It also landed Wilson in the fight of his intellectual life. And while he has had a lifelong obsession with ants, discovering how they communicate through pheromones, he is most famous for the publication in 1975 of Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, a work of deep insight that advanced evolutionary thinking and proved a Darwinian manifesto, describing social behaviour from the ants to humans. Wilson’s career has been unusually fruitful. The bleaker inheritance of the South is there too, in a way. His manners are Old South as well - warm, polite and thoughtful. He smiles gently as he eases into a chair, his voice a rich, Southern drawl, even though he left Alabama for Harvard over 45 years ago. A few workers are marching up the arms of his linen jacket and across his shoulders. In his brightly lit laboratory behind the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, he stands over a plastic tray of pheidole rhea, remarkable for having two soldier castes. Now 71, Wilson is a tall, slender man, his upper spine crooked from years of looking earthwards. And humanity would disappear from the face of the earth without them. True, they haven’t written any operas, but they do live in colonies of elegant social complexity. There are thousands of different species of ant, no one is sure since most of them are unknown to science, and perhaps a hundred million billion of the creatures alive at any one time.

On human nature by edward o wilson