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Monday, February 13, 2006

E.O. Wilson: the coolest?

Is there anyone alive today cooler than E.O. Wilson? (Note to my mystery commenter: that was a rhetorical question.)

I had the great pleasure of taking Wilson's Core Course, "Evolutionary Biology" as a college freshman. This was during a period of chilly relations between Wilson and the self-promoting Stephen Jay Gould, whose better-known course met at the same time in the lecture hall next door. (In a nutshell, Gould was a Marxist who didn't want to see Darwinian principles applied to humans in ways that might yield conclusions that were scientifically but not politically correct, and a group he was involved with threw water on Wilson at a speech after Wilson published Sociobiology.) Wilson never discussed any of this in class, but was drawn out once during a Q&A session. He made what I consider one of the all-time great comments: "Gould and I agree on everything he understands."

Also, one day Wilson fell down some stairs on the way to class and broke his arm, but he still taught the class. He's great. It's a pity I didn't then and there resolve to concentrate in evolutionary and organismal biology, but, for whatever reason, I did not.


posted at 1:57 PM

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