Here are four different species of finches from the Galapagos Islands. Although they look similar, their differences include their beaks — each one takes advantage of a different type of seed. Natural selection shaped the trajectory of these birds’ appearance, and one of the scientists who first figured out how this worked passed away yesterday (December 26, 2021) — Edward Osborne Wilson.
Wilson lived a venerable life, dying at 92 years after publishing so many books and earning so many accolades that he has been hailed “America’s leading naturalist” and “the New Darwin”. One of his best monikers is “the Ant Man,” which is awesome, because he’s better than the Marvel superhero, and really really knew his ants. He figured out how they communicated (usepheromone excretions), and studied how they interacted — and the way he brought the discipline of evolution into his analysis is super important for understanding animal behavior.
Ants, Wilson argued, operated like a pure form of Marxist socialism, with each individual’s behavior motivated by the interest of the colony as a whole. They evolved this way because biologically, no individual ant bequeaths its DNA to an individual baby ant — rather, each ant’s best chance at spreading its genetic material is to help the queen ant successfully reproduce.
Back to the finches, though. Another pillar of Wilson’s research focused on the reasons for biodiversity. He and his colleague Robert H. MacArthur coined the term “island biogeography” to describe how isolated natural communities evolve.
His article “Character displacement,” (co-authored by William Brown Jr) is one of the most cited scientific journal articles in history. In it, Wilson argued that when two closely related species share the same geographical space, they will physically evolve to diverge in order to take advantage of a more specific ecological niche — where the species do not overlap, they will continue to look similar, because they are not competing for resources.
Wilson was a vehement advocate for preserving non-human ecology and a strident environmentalist, and he helped us see the complex beauty of the natural world a little bit better.
Source(s): “Character displacement,” W.L. Brown, Jr., E.O. Wilson, _Systematic Biology_, vol 5, issue 2, June 1956, pp 48-64, https://doi.org/10.2307/2411924. BBC News “Leading American naturalist EO Wilson, dubbed ‘Darwin’s heir’, dies at 92”, Dec 27, 2020. Wikipedia.
