Edward O. Wilson's research while affiliated with Harvard University and other places
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Publications (258)
On West Indian islands, as elsewhere in the world, ants are a very important component of virtually every terrestrial ecosystem. Nonetheless, the ants of most West Indian islands have remained largely unknown and unstudied. Now several destructive exotic ant species are spreading through the region threatening native biodiversity. Here, we have com...
p>Our incomplete taxonomic knowledge impedes our attempts to protect biodiversity. A renaissance in the classification of species and their interactions is needed to guide conservation prioritization.</p
Significance
Hamilton’s rule is a well-known concept in evolutionary biology. It is usually perceived as a statement that makes predictions about natural selection in situations where interactions occur between genetic relatives. Here, we examine what has been called the “exact and general” formulation of Hamilton’s rule. We show that in this formu...
The Caribbean region is considered a threatened biodiversity hotspot because of its high levels of biotic endemism and widespread habitat destruction. On Caribbean islands, as elsewhere in the world, ants are a critical component of virtually every terrestrial ecosystem. Nonetheless, the ants of most Caribbean islands remain poorly known. Here, we...
Aim:
We sought to reconstruct the biogeographical structure and dynamics of a hyperdiverse ant genus, Pheidole, and to test several predictions of the taxon cycle hypothesis. Using large datasets on Pheidole geographical distributions and phylogeny, we (1) inferred patterns of biogeographical modularity (clusters of areas with similar faunal compo...
Ants that resemble Camponotus maculatus (Fabricius, 1782) present an opportunity to test the hypothesis that the origin of the Pacific island fauna was primarily New Guinea, the Philippines, and the Indo-Malay archipelago (collectively known as Ma-lesia). We sequenced two mitochondrial and four nuclear markers from 146 specimens from Pacific island...
Ants are among the world’s most destructive invaders, and Pacific Islands are particularly susceptible to invasion by non-native ant species. A species from the taxonomically problematic Pheidole flavens-complex is reported here for the first time from the southwestern Pacific. Specimens of the species reported here were collected November 2011 fro...
The genetic origin of advanced social organization has long been one of the outstanding problems of evolutionary biology. Here we present an analysis of the major steps in ant evolution, based for the first time, to our knowledge, on combined recent advances in paleontology, phylogeny, and the study of contemporary life histories. We provide eviden...
A ten-foot-tall, bullet-pocked slab of concrete, near the center of Chitengo Camp, is a remnant of the 1973 attack by Frelimo insurgents during the war of independence against Portugal. Portuguese secret police suppressed Frelimo activity within the cities and villages by means of imprisonment, torture, and executions. When Rhodesia was liberated i...
Scientific natural history, which addresses all biological aspects of individual species, one species at a time, then compares
many together, is as important to science as any of the umbrella biological disciplines. With most species yet undiscovered
and the vast majority of those known yet unstudied, most biological phenomena are probably also unk...
Significance
Inclusive fitness theory is the idea that the evolutionary success of a trait can be calculated as a sum of fitness effects multiplied by relatedness coefficients. Despite recent mathematical analyses demonstrating the limitations of this approach, its adherents claim that it is as general as the theory of natural selection itself. Thi...
Im Jahre 1966 wurde endlich das fehlende Glied in der Ameisenevolution, die Urameise, entdeckt, die die heutigen Formen mit ihren Vorfahren unter den Wespen verbindet. Die fossilen Fundstücke, die diese Verbindung darstellen, brachten uns neben manch aufregender Überraschung die Bestätigung für einige Vorhersagen, die wir schon früher auf Grund der...
Durch Massenaktionen und Arbeitsteilung unter den Arbeiterinnen sind Ameisenkolonien in der Lage, nach Belieben ihre Umwelt zu kontrollieren und zu verändern. Die Regelung ihrer Umgebungstemperatur, eine wichtige Voraussetzung für ihren Erfolg, ist eines der besten Beispiele für die soziale Leistungsfähigkeit der Ameisen. Aus Gründen, die nach wie...
Im Jahre 1950 wandte sich der 20jährige Wilson, der zum damaligen Zeitpunkt an der Universität von Alabama studierte, einer wichtigen Fragestellung bei der Untersuchung der Feuerameisen zu. Die aus Südamerika eingeschleppte Art begann, sich im südlichsten Teil der Vereinigten Staaten auszubreiten. Sie kam in zwei Farbvarianten vor: einer roten und...
Unsere Leidenschaft sind die Ameisen, und unsere wissenschaftliche Disziplin ist die Myrmekologie. Wie alle Myrmekologen — weltweit gibt es nicht mehr als 500 von uns — betrachten wir die Erdoberfläche gerne als ein Netzwerk von Ameisenkolonien. In unseren Köpfen haben wir eine Weltkarte dieser unermüdlichen kleinen Insekten. Wo immer wir uns aufha...
Ameisenköniginnen genießen in ihren solide gebauten Nestern, in denen sie wie in einer Festung verborgen leben und von ihren emsigen Töchtern geschützt werden, ein außergewöhnlich langes Leben. Sieht man von Unglücksfällen ab, werden die Königinnen der meisten Arten mindestens fünf Jahre alt. Ein paar übertreffen in ihrer Langlebigkeit alles, was s...
Dank der allgemeinen revolutionären Veränderungen, die in der Biologie stattfanden, machten die wisssenschaftlichen Untersuchungen an Ameisen in den sechziger und siebziger Jahren große Fortschritte. Innerhalb kurzer Zeit entdeckten die Insektenforscher, daß sich Koloniemitglieder meist über den Geschmack und den Geruch von chemischen Stoffen mitei...
Eines unserer größten Abenteuer, nämlich die Untersuchung der afrikanischen Weberameisen, begann an jenem Tag, als eine Kolonie dieser Insekten Wilsons Arbeitszimmer in Besitz nahm. Kathleen Horton und Robert Silberglied, zwei unserer Mitarbeiter, hatten uns 1975 die Ameisen aus Kenia mitgebracht. Eine ganze Kolonie mit Königinmutter einzufangen, i...
Am Rio Sarapiqui in Costa Rica bricht ein neuer Morgen an. Als das erste Tageslicht auf den schattigen Boden des Regenwaldes fällt, bewegt sich nicht die leiseste Brise in der feuchten und angenehm kühlen Luft. Die flötenähnlichen Rufe der Tauben und Oropendolas, die außer Sichtweite in den Baumkronen sitzen, zeigen die Stunde an und werden nur gel...
Die große Stärke der Ameisen liegt darin, daß sie trotz ihres winzigen Gehirns fähig sind, enge soziale Bande zu knüpfen und komplexe Sozialstrukturen aufzubauen. Dies haben sie dadurch erreicht, daß sie ihr Verhalten auf eine beschränkte Anzahl sehr spezifischer Reize abgestimmt haben: Eine Duftspur wird durch ein ganz bestimmtes Terpen gebildet,...
Im Laufe ihrer hundert Millionen Jahre alten Entwicklungsgeschichte haben Ameisen ein erstaunliches Maß an ökologischen Anpassungen erreicht. Einige der hochspezialisierten Formen sind so bizarr, daß sie sich kaum einer der Insektenforscher, der sie im Freiland zufällig entdeckte, vorher in seiner kühnsten Phantasie hätte ausmalen können. Im folgen...
Das Schauspiel der Weberameisen, deren Kolonien sich wie so viele italienische Stadtstaaten in ständigen Grenzauseinandersetzungen befinden, veranschaulicht die Situation, in der sich fast alle sozialen Insekten befinden. Vor allem die Ameisen sind wohl die aggressivsten und kriegerischsten von allen Tieren. Sie übertreffen mit ihren organisierten...
Replying to: P. Abbot et al. Nature 471, 10.1038/nature09831 (2011); J. J. Boomsma et al. Nature 471, 10.1038/nature09832 (2011); J. E. Strassmann et al. Nature 471, 10.1038/nature09833 (2011); R. Ferriere & R. E. Michod Nature 471, 10.1038/nature09834 (2011); E. A. Herre & W. T. Wcislo Nature 471, 10.1038/nature09835 (2011)
Our paper challenges t...
Eusociality, in which some individuals reduce their own lifetime reproductive potential to raise the offspring of others, underlies the most advanced forms of social organization and the ecologically dominant role of social insects and humans. For the past four decades kin selection theory, based on the concept of inclusive fitness, has been the ma...
In this landmark volume, an international group of scientists has synthesized their collective expertise and insight into a newly unified vision of insect societies and what they can reveal about how sociality has arisen as an evolutionary strategy.Jürgen Gadau and Jennifer Fewell have assembled leading researchers from the fields of molecular biol...
View a collection of videos on Professor Wilson entitled "On the Relation of Science and the Humanities"In his new preface E. O. Wilson reflects on how he came to write this book: how "The Insect Societies" led him to write "Sociobiology," and how the political and religious uproar that engulfed that book persuaded him to write another book that wo...
Group selection or "for the good of the group" was once accepted in evolutionary thinking but eventually was discredited for further reassessment. The problem with this behavior is that they are locally disadvantageous. Selection between individuals within groups favors cheating behaviors and behaviors that increase the relative fitness of the whol...
A new ant species, Pheidole mutisi (Hymenoptera: Formicidae: Myrmicinae), is described in honor of José Celestino Mutis, the Neogranadian "Wiseman" who conducted the first studies on ants in the New World, although his writings on the subject remained unknown for many years. Here we offer some general comments about Mutis' myrmecological studies. T...
Charles Janet (1849-1932) was the leading pioneer in the histological description of the internal anatomy of social insects, in particular of ants and wasps. Because many of the original Janet sections still exist, this article is able to illustrate the amazing skills through some selected pictures taken from this more than a century old material,...
Current sociobiology is in theoretical disarray, with a diversity of frameworks that are poorly related to each other Part of the problem is a reluctance to revisit the pivotal events that took place during the 1960s, including the rejection of group selection and the development of alternative theoretical frameworks to explain the evolution of coo...
The advanced colonial state of eusociality has evolved in insects as a defense of nest sites within foraging distance of persistent
food sources. In the Hymenoptera, the final step in the approach to eusociality is through a suite of preadaptations comprising
simultaneous provisioning, fidelity to the nest, and a preexisting propensity toward domin...
There's more to evolution than the selfish gene. After half a century of research, it's time to profoundly alter our views, say David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson
The profound biological changes that lofted the honeybee to an advanced state of social organization are reflected in its newly sequenced genome. The species can now be studied all the way from molecule to colony.
The central question of general scholarship is whether all of knowledge is intrinsically consilient, that is, whether it can be united by a continuous skein of cause-and-effect explanation and across levels of increasingly complex organization. The answer lies in the recognition that the traditional line separating the great branches of learning (n...
A first study of the ants on the three main islands of the Juan Fernández Archipelago (Chile) has revealed the presence of
just three species, Hypoponera confinis, Linepithema humile, and Tetramorium bicarinatum, all widely distributed invasive species. Most notable among them is the Argentine ant, L. humile, an ecologically destructive species tha...
Andrew Polaszek and colleagues propose an open-access web-register for animal names, which they believe is vital to move taxonomy into the twenty-first century.
In this new assessment of the empirical evidence, an alternative to the standard model is proposed: group selection is the strong binding force in eusocial evolution; individual selection, the strong dissolutive force; and kin selection (narrowly defined), either a weak binding or weak dissolutive force, according to circumstance. Close kinship may...
Guidelines for submitting commentsPolicy: Comments that contribute to the discussion of the article will be posted within approximately three business days. We do not accept anonymous comments. Please include your email address; the address will not be displayed in the posted comment. Cell Press Editors will screen the comments to ensure that they...
Long considered one of the most provocative and demanding major works on human sociobiology, Genes, Mind, and Culture introduces the concept of gene-culture coevolution. It has been out of print for several years, and in this volume Lumsden and Wilson provide a much needed facsimile edition of their original work, together with a major review of pr...
In the past two decades, studies of anatomy, behavior, and, most recently, DNA sequences have clarified the phylogeny of the ants at the subfamily and generic levels. In addition, a rich new harvest of Cretaceous and Paleogene fossils has helped to date the major evolutionary radiations. We collate this information and then add data from the natura...
The identity and origin of the West Indian plague ants of the early sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries have long been a mystery. By reviewing historic accounts with an analysis of the present-day Caribbean ant fauna, I have narrowed the list of suspects to two species and their insect symbionts.
There are at present, at rough estimate, ca. 6000 taxonomists at work worldwide on all organisms combined. That is a tiny slice of the biological community as a whole, and their discipline remains one of the weakest and most underfunded (Wilson 2002). From my own museum experience, I believe that twice this number, with several technical assistants...
Society has a growing need for credible taxonomic information in order to allow us to conserve, manage, understand, and enjoy the natural world. At the same time support for tax- onomy and collections is failing to keep pace. Funds nominally allocated to taxonomy go largely to reconstruct molecular phylogenies, while thousands of species are threat...
As pointed out by Agosti in a recent letter in TREE [1xEncyclopedia of life: should species description equal gene sequence?. Agosti, D. Trends Ecol. Evol. 2003; 18: 273Abstract | Full Text | Full Text PDF | Scopus (10)See all References[1], images of Pheidole type specimens from Wilson's revision of the New World species of the ant genus Pheidole...
In “Scientists versus Whaling” (BioScience 52:1137–1140), Aron, Burke, and Freeman defend Japan's controversial “scientific” whaling program against a series of criticisms we made in an open letter to the Government of Japan last May in the New York Times. Our letter, signed by 21 eminent scientists, including three Nobel laureates and several pion...
Comparative biology, crossing the digital divide, has begun a still largely unheralded revolution: the exploration and analysis of biodiversity at a vastly accelerated pace. Its momentum will return systematics from its long sojourn at the margin and back into the mainstream of science. Its principal achievement will be a single-portal electronic e...
The following represents excerpts from a transcription of the informal discussion that ensued after Stephen Pope and Philip Hefner delivered the preceding papers at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., 20 February 2000. These excerpts are presented with a minimum of editing, to preserve...
Nature is the international weekly journal of science: a magazine style journal that publishes full-length research papers in all disciplines of science, as well as News and Views, reviews, news, features, commentaries, web focuses and more, covering all branches of science and how science impacts upon all aspects of society and life.
Responding to the Reviews of Elshtain, Kaye, and Ruse - Volume 18 Issue 2 - Edward O. Wilson
Citations
... For more than 50 million years, a subclade of ants in the subtribe Attini has lived in a symbiosis with basidiomycetous fungi of the families Agaricaceae and Pterulaceae (Wheeler 1907;Weber 1958Weber , 1966Chapela et al. 1994;Mehdiabadi and Schultz 2010;Schultz et al. 2015). Among fungus-farming ants, the leafcutters, a small group of species in the genera Atta and Acromyrmex, collect leaves from many different plants and transport them into their nest to cultivate the fungi with it (De Fine Licht et al. 2010;Mehdiabadi and Schultz 2010;Hölldobler and Wilson 2011). Furthermore, the fungus-farming ants establish constant and optimal living conditions for the fungi in their nest chambers. ...
... Deyrup (2016) collected S. subcoeca at one site in South Florida, the first published record of S. subcoeca from outside the West Indies. Wetterer et al. (2019) reported the first records of S. subcoeca from Grenada. Here, we present new descriptions of the worker and queen castes, and document a greatly expanded known geographic distribution of S. subcoeca in both the New World and the Old World. ...
... In addition to heightening political tensions, the border wall and its construction processes have significantly degraded landscape connectivity. The physical barrier disrupts migration and dispersal routes, preventing wildlife from accessing critical resources including food, water and mates (Peters et al., 2018). It is increasingly difficult for large endangered animals such as the jaguar, Mexican gray wolf, and Sonoran pronghorn (Antilocapra americana sonoriensis) to disperse across the border, fragmenting already at-risk populations (Peters et al., 2018). ...
... New fencing would likely be exempted from all environmental laws and considerations due to authorizations provided to the USA Department of Homeland Security under the Real ID Act of 2005. The ocelot is one of many species that would be adversely affected by additional fence construction (Peters et al., 2018), and the fence and associated lights, roads, vehicles, and human presence have the potential to sever currently viable ocelot movement corridors across the border, perhaps precluding natural recolonization of suitable habitats in the USA. ...
... Otherwise, the absence or loss of the species will be a negative indicator. [13] The air temperature is related to the sun's rays that penetrate the forest floor. A high percentage of canopy cover reduces the intensity of sunlight to the forest floor. ...
... Lastly, the large percentage of alien insects assessed as data-deficient (47%) (Fig. 6) combined with the high percentage of species whose establishment status is considered unknown or presence is doubtful (25%) (Fig. 4), clearly illustrate the necessity for "more boots in the ground" (Wilson 2017) regarding the study of insects in Cyprus. ...
... However, it is believed that the principle of conservation of energy is a law governing all the natural phenomena known to date and there is no known exception to this law [60]. Unfortunately, the principle of energy conservation is not like Hamilton's principle and its variants, such that although being lack of concrete physical meanings and having been questioned in serval aspects [61,62], it is the heart of theoretical physics, and is still dominating 21 st century mostly in classical mechanics [63,64], fluid mechanics [65,66], elastodynamics [67], electrodynamics [68] and in quantum mechanics [68][69][70][71][72][73][74], etc. ...
... for example the various comments on Mesoudi et al., 2006), complicated by debate within evolutionary biology itself concerning the robustness of the Weismann barrier (Sabour & Schöler, 2012;Surani, 2016) and the relative importance of environmental conditions for genetic expression (Hall, 2003;Jablonka & Lamb, 2005). In cultural evolutionary studies, it is generally accepted that the cultural equivalents of genes-variously labelled 'culturgens', 'memes', or increasingly just 'cultural traits'-are ideas (Aunger, 2002;Dawkins, 1982;Lumsden & Wilson, 1981;Mesoudi, 2011;Mesoudi & O'Brien, 2008;O'Brien et al., 2010), although there is certainly debate about their granularity (Bloch, 2000;Henrich et al., 2008;Mesoudi & O'Brien, 2008;Mesoudi et al., 2006;O'Brien et al., 2010). However, there is no equivalent consensus about exactly what role (or roles) objects play in cultural inheritance (Lake, 1998). ...
... These two genera rarely share a home range on islands. Surveys of islands such as Cocos Island [50], Barbados [51], Tobago (see [51]), and almost all the Greater Antilles record the presence [52], and sometimes the abundance of Odontomachus, and the total absence of Neoponera. Though both are reported to occur in Puerto Rico [53,54], this report was later put in doubt [50,51,55]. ...
... Many insects species organize themselves into societies that resemble, and potentially outperform, human societies in many ways (Wilson 1971). Insect societies display, in addition to group living, division of labour, communication, coordination, cooperation, conflict, altruism, and more (Hölldobler and Wilson 2009). Perhaps the most fascinating, albeit evolutionarily paradoxical, feature of insect societies is their reproductive caste differentiation. ...