Naturalist 25th Anniversary Edition

by Edward O. Wilson

  I was exhilarated by the successes of my early fire ant research. I found that the vagrant learning of my boyhood could be focused in a way that was of interest and practical use to the public. The self-confidence I acquired helped to carry me through the critical years of intellectual growth and testing ahead.

  Meanwhile, a second obsession intruded briefly into my college training. I was transfixed by the legend of the four-minute mile, the supposedly unbreakable barrier of track and field. In 1945, when Gunder Hägg brought the record down to 4:01.4, there was much talk about whether the great Swedish miler had reached the limit of human endurance. Such speculation was entirely misdirected, of course: an inspection of the history of the event shows that the mile record had been descending in a nearly straight line for eighty years; the curve showed no sign of bottoming out when Hägg led the world, and a simple extrapolation in the late 1940s would have indicated that the four-minute mile could be expected at any time. That moment came on May 6, 1954, when England’s Roger Bannister ran the distance in 3:59.4. Thereafter hundreds of athletes repeated the feat, pushing the finishing time steadily downward. As I write, the record stands at 3:46.31.

  But in 1948, while athletes around the world prepared for the first postwar Olympic Games, distance running was still in its romantic period. The four-minute mile was the Everest of track and field. In the July 10 issue of the Saturday Evening Post I came upon an article declaiming that European athletes would “run Americans ragged” in the distance events. They trained longer, the author said, were willing to endure more discipline and pain than the soft Americans, and would sweep the medal rounds. Gunder Hägg was pictured cruising along a track in six-foot strides, long dark hair flying. I became enchanted by the idea of breaking records by will and discipline. If you were not large in body, I thought, perhaps you could triumph by being large in spirit. It was my kind of activity: do it alone, avoid the drag of teams, have no one witness your trials and failures, until you can accomplish some exceptional feat.

  So I bought a pair of surplus Army boots to add weight to my feet and endurance to my body, and started running through the back streets of Mobile, into the countryside, and, back in Tuscaloosa, round and round Northington Campus, which I treated as a giant track. I trained in solitude, mostly at night, all through the late summer and into the winter of 1948. I scaled the chain-link fence surrounding the University of Alabama athletic grounds in order to run on the cinder track when the regular athletes had left, to get the feel of a quarter-mile. I ran for an hour or two hours at a time. I had neither coach nor training schedule, and spoke to no one about my effort. I just ran in the heavy shoes that I thought would lend wings to my feet when I later switched to lighter gear.

  In February I tried out for the track team. I simply reported to the locker room, put on spiked shoes for the first time in my life, walked out on to the track, and ran a trial mile while the coach timed me with a stopwatch. I came in at “a little over five minutes.” The coach mercifully didn’t tell me the exact time, and I didn’t want to hear it. I was bitterly disappointed and humiliated. Not just my body but my philosophy had failed. But—surely if I tried harder I could do better! The coach was kindly disposed. He suggested that I practice for the two-mile race. There were no longer distances, such as 10,000-meter races and marathons, in the Southern Conference programs of 1949. So I started coming to practice for two-mile runs every afternoon, adding speed sprints to my endurance training. But it was too late, and obviously hopeless. At nineteen, I was already a senior, and I must have seemed to the coach his poorest prospect. We were both saved further embarrassment when shortly afterward I was offered the temporary position to survey fire ants in Alabama. I told the coach I was dropping out, and handed back my spiked shoes. He did not burst into tears.

  My failure galled me for years afterward. What, I sometimes mused, if I had started at sixteen or seventeen, with proper coaching? Might I have at least made the team? Would Gunder Hägg have found an American rival? In 1970, at the age of forty-one, I started jogging again, then running wind sprints, this time to lose weight and safeguard my health. These goals attained, I felt the old fire rekindling and crazy hopes rising: maybe I could compete in races at the master’s level, for men over forty. Obviously no four-minute miles were in the cards, but perhaps a five-minute mile? As my times dropped in solitary runs, I consulted the world records for different age groups, from childhood to old age. They are kept for all distances, based on times registered from all over the world. I found that even though most of the records from one age to the next, say twenty-nine to thirty to thirty-one years, were made by different individuals at various meets in widely separated parts of the world, they formed a tight line of points for each event. The curves peaked in the early twenties for the hundred-meter dash and in the late twenties for the marathon. This statistical evidence suggested that the best in the world, whoever they were, wherever and whenever they ran, turned in a record time that is precisely predictable once age is known. Age alone accounts for almost all the variation in world record times.

  This result impressed me deeply. It seemed to show that heredity is destiny, at least in one important sense: taken to the limit of human capacity, performance follows a predetermined trajectory. No athlete can break away, not even an iron-willed distance runner. I applied the results to my own capacity. I took the ratio of my mile in 1949, “a little over five minutes,” to the world record set in that period, a tick over four minutes. Multiplying it by the world record held in 1970 by men in their early forties, I arrived at my own likely best personal time, about six minutes.

  Pathetic! In a sport where a tenth of one percent can mean victory or defeat, I was carrying a 25 percent hereditary deficit. Then I felt a last adolescent surge. I would break the apparent genetic bond and wipe away the stain of 1949! This was the period just before the jogging craze of the mid-1970s. I ran the streets of my hometown, Lexington, Massachusetts, in tennis shoes, almost never encountering another jogger. Dogs chased me, neighbors stared, teenage boys hurled taunts. I ran quarter-mile wind sprints on the high school track. I entered races and did time trials. My three best times were 6:01, 6:01, and 6:04. Returning to my track tables, I estimated that my fastest time for two miles would be about 13 minutes. One day I ran my personal best, 12:58. Heredity was destiny after all.

  Meanwhile, I witnessed one triumph after another by my friend Bernd Heinrich, a distinguished entomologist and champion master’s distance runner. He won the over-forty laurels in the 1980 Boston Marathon, and variously set national or world records in the 50-mile, 100-kilometer, and 24-hour endurance runs, the latter by covering 158 miles in nonstop running. I went out with him one day for a 4-mile practice run, during which he patiently held back as I padded alongside. “Ed,” he said, “you could go faster if you ran on the balls of your feet.” He might as well have said, you could fly if you flapped your wings. He seemed made of aluminum tubes and wires. His lungs were leather-lined. He was Mozart to my envious Salieri.

  The experience has often made me think more objectively about my own limitations and more generally about those of the species to which I belong. For the obsessed and ambitious, the only strategy is to probe in all directions and learn where one’s abilities are exceptional, where mediocre, where poor, then fashion tactics and prostheses to achieve the best possible result. And never give up hope that the fates will allow some unexpected breakthroughs.

  I am blind in one eye and cannot hear high-frequency sounds; therefore I am an entomologist. I cannot memorize lines, have trouble visualizing words spelled out to me letter by letter, and am often unable to get digits in the right order while reading and copying numbers. So I contrived ways of expressing ideas that others can recite with quotations and formulas. This compensation is aided by an unusual ability to make comparisons of disparate objects, thus to produce syntheses of previously unconnected information. I write smoothly, in part I believe because my memory is less encumbered by the ph
rasing and nuances of others. I pushed these strengths and skirted the weaknesses.

  I am a poor mathematician. At Harvard as a tenured professor in my early thirties I sat through two years of formal courses in mathematics to remedy my deficiency, but with little progress. It was distance running all over again. I remain mathematically semiliterate. When walked through step by step, I have been able to solve partial differential equations and grasp the elements of quantum mechanics, although I soon forget most of what I have learned. I have no taste for the subject. I have succeeded to some extent in theoretical model building by collaborating with mathematical theoreticians of the first class. They include, in successive periods of my research, William Bossert, Robert MacArthur, George Oster, and Charles Lumsden. My role was to suggest problems to be addressed, to combine my intuition with theirs, and to lay out empirical evidence unknown to them. They were my intellectual prosthesis and I theirs. Like my fellow field biologists who waded with me into swamps and climbed forested hillsides, we were civilized hunters searching for something new that might be captured, something valuable enough to take back home and display at the tribal campfire.

  I have evolved a rule that has proved useful for myself and might be for others not born with championship potential: for every level of mathematical ability there exists a field of science poorly enough developed to support original theory. The advice I give to students in science is to move laterally and up and down and peer all around. If you have the will, there is a discipline in which you can succeed. Look for the ones still thinly populated, where fine differences in raw ability matter less. Be a hunter and explorer, not a problem solver. Perhaps the strategy can never work for track, with one distance and one clock. But it serves wonderfully well at the shifting frontiers of science.

  chapter eight

  GOOD-BYE TO THE SOUTH

  WHEN I GRADUATED FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA, IN 1949, my father’s health had begun to decline steeply. Chronic bronchitis, worsened by two packs of cigarettes a day, racked his body far into the night. As a member of a class and generation of men who took pride in fingers stained yellow by tar, he had no inclination to quit the habit. His alcoholism was also severe, and that addiction he took seriously. He feared becoming, as he put it, “like a Bowery bum.” Already a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, he checked himself in at intervals to a rehabilitation center for detoxification and yet another stab at recovery. Nothing worked for long; the problem seemed insoluble. Given that he was already seeking professional help, there was nothing left for Pearl and me to offer but sympathy and attempts at persuasion. I hid the frustration and anger I felt: a son does not easily instruct his father on right behavior and self-control.

  In early 1951 my father grew noticeably depressed and his behavior erratic. I was not able to read the signs, and was in any case away from home most of the time. I did not suspect what was coming. Early in the morning of March 26, he wrote a calm note of apology to his family, drove his car to an empty section of Bloodgood Street near the Mobile River, seated himself by the side of the road, put his favorite target pistol to his right temple, and ended his pain. He was forty-eight years old when he died.

  He was given a military funeral at Magnolia Cemetery, graced with rifle volleys and the folding of the American flag from atop his coffin. The painful disorder of his life made this strictly prescribed rite of passage deeply comforting to me. My father was laid to rest close to the last of his three brothers, Herbert, dead from heart failure only a year before.

  After a few days the shock of grief was infiltrated by feelings of relief, for my father now released, for Pearl whose desperate siege had been broken, and for myself—the filial obligation I had feared might tie me to a crumbling family was now forgiven. The impending tragedy finally took form, and happened, and was over. I could now concentrate entirely on my new life. As the years passed, sorrow and guilt-tinged relief were replaced by admiration for my father’s courage. It is easy to say that the greater courage would have been to try again, to pull himself back and struggle toward a normal life. I am reasonably certain, however, that he had considered the matter very carefully and decided otherwise.

  No son knows his father well enough to matter until it is too late; then understanding comes in fragments. I can say of him that he was an intelligent man who cheated himself of his own potential. Before he finished high school he ran away from home to go to sea in the boiler room of a cargo ship, made one round trip to Montevideo, and joined the Army. In the Quartermaster Corps he learned his trade as an accountant, which carried him through a long succession of jobs in private business and, in his last twelve years, the federal government. He was by nature loyal, warm, and sympathetic. He was quick-tongued in mixed company, given to frequent bouts of nostalgic and embroidered tales of personal adventure and to little, short-lived flashes of anger. He loved poetry but, like me, could not memorize enough lines to recite it competently. The youngest of four brothers, he lost his father when he was thirteen, and in his remaining time at home was spoiled by a mother whose permissiveness had become a family legend. His lifelong self-indulgence was made worse by a restiveness that never found ease because, I suspect, he had no destination in mind. His dream of retirement was to pilot his own houseboat back and forth on the Intracoastal Waterway of the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, with no place chosen as home port.

  My father’s reading was limited to magazines and newspapers. He paid scant attention to music or to history other than that of his family, and he had little interest in current affairs. He loved hunting and fishing but did not take the time to develop his skills. He turned instead to the more quickly satisfying recreation of target practice with his collection of guns. From him I learned how to blow cans and bottles off fence posts with pistols and shotguns at twenty paces, how to fire a U.S. Army Colt .45 with both hands to keep it from bucking too far out of line.

  He drew strength from his conception of southern white male honor. Never lie, he told me, never break your word, be always respectful of others and protective of women, and never back down if honor is at stake. He rested his dicta upon the remembered traditions of his family, which he rewove and annotated endlessly. He meant every word of this credo, and he was a physically courageous man. I think he would have died rather than accept humiliation or disgrace as defined by his lights. In truth, he did just that in the end. But otherwise the world in which he chose to live was too confining, too ambiguous, and too nearly obsolete to test his code of honor in any decisive way.

  I sometimes reflect on the fact that my father and the old house on Charleston Street are not just physically gone but absolutely gone, except for a handful of photographs, official records, and now this brief memoir. The neighborhood of old trees and sagging Victorian homes has been scraped away and replaced with cinderblock public housing. When I and a few other older family members die, the man and our family home will vanish almost as though they never existed. This observation on the human condition is one that I find both altogether banal and eternally astonishing. When my cousin Jack Wilson, son of my father’s oldest brother and a lifelong resident of Mobile, died in 1993, a large section of the cerebral memory of his and my father’s generation was erased. I have felt a small pleasure from this, certainly not from Jack’s death but from the fact that I am now the sole inheritor of my father’s existence. I have been freed to recreate my father not just from his scantily remembered actions but also from what I can reconstruct of his character. Some of that I will keep private and let go to oblivion, when I die.

  Strong father, weak son; weak father, strong son; either way, pain drives the son up or down in life. I do not dare to take the full measure of my father’s influence on me. But I would say to him if I could that his self-image was a worthy template, and I tried to bring it to fruition.

  My mother, Inez Linnette Freeman, had achieved a better life after the divorce, and she encouraged and assisted me to do the same. She had come from a background similar to my fat
her’s in many respects, her roots reaching far back in Alabama. Her forebears, all of English descent, had come from the Mississippi Delta and Georgia to settle in the northern half of the state. Several of them helped to found the little towns of Bremen, Falkville, and Holly Pond during the early and mid-1800s. Most were farmers and merchants. One, my great-grandfather Robert Freeman, Jr., was both a farmer and a renowned (I hesitate to use the word notorious) horse trader. His wife, Isabel “Izzie” Freeman, practiced as a country doctor, which I interpret to mean the equivalent of practical nurse and midwife in a rural region where M.D.s were scarce. Being freeholders with property well north of the cotton belt and main river ports, these people by and large held tepid opinions about the Confederacy and the Civil War. When captured by Federal forces, Private Robert Freeman readily forswore further military service in order to return to his family and farm near Falkville.

  In 1938 my mother married Harold Huddleston, a native of Stevenson, Alabama, near the Tennessee line. He was a successful businessman, and later advanced by the time of his retirement to a vice presidency of the Citizens Fidelity Bank and Trust, one of the several largest banks in the Southeast. Each September from my early teens until my graduation from college, I lived with my mother and Harold in their home first in Louisville, Kentucky, and then in the adjacent town of Jeffersonville, across the Ohio River in Indiana. They were supportive of my plans to attend college and train to be a biologist. Harold himself had attended the University of Alabama. Upward mobility into the professional class was something both he and my mother embraced as a fundamental ethic. They frequently took me to local parks where I could collect butterflies and ants. In what was a brave expedition on her part, my mother accompanied me when I was fourteen to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. The cavern system, one of the largest in the world, had recently been set aside as a national park. As we descended into the gloom, I held back from the tour group to search (illegally) along the walkways for blind yellow ground beetles, cave crickets, and any other cave-dwelling insects I could find, giving the specimens to my mother to hold. She lost them somewhere near the cave exit, and I sulked all the way back to Louisville.