by DAVID SLOAN WILSON
“Did you like the grenade I tossed in their midst?” the biologist asked me.
I first met Edward O. Wilson in 1971 when I was a student in an ecology course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Wilson, a famous Harvard professor, was sitting in on the student project reports. After I reported my experiments on food size selection in zooplankton, Wilson remarked, “That’s new, isn’t it?” I was so proud to have impressed the great E.O. Wilson that I have remembered his comment ever since!
Our next personal interaction came near the end of my graduate career at Michigan State University. I had constructed a mathematical model that provided support for the theory of group selection, which explains how altruism and other “for the good of the group” behaviors can evolve. This theory had been almost universally rejected by evolutionary biologists. Convinced of its importance, I wrote to Wilson asking if he would consider sponsoring it for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He invited me to visit him at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. After giving me a tour of his ant laboratory, he stood me in front of a blackboard, sat down in a chair, and said, “You have 30 minutes until my next appointment.”
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