Edward O. Wilson

Edward Osborne Wilson, also known as the “Ant-Man” is an American biologist, naturalist and writer. His speciality is myrmecology, the study of ants and, he is the leading expert in the field. Despite having an impaired vision in his right eye, the young Edward Wilson never stopped. He could still see the fine print and hairs on the body of insects and immediately got fascinated by them, especially ants and butterflies. After his B.S and M.S in the University of Alabama, he got appointed to the Harvard Society of Fellows, and thus he began his expedition.

Wilson is sometimes called “the father of sociobiology," because he was the one who imagined sociobiology as a global theory of animal social behaviour. He then collaborated with a mathematician, William Bossert and discovered the chemical nature of ant communication, via pheromones. In the 1960s, he worked along with mathematician and ecologist Robert MacAurthor in developing the theory of species equilibrium. In the 1970s he and Daniel S.Simberloff tested this theory on tiny mangrove islets in the Florida Keys. They eradicated all insect species and observed the re-population by new species. Wilson and MacArthur's book The Theory of Island Biogeography became a standard ecology text.

In 1971, he published his first book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, in which he used sociobiology and evolutionary principles to explain the behaviour of social insects and then to understand the social behaviour of other animals, including humans, thus establishing sociobiology as a new scientific field. His book On Human Nature won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. The book, The Ants, co-authored with Bert Hölldobler carried out a systematic study of ants and ant behaviour, which fetched him his second Pulitzer Prize. He retired from Harvard University in 1996 but is quite active and has published 15 books since 2000.