A driven person even as a boy, at age 13 Wilson took a job as a newspaper delivery boy for the Mobile Register with a route of more than 400 deliveries. As a budding teenage naturalist, Wilson explored the nearby wilderness, including the Mobile-Tensaw Delta along the former U.S. For part of the 1942-43 academic year, he attended Murphy High School. He attended Barton Academy in 1941-42, when it was reserved for the seventh grade.

In 1941, Wilson’s father remarried, and the family moved to Mobile. In 1937, Wilson was sent to Gulf Coast Military Academy in Biloxi, Mississippi. Wilson’s father was a federal government accountant, and the pair moved frequently, residing in Washington, D.C., Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. He would become one of the world’s foremost authorities on ants.Īlthough Wilson’s mother was awarded legal custody of her son, she sent him to live with his father, believing that he could provide better care. His vision impairment led him to focus on creatures that he could pick up, hold between his thumb and forefinger, and inspect closely. One incident during this period would have a lasting effect: while fishing in the surf, Wilson hauled in a pinfish that hit him in the right eye, partially blinding him permanently. While there, he explored the coast and its wildlife.

In 1936, in the midst of his parents’ impending divorce, Wilson was sent to board with a family in Paradise Beach, Florida. Wilson was born in Birmingham, Jefferson County, on June 10, 1929, to Edward and Inez Wilson. His last major conservation effort was promoting the Half-Earth Project, aimed at reserving half of the planet’s surface to conservation efforts. MacArthur, Naturalist (1994), and The Creation (2006), in which his interests turned to ecology, the environment, and the place of humanity in the web of life on Earth. His life and career are chronicled in his books, principally The Theory of Island Biogeography (1967) with Robert H.

O.” Wilson (1929-2021) was a naturalist, environmentalist, ecologist, entomologist, and humanist who was acclaimed as the “father of biodiversity.” Wilson was a world-renowned expert on ants, but his work in his later years shifted toward conservation and reconciling the often-competing arenas of religion and science in that effort.

On Human Nature by Edward O. Wilson