In 1975, the world’s leading authority on ants decided to break out and go for the big time. Harvard professor Edward O. Wilson had already had 20 years of stunning success as an evolutionary biologist. He had worked on ants from all over the world; he had been the coauthor with ecologist Robert MacArthur of a hypothesis about island biogeography that is still the lynchpin of our studies about the flows of organisms in and out of restricted areas; and he had just finished major studies on the nature and functions of pheromones, methods of chemical communication particularly important for insects. Now, however, he wanted to do something rather different. He wanted to bring together and establish explicitly a whole new area of study, the evolution of social behaviour. And so he produced a grand overview: Sociobiology: The New Synthesis.
The idea was not that new. In 1859, the English naturalist Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species...
Michael Ruse, a refugee from compulsory retirement laws, now living and working in Florida, was for 35 years a professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph. He has written many books on the history and philosophy of Darwinian evolutionary theory. With Socrates, he believes that good food and drink are highly conducive to deep philosophical thought.
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