Letters to a Young Scientist

Charles Darwin was an English biologist and naturalist widely considered to be a giant in contemporary biology. In his 1859 book, On the Origin of Species, and in later writings, Darwin argued that all life on Earth originated from a common ancestor many millions of years ago. He also proposed natural selection as the mechanism for evolution. He suggested that animals are more likely to pass on their genes when they are particularly well-suited to their ecological niches, a concept known as “survival of the fittest.” Darwin was not the first to propose the theory of evolution, but he was the first to describe natural selection. He gathered a lot of the evidence for his theory on a long journey of naturalistic discovery that he undertook between 1831 and 1836. He circled the globe on the HMS Beagle, collecting samples and noting adaptive differences among species. 

Wilson mentions Darwin several times in Letters to a Young Scientist. Like many contemporary biologists, Wilson has a great deal of admiration for Darwin’s contributions to the field. In one of Darwin’s later books, The Descent of Man (1871), he argued that although all humans (like all life on Earth) share a common ancestor, different human races are more or less advanced. Since he was writing from the perspective of a white European, he argued that white people were the superior race, with other races failing to measure up in various ways. Although these ideas have since been thoroughly debunked, biology is still reckoning with the legacy of scientific racism today.

Corrie Moreau is an American entomologist and a former mentee of Edward Wilson. She was born in New Orleans and studied at Harvard University for her PhD. Like Wilson, Moreau focuses primarily on the study of ants. Wilson positions her as the ideal young scientist. She is uniquely driven, confident in her abilities, and so passionate about her field of study that she even has tattoos of insects. When she encounters roadblocks to success, she takes on more responsibility for herself, ultimately completing a huge amount of highly valuable work with Wilson’s support.

Moreau now works as a professor and curator at Cornell University. She has received acclaim for working to uplift women’s contributions to the sciences and for bringing information about ants into the mainstream. Many of her articles are publicly available online.

Wilson worked closely with fellow biologist Robert H. MacArthur. MacArthur was a Canadian American ecologist who studied population changes among animals. In 1967, Wilson and MacArthur codeveloped the field of island biogeography when they wrote The Theory of Island Biogeography (1967). Wilson later tested the theory on real small islands, and confirmed that it was accurate.

Although MacArthur and Wilson worked together for quite some time, they never became particularly close friends. Wilson now attributes this to a certain competitiveness between them, as though they “never finished taking the measure of each other” (228). MacArthur died of renal cancer at the age of 42, which Wilson acknowledges was a major loss to the future of science.