scores of stings he is receiving feels like "the touch of a hot
needle." (Wilson's fearlessness with wild animals goes way back, as
our excerpt from his autobiography shows.)
Second,
Wilson hit the headlines and became a lightning rod in academic circles for his
1975 book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis,
which holds that evolutionary principles can explain social behavior throughout
the animal kingdom, including in humans. (Sociobiology is just one of several scientific
fields he has either invented outright or greatly influenced—see Man of
Ideas.)
At the
time, critics warned that Wilson was promoting a dangerous idea with roots in
biological determinism, which in the past had fueled the eugenics movement. (Wilson
was even attacked physically, having a pitcher of ice water poured over his
head as he stood up to give a talk.) The controversy has since calmed somewhat,
as experimental evidence shows that genes do play a role in aspects of
behavior.
In fact, these
two elements of Wilson's work—ants and sociobiology—are
intimately connected, because ants are among the most social of animals.
Characteristically, Wilson's wide-ranging mind could look beyond one
domain to another. "He is able to step back not just one pace but three
paces and see the entire panorama of not just invertebrates but of the whole
magic complex web of organisms—animals and plants," says
Attenborough.
Wilson's
latest step back has shown him more unequivocally than ever that the complex web
of life in which he has delighted since a child is under threat in many of the
most biologically diverse regions of the world. Accordingly, he has become a
tireless organizer and spokesman for preserving the world's threatened
species. (See A Conversation With E.O. Wilson for some of his latest thinking on
conservation.)
And he
has his own research to back him up. NOVA visits a small island in the Florida
Keys where Wilson and biologist Daniel Simberloff started a unique experiment
in 1965. They first made an inventory of every living species on the island.
Then they hired an exterminator to wipe them all out.
Over the
next few years they documented the recolonization and rebirth of life on the
island, showing that, in general, the smaller an area of land, the fewer the
number of species it can support and the higher the risk of extinction.
"This is one of the reasons why conservationists have a sound scientific
basis for trying to get larger reserves," says Wilson. "It's
good insurance. It means we can save more species over the long term."
And
he's not stopping there. Wilson's ultimate dream is to catalog
every species of life on the planet, a number that probably vastly exceeds the
inventory of life to date. He calls it the Encyclopedia of Life, and he now has
the backing of Harvard University, the Smithsonian Institution, and several
other organizations to make it a reality. The young naturalist who never grew
up surely has even more up his sleeve.
Program Transcript
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