Edition: U.S. / Global

Scientist at Work: Edward O. Wilson; From Ants to Ethics: A Biologist Dreams Of Unity of Knowledge

Published: May 12, 1998

LAID out on a desk in Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology is a neat array of white-sided boxes, each with pinned specimens of ants belonging to the genus Pheidole. Dr. Edward O. Wilson is writing a monograph on the genus, which is the world's largest. There are 326 new species, many of which he discovered himself, and each is in need of a precise description and a scientific name. The work is pure taxonomy, ''scientific knitting,'' he calls it. The ants, little black specks mounted on white triangles of cardboard, seem perfectly indistinguishable. But under the microscope each species looks as different as a bear does from a tiger, Dr. Wilson assures a visitor.

The ''knitting'' is no doubt mental relaxation from the soaring works of synthesis that are Dr. Wilson's other passion. Or maybe both are the products, on different scales, of a mind that loves to classify and discover patterns in the world's unruly substance.

In an alternative fate, Dr. Wilson might have been an obscure expert on the ants of Alabama, his home state. But at each stage of his career he has looked outward, trying to see how the scholarly patch he had cultivated might fit into some larger scheme of things. And because so few scholars dare to explore beyond the boundaries of their own narrow fields, Dr. Wilson has produced an original work of synthesis time after time.

His first foray outside the ant microcosm was ''The Insect Societies,'' published in 1971, which surveyed the evolution of sociality among wasps, ants, bees and termites. It seemed only logical to extend the synthesis to vertebrates, humans included, though no one else had attempted so obvious a task. ''Sociobiology'' appeared in 1975, immediately falling under political attack from left-wing colleagues who objected to the idea that certain human behaviors might have genetic determinants.

''He was taken to task in an unfair way,'' says Thomas Eisner, a Cornell University biologist and longtime friend, ''but his ideas are not arrived at lightly.'' The ideas of sociobiology were many years in the making, Dr. Eisner says.

Dr. Wilson was blindsided and bruised by the attack but undeterred. He expanded his ideas about the mind's genetic history in ''On Human Nature,'' which appeared in 1978. Then he turned to other matters, like writing a comprehensive survey of ants with his colleague Bert Holldobler and becoming a champion for the world's disappearing rain forests.

Twenty years later, Dr. Wilson has returned to the theme of genes and human nature. His new work of synthesis is called, a little forbiddingly, ''Consilience,'' a word coined by the 19th century philosopher of science William Whewell to mean the melding of inferences drawn from separate subjects. Dr. Wilson has resurrected it as the slogan for a program of unrivaled ambition: to unify all the major branches of knowledge -- sociology, economics, the arts and religion -- under the banner of science and in particular of the biology that has shaped the human mind.

The kind of unification he proposes is the outright intellectual annexation that occurs when one field of knowledge becomes explainable in terms of a more fundamental discipline, as when thermodynamics (heat processes) was explained in terms of statistical mechanics (equations describing the movement of molecules). These putsches, which always constitute major advances yet are usually not much welcomed by scholars in the discipline being taken over, are termed ''reductions'' by philosophers of science.

How can economics, not to mention religion and esthetics, be reduced to molecular biology? Dr. Wilson believes this will come about as biologists work out the behavioral rules that evolution has built into the brain. These rules, the sum of which is human nature, define the framework in which economic, religious and esthetic decisions are made and so should, he says, be made fundamental to those branches of study.

Dr. Wilson is well aware that people do not always warm to the idea of having their higher cognitive functions explained in terms of genetic programming. But he can see the revolution coming, the vanguard being led by the new approach to the brain called evolutionary psychology (another name for sociobiology, in his view).

Karl Marx, Dr. Wilson once joked when talking about ants, was correct: he just applied his theory to the wrong species. Ant societies, of course, are very different from the biped variety, but one common feature is the inherited nature of social behavior. Like any other feature of an organism, behavior can be shaped by evolution. Ants have evolved quite elaborate behaviors, but most are rigidly determined. Human behaviors have also evolved for the purpose of survival. But unlike the programmed instincts of ants, these behaviors, Dr. Wilson believes, are governed by what he calls epigenetic rules, genetically based neural wiring that merely predisposes the brain to favor certain types of action.

In the case of the universal taboo against incest, for instance, Dr. Wilson suggests there is an epigenetic rule that makes people instinctively averse to marrying those whom they knew intimately in childhood.