History & Science

PBS Nova: Lord of the Ants - full ~53 minute documentary in one video hosted on the PBS YouTube channel.

Fantastic documentary on the brilliant Ed Wilson. Not much more I can say about it, Wilson is one of the most brilliant biologists of all time; and it’s narrated by effin’ Harrison Ford! Can’t go wrong.

Ed O. Wilson:

“Edward Osborne Wilson (born June 10, 1929) is an American biologist, researcher (sociobiology, biodiversity), theorist (consilience, biophilia), naturalist (conservationist) and author. His biological specialty is myrmecology, the study of ants.
Wilson is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. He is known for his career as a scientist, his advocacy for environmentalism, and his secular-humanist and deist ideas pertaining to religious and ethical matters.
As of 2007, he is Pellegrino University Research Professor in Entomology for the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He is a Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism.” - enWikipedia

Wilson and sociobiology:

To be short, the man’s writing gave rise to the study of sociobiology (now closely related to the field of evolutionary psychology)

Michael McGoodwin paraphrasing and quoting Wilson (pp. 16 and 222) on sociobiology

Sociobiology is defined as the scientific or systematic study of the biological basis of all forms of social behavior, in all kinds or organisms including man, and incorporating knowledge from ethology, ecology, and genetics, in order to derive general principles concerning the biological properties of entire societies. “If humankind evolved by Darwinian natural selection, genetic chance and environmental necessity, not God, made the species.” “The brain [and the mind] exists because it promotes the survival and multiplication of the genes that direct its assembly.” The two apparent dilemmas we face therefore are: (1) We lack any goal external to our biological nature (for even religions evolve to enhance the persistence and influence of their practitioners). Will the transcendental goals of societies dissolve, and will our post-ideological societies regress steadily toward self-indulgence? (2) Morality evolved as instinct. “Which of the censors and motivators should be obeyed and which ones might better be curtailed or sublimated?”

“Although much human diversity in behavior is culturally influenced, some has been shown to be genetic - rapid acquisition of language, human unpredictability, hypertrophy (extreme growth of pre-existing social structures), altruism and religions. “Religious practices that consistently enhance survival and procreation of the practitioners will propagate the physiological controls that favor the acquisition of the practices during single lifetimes.” Unthinking submission to the communal will promotes the fitness of the members of the tribe. Even submission to secular religions and cults involve willing subordination of the individual to the group. Religious practices confer biological advantages.
Wilson used sociobiology and evolutionary principles to explain the behavior of the social insects and then to understand the social behavior of other animals, including humans, thus established sociobiology as a new scientific field. He argued that all animal behavior, including that of humans, is the product of heredity, environmental stimuli, and past experiences, and that free will is an illusion. He has referred to the biological basis of behaviour as the “genetic leash.” The sociobiological view is that all animal social behavior is governed by epigenetic rules worked out by the laws of evolution. This theory and research proved to be seminal, controversial, and influential.
The controversy of sociobiological research is in how it applies to humans..” - enWikipedia

Wilson and ants:

Wilson, along with Bert Hölldobler, has done a systematic study of ants and ant behavior, culminating in their encyclopedic work, The Ants (1990). Because much self-sacrificing behavior on the part of individual ants can be explained on the basis of their genetic interests in the survival of the sisters, with whom they share 75% of their genes (though the actual case is some species’ queens mate with multiple males and therefore some workers in a colony would only be 25% related), Wilson was led to argue for a sociobiological explanation for all social behavior on the model of the behavior of the social insects…
…Wilson, referring to ants, once said that “Karl Marx was right, socialism works, it is just that he had the wrong species”, meaning that while ants and other eusocial species appear to live in communist-like societies, they only do so because they are forced to do so from their basic biology, as they lack reproductive independence…” - enWikipedia

If you have an interest in further reading on the subject(s) of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, I highly recommend The Moral Animal by Robert Wright, as well as the two biggest influences on the book, The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins and of course Sociobiology: The New Synthesis by Ed O. Wilson.