ABSTRACT
Edward Osborne Wilson was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1929, the son of a travelling government accountant. Wilson describes his early life as 'blessed', although he was often beset by difficult emotional and physical circumstances. Wilson's behavioural studies of ant societies were the foundation for a second great theme of his scientific career, the study of sociobiology. The reception for Sociobiology was at times abusive and even violent, as when Wilson was doused with water by protestors at a sociobiology symposium in Washington in 1978. Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winning On Human Nature was to some degree a rebuttal of his detractors' politically motivated criticisms of sociobiology. Some people perceive a certain irony in Wilson's later work, described in Consilience, which seeks to unify all knowledge – including religion, economics and aesthetics – in terms of reductionist physical and biological principles.
