Naturalist 25th Anniversary Edition

by Edward O. Wilson

  And so on until all the known species are covered from a particular geographic area, say Mississippi or all of North America or even the whole world. I got busy, put names on the specimens I had collected, and sent them to Smith for verification. He responded quickly: You got half of them right. You are off to a good start! He didn’t say, You got half of them wrong. And he did not say, Why don’t you study a few years more and see me then? He said, Keep up the good work and write me soon. With each passing year I cherish yet more warmly the memory of Dr. M. R. Smith, myrmecologist of the National Museum of Natural History.

  I redoubled my efforts and began to discover unusual and interesting species. One day I found a marching column of army ants in my backyard—not the famous voracious hordes of South American rain forests, but miniature army ants of the genus Neivamyrmex, whose colonies of 10,000 to 100,000 workers search for prey through grass clumps around human habitations and across leaf-carpeted forests in the southern United States. At first glimpse a Neivamyrmex raiding group resembles nothing more than a large column of slender, dark-brown workers of some other species, running back and forth between nest and a dead animal or spilled sugar. A close examination, however, reveals them to be armies on the march, invading the nests of other kinds of ants, often changing their own nest site from one day to the next. I tracked the Neivamyrmex colony for several days until finally, on a rain-soaked afternoon, they marched across the street and out of sight into the tangled weeds of a neighbor’s yard. In future years I would encounter and study Neivamyrmex colonies many times, in many places, from the Carolinas to the Amazon. I would write on army ants from all around the world.

  During my senior year in high school this late-adolescent idyll was invaded by a rising anxiety: to be a scientist, one must go to college, and no member of my family on either side had ever progressed that far. They had been successful businessmen, farmers, shipowners, even engineers in an era when a high school diploma sufficed for such occupations. College was still thought of as a costly luxury, and the ordinary middle-class life trajectory up to that time was to pass directly from high school graduation to gainful employment. To further my ambitions I had to enter uncharted waters.

  Unfortunately, my father’s health was failing. A thin, frail-looking man, his 130 pounds stretched over a five-foot, nine-inch frame, he had been sickly for years, worn down by bouts of alcoholism and bronchitis. The latter was made chronic and severe by chain smoking, two to three packs a day. Now, in the winter of 1945, he was stricken with a bleeding duodenal ulcer. He checked into the Naval Hospital in Charleston, South Carolina, where treatment was free to him as a veteran of the First World War. The operation, during which a large section of his small intestine was removed, was nearly fatal. He returned home for a long convalescence, never complaining to me, never expressing anything but optimism about our future; but I knew better.

  Although I loved my father, my concern at this point was mostly selfish. I realized I could not depend on him for further support and feared that I might have to postpone college and take work to assist him and Pearl (who never took a job of her own). Later I learned that my mother, now married to a successful businessman and herself a civilian employee of the Army Quartermaster Corps, would have been more than willing to cover all my expenses. She was soon to supply partial support in any case. But I was a proud, closemouthed kid, frankly ignorant in such matters, and did not tell her of my father’s troubles or my own anxieties.

  How, then, to get to college? Grades. For the first time I focused on my course work and began to receive straight As. Financial aid. I competed for a scholarship from Vanderbilt University, a respected private institution in nearby Nashville, Tennessee. The application consisted of a written test, transcripts, and letters from teachers. As a newcomer at Decatur High School with a spotty previous academic record, I must have seemed easily dismissible to the Vanderbilt scholarship committee. There was no way to convey my passion and special expertise in natural history, nor did I think these qualities should weigh much in comparison with formal classroom performance. Probably I was right. In any case I was turned down.

  The GI Bill of Rights offered a way to college. If I enlisted in the Army immediately after my seventeenth birthday, I would be technically a veteran of the Second World War and eligible for veterans’ benefits, including financial support for later college attendance. Three years in the service, four years of college, graduate at the age of twenty-four. My father and Pearl enthusiastically approved. So in June 1946 I rode a Greyhound bus to the induction center at Fort McClellan near Anniston, Alabama, where I intended to enlist. I hoped to train and qualify as a medical technician, to learn all the biology possible during my period of servitude, perhaps to travel, and to spend all my spare time improving my skills in entomology.

  At the end of the physical examination the attending physician and a recruitment officer took me aside. They informed me that I could not be accepted into the Army because I was blind in my right eye. Physical standards, they said, had tightened with the end of the shooting war. Once again the little pinfish of Paradise Beach, whose dorsal spine had pierced my eye, changed the course of my life. I stood on the veranda of the administration building, my hands on the railing, enviously watching successful recruits drill on the field below, as I waited for transportation back to Anniston. Bitterly disappointed by this unfair outcome, I wept. I vowed that although I had failed here, I would go on, make it through college and succeed some other way, work on the side as needed, live in basements or attics if I had to, keep trying for scholarships, accept whatever help my parents could give, but regardless of what happened, let nothing stop me. In a blaze of adolescent defiance against the fates, I swore I would not only graduate from college but someday become an important scientist.

  chapter seven

  THE HUNTERS

  THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA SAVED ME. IT WAS OPEN TO all graduates of Alabama high schools, by which I mean all qualified white graduates, an exclusion that was to endure two more decades. The expense was minimal: $42 a quarter in tuition and fees, $168 for the full year of four quarters, including summer; room rent $7 a month; laundry costs negligible; textbooks $2 to $10 apiece, less if you got them secondhand. Travel back and forth from home, by either hitchhiking or Greyhound bus, cost less than $20. I found a boardinghouse that offered three meals a day, heavy on eggs, flapjacks, grits, turnip greens, corn bread, and fried chicken necks and wings, for $30 a month. My total expenses for attending the University of Alabama in the 1946–47 academic year plus an extra summer term were about $700. By finishing in three years through an accelerated program, I earned my bachelor of science degree with an expenditure of a little more than $2,000, somewhat less than the annual salary of a government clerk or schoolteacher at the time.

  None of it came from loans and scholarships. All of it came from my parents. My luck was holding as I started classes in September 1946. My father’s health had improved somewhat. He moved with Pearl yet once again, this time back to Mobile, where they settled in half of a duplex house owned by one of my aging aunts. My father found a job as an accountant at Brookley Air Field and was able to defray part of my expenses. My mother, alerted by this time to our precarious financial state, gave me the balance. As the only child of four parents, I was blessed, proceeding on safer ground than I had expected. Nevertheless, the generous admission standards and low cost of the University of Alabama were important preconditions of upward mobility for me, as they have been for thousands of others even less well situated. Faithful alumnus I have been ever since. My journey came full circle in 1980, when I was invited to give the spring commencement address. There before me, to my relief, sat black graduates among white, the doors of opportunity by then having been opened to all.

  When my father and I rode into Tuscaloosa that first September afternoon in his new Hudson Commodore sedan, the campus was verging on chaos. Veterans were pouring in to the university to use the educational benefits of the GI Bi
ll of Rights. All the physical facilities were overcrowded, traffic around the campus was snarled, and teachers, administrators, and counselors were forced to work overtime to cope with the greatest crisis since that sorry day in 1865 when the teenage Corps of Cadets had marched out to engage an advancing column of Union cavalry, lost, and watched as the Federals burned the university down.

  I entered college in the company of men as much as ten years my senior, many of whom had undergone harrowing combat only a year or two before. One, Hugh Rawls, a biology student with whom I became good friends, had seen just ten minutes of action. He had gone ashore at Saipan as commander of an amphibious tank; on the beach Japanese shells fell first left, then right, then dead center on his tank. Only he and the gunner were able to crawl out. As he staggered back to the water’s edge, seven sniper bullets struck and permanently disabled him. Another good friend, Herbert Boschung, survived three plane crashes during combat missions over Germany. My companions seldom spoke of these events. They had begun a new life.

  Many of the men came from outside Alabama, having found colleges and universities closer to their homes too crowded to admit them. I had no problem in adjusting to their company. They were used to mingling good-naturedly with seventeen-year-old recruits. College life was in any case as strange to them as it was to me, and I found reassurance in their shared bewilderment.

  The university solved many of its problems by acquiring and converting part of a military hospital two miles away on the outskirts of Tuscaloosa. Thus was created the Northington Campus, where I lived and at first attended most of my classes in Quonset huts and recreation rooms. Because the hospital had been constructed during the war and was large, many of us were assigned private rooms. Mine was a padded cell in the former mental ward. In 1978, thirty-two years later, I watched the tall smokestack crumple, felled by an explosive charge, and the surrounding buildings destroyed. I viewed the scene on film, at the climax of the motion picture Hooper, starring Burt Reynolds and Sally Field. Thus Northington Campus ended its existence in the service of a Warner Brothers Gotterdämmerung.

  It was in the university, padded cell notwithstanding, that I found my natural home. Shortly after classes started, I climbed the balustraded steps to the main entrance of Nott Hall, built in the 1920s but antebellum in design. I had come to call on Professor J. Henry Walker, head of the Department of Biology, to introduce myself and to discuss my career plans. I was moved to this bold maneuver not by any sense of self-importance—I was still a timid boy, and hubris was only later to fester in my soul—but by the mistaken belief that college students normally chose their careers immediately, and should therefore at an early point consult the faculty for guidance on research and special study. I was reinforced in my presumption by the manly talk I heard among the returned veterans, most of whom had firm career plans of their own.

  Walker was a slenderized replica of Warren Harding, a handsome, middle-aged man with blue eyes, prematurely white hair, and meticulous grooming befitting a gentleman of the Deep South. He communicated with soft accent and precise hand gestures. He was careful in all things, I later learned: he kept the department’s postage stamps in his office safe. He nodded encouragingly as he peered into my Schmitt box of specimens and listened to my disquisition on the ants of Alabama. He murmured reinforcement as though it were entirely routine for freshman students to launch entomological careers in his office: “Yes, yes, very interesting, fella, very interesting, you’ve done very well.” (All younger males, it turned out, were called fella.) He then made a telephone call and escorted me one flight up to the office of Bert Williams, a young professor of botany newly arrived from Indiana University.

  Williams, a tall, gangling man in his thirties with a slight stoop and Lincolnesque face, greeted me warmly without hesitation, as though I were a fellow academic on sabbatical leave. After we talked ants, natural history, and botany for a while, he took me to a table space in his laboratory where, he suggested, I might wish to conduct my research. His largess knew no bounds thereafter. He lent me a dissecting microscope, glassware, and alcohol. He offered to take me along on future field trips. Later in the year he gave me a part-time research assistantship, tracing radioactive phosphorus through the roots of plants. Perhaps because Williams had no other research students at that time, and certainly in part because he was by nature a modest and caring man, he treated me as though I were a graduate student or postdoctoral fellow. I even came to feel as though I had joined his wife and infant daughter as part of the family, like a favored nephew. I have known no kinder or more effective mentor. Forty-seven years later, in 1993, I had the great pleasure of welcoming his granddaughter to her freshman year at Harvard University and offering her my assistance.

  I received less personal but equally cordial treatment from the other half-dozen members of the biology faculty. They were used to devoting their time to large classes of premedical students, whose strictly defined needs in anatomy, physiology, histology, and parasitology called for formal lectures and by-the-book laboratory exercises. Undergraduate students who followed in their own footsteps, who were bent on careers in pure science, were relatively rare. I flourished under the guidance of these multiple elders. In addition to training, they gave me the most priceless gifts an apprentice can receive: they let me know that they did not understand everything, that I might acquire information they did not have, and that my efforts were valued.

  I set up an aquarium just inside the lower entrance of the biology building and exhibited a giant amphiuma salamander I had captured on one of our field trips. Fascinated students watched as it slithered back and forth crunching live crayfish. I captured entire colonies of Neivamyrmex army ants, seething masses of thousands of workers, housed them in artificial nests I built in Williams’ laboratory, and studied the parasitic beetles and flies living with them. One of these guests, a near-microscopic beetle in the genus Paralimulodes, rides on the backs of the worker ants like a flea and lives by licking oily secretions from their bodies. My observations later became the basis of one of my early scientific papers. The biology faculty let me know with passing smiles and fragments of corridor conversation that they considered all these efforts useful and important.

  To much of the rest of the country the University of Alabama means football, the Rose Bowl in the golden 1930s, the Sugar Bowl in the 1970s and 1980s, the blood feud with Auburn University—Harvard versus Yale with 280-pound tackles—and the legend of Paul William “Bear” Bryant. But those are only the most visible aspects of an excellent public university. The University of Alabama was and is the home of first-rate scholars and teachers, and of abounding opportunity for students who come there, as I did in 1946, to learn about the world, to enter a profession, and, if you will permit an old-fashioned expression, to make something of themselves. I found it as good a place for undergraduate training in my field of science as I would later judge Harvard, Princeton, and Cambridge to be, among other universities I have come to know reasonably well. The personal attention and encouragement I received could not have been surpassed.

  What counts heavily in the shaping of a scientist is the accessibility and approval of the faculty. What is truly decisive, however, is the desire and ability of the student. Otherwise, failure awaits regardless of the learning environment, and no excuse can be made for it. If you are a lousy hunter, the woods are always empty.

  Unencumbered by the need to hold a job on the side, I devised a time budget that was optimal for my progress through the university; I paid just enough attention to formal courses to get mostly As. I spent the rest of my time doing research, reading, and talking with faculty and other students, usually about evolutionary biology but ranging widely into subjects as diverse as geography, philosophy, and the techniques of creative writing.

  I never joined one of the fraternities that dominated social life on the campus, for the simple reason that I was never invited. At the end of my senior year I was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, the national hono
r society, as a reward for my overall high grade average. At commencement I hitched a ride to the campus from a middle-aged couple from Tuscaloosa. As they let me off near the president’s house, the woman told me her son belonged to Sigma Epsilon Alpha and asked which fraternity I belonged to. “Phi Beta Kappa,” I replied. “Why, I never heard of that one,” she said. Too bad, I thought.

  During my first two years I was a part-time cadet in the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC), which was compulsory for all male students at the University of Alabama. I was by then in my late-teens radical period and anxious to see the world rise to meet my own empyrean and wholly untested moral standards. I now held much of American culture in contempt. My guidebooks to radicalism were Philip Wylie’s Generation of Vipers and An Essay on Morals, wonderfully humorous jeremiads against organized religion, Babbitry, Mom worship, and sundry other national foibles. If radical left students had existed and been active then, I might have linked arms on behalf of each week’s nonnegotiable demand. At ROTC drill one day, I explained to our sergeant, a regular Army lifer waiting out his retirement in this remote outpost, that marching and rifle practice had been made obsolete by the atom bomb. What we were doing on the parade ground, I declared, was a useless exercise to commemorate the past, like dancing around maypoles. Without changing expression, he growled something inaudible that might have been an expletive.

  My feelings about the military were decidedly mixed by this time. On Governor’s Day in my sophomore year, His Excellency James Folsom Senior (Junior was also to become governor in the 1990s) traveled from his capital office in Montgomery to review the ROTC cadet corps. A great populist and pro-education governor, referred to fondly as Big Jim because of his towering height and hefty body, and Kissing Jim for reasons ambiguously reported by the press, Folsom was already a legend in the Camellia State. I waited out in front of formation in a special line of cadets to be honored for scholarship, together with others to be recognized for rifle marksmanship. Folsom arrived in a gaggle of state troopers, military officers, and school officials. He was that day conspicuously under the influence of alcoholic refreshments, a common condition for him on public occasions after eight in the morning, and he wove a bit on his feet as he moved from honoree to honoree, speaking to each before handing him a medal. When he came to me he said, “Wheah you from, boy? Mobile? That’s a mighty fine place, mighty fine.” He reached into a box held by a staff aide and handed me a marksmanship medal. I was delighted to own this unearned award, even for a short while. I much preferred it to the wimpy scholarship medal—it did not seem right for a soldier to be decorated for doing well in English literature. The next day I reluctantly returned my prize to ROTC headquarters.