ANOTHER NOTABLE DEATH

This seems to be a time when famous people whose lives have briefly intersected with mine are dying. First Desmond Tutu, now the famous biologist E. O. Wilson. Since today is my 88^th birthday, I am more than usually aware of my mortality and consequently more affected that I might otherwise be by the announcement of these deaths. Let me take cognizance of Wilson’s passing by quoting from my Autobiography the account of my meeting with him.

 

“A Canadian philosopher, Michael Ruse, asked whether I would like to meet E. O. Wilson.  I said sure, and Ruse set it up.  It was agreed that I would spend an afternoon in his office, which doubled as his laboratory.  In advance of the rendezvous, we exchanged gifts.  I sent him, through Michael, a copy of The Poverty of Liberalism, and he sent back a copy of his latest book, Promethean Fire, co-authored by Wilson and Charles Lumsden.  The volume, which sits on my shelves today, is inscribed "For Robert Paul Wolff, with warm regards, Edward O. Wilson, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard U., January 25, 1984."

            We met in Wilson's office in the Museum.  After the usual greetings, he showed me the centerpiece of the office, a large table on which, under a Plexiglas dome, was a bustling, complex ant colony.  Wilson banged the side of the table, which set the ants scurrying, and as they poured out of the anthill he pointed out the soldier ants, worker ants, and so forth.  I didn't have much in the way of conversation.  What can you say about an anthill, after all?  So, casting about for something to say, I mused aloud, "I wonder how many ants there are in the entire colony."  "Fifteen thousand," Wilson replied.  "How can you be sure?" I asked.  "I counted them," he said.

 

            There are moments in life when the scales fall from your eyes and you suddenly see clearly something that has hitherto been obscured from view.  This was one of those moments.  I had from time to time reflected on how different the workaday lives are of people in different corners of the Academy, even though we all call ourselves "Professor."   Here was E. O. Wilson, the creator of Sociobiology, who thought nothing at all about counting fifteen thousand ants.  Had anyone asked me to figure out the number of ants in an anthill, the farthest I would have gone was watching eight or ten walk by and then guesstimating the rest.

            To be sure, philosophers sometimes descend to the level of the particular.  But our tendency is to go in somewhat the opposite direction.  Confronted with the real world, the reflex reaction of philosophers is to ask about possible worlds.  It was clear to me that although we were both professors and authors, Wilson and I led lives so utterly different that no real mutual understanding was likely.  It was also clear that however much the world might think of Wilson as the tendentious, controversial author of Sociobiology, his real interest was in those ants.

 

            When our conversation about the anthill began to drag, Wilson took me into a nearby room in which there were rows of file cabinets.  He pulled out a drawer at random to show me a card on which was impaled an ant.  The card identified the ant as belonging to one of the more than twenty thousand species of ants that are estimated to exist somewhere or other on the face of the earth.  A second éclaircissement illuminated my mind.  I had a vision of thousands of English curates and amateur entomologists, each of whom had devoted much of his or her life to searching for, identifying, catching, impaling, and thus nailing down for all time one of those ant species.  Here again, I saw clearly how different my field was from Wilson's.  Philosophy does not advance by the taking of thousands of tiny steps, assuming for the sake of argument that it advances at all.  Instead, ages pass during which little or nothing happens, although thousands of philosophers are doing their best.  Then, there is a moment of transformation -- fourth century B. C,. in Greece, or the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Western Europe.  Suddenly, the subject leaps forward, changing forever the way we think.  But Entomology is not like that at all.  Every one of those file cards was the evidence of a worthwhile piece of work, undertaken, completed, and added to our knowledge of the ant.  I was properly humbled.  After we parted, I reflected that Wilson probably had learned nothing at all from meeting me, but I felt that I had learned a good deal from meeting him."