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Wilson, Edward Osborne
(redirected from E. O. Wilson)

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Wilson, Edward Osborne, 1929–, American sociobiologist, b. Birmingham, Ala. Founder of sociobiology sociobiology, controversial field that studies how natural selection, previously used only to explain the evolution of physical characteristics, shapes behavior in animals and humans.
..... Click the link for more information. , Wilson argued in his controversial Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975) that all human behavior, including altruism altruism , concept in philosophy and psychology that holds that the interests of others, rather than of the self, can motivate an individual. The term was invented in the 19th cent. by the French philosopher Auguste Comte, who devised it as the opposite of egoism.
..... Click the link for more information. , is genetically based, and therefore "selfish." He later called for careful study of "gene-cultural co-evolution." Critics have called sociobiology a dangerously reductive determinism that could be used to defend notions of racial superiority and eugenics eugenics , study of human genetics and of methods to improve the inherited characteristics, physical and mental, of the human race. Efforts to improve the human race through bettering housing facilities and other environmental conditions are known as euthenics.
..... Click the link for more information. ; others have defended Wilson's evidence and biological reasoning. Wilson's On Human Nature (1978) won the Pulitzer Prize; Biophilia (1984) suggests that human attraction to other living things is innate; Consilience (1998) urges wider integration of the sciences; and The Creation (2006) pleads for a unified effort by secular and religious thinkers to save the earth's biodiversity. Other books by Wilson are Insect Societies (1971), The Diversity of Life (1992), The Ants, with Bert Hölldobler (1990; Pulitzer Prize), and The Future of Life (2002).

Bibliography

See his autobiography (1994).
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