A gentleman of the colonies

E. O. Wilson, the world's most evolved biologist, has more than a passing interest in arguments about nature and nurture.

He has, he tells me from his office at Harvard, often been asked what it was his parents gave him that made him what he has become. Wilson is now 81, and over the years he has given this question a good deal of thought.

The answer he comes up with these days is this: "I had the early divorce of my mother and father when I was 7; I spent time at military school where I was very lonely; we moved around a lot; I would go out into the woods alone for adventure and very early on I became bonded with the natural world. What did my father and stepmother give me? Simple: they left me entirely alone. They let me walk out in the morning after breakfast and they didn't ask me where I was going, and when I got back for supper they didn't ask where I had been."

Far from being a source of dismay, Wilson regrets the fact that this kind of freedom has been lost to children in most of the developed world because parents "are so concerned about their kids fitting into an urban or suburban culture ... there are almost no opportunities for a child to explore a universe that belongs to him or her alone".

He mourns this not only because he believes that exploring the natural world is a fundamental stage of cognitive development that our brains have evolved to expect and need, but also because in the absence of this bonding, we are far more likely to misunderstand and abuse the ecology of which we are all a part.

The world that Wilson discovered for himself as a child was the swampland of Florida and Alabama, where he did most of his growing up.

In his wonderful memoir Naturalist, he wrote of a kind of Wordsworthian "fair seed time for his soul" in which his sense of kinship with the world around him was fostered and nurtured in wilderness.

"By the time I was about 15 years old," he tells me, "I had a swamp of my own, near a small town called Brewton, Alabama. It was my own tract, which no one knew about, no one had explored and it was wild enough country around there that I never saw another soul."

That lifetime has mostly involved the comprehensive study of a particular world that first intrigued him way back when: the world of ants.

Much of what we know about social insects and the "superorganism" of the hive and nest has been a result of Wilson's research. Over six decades and 20 books he has detailed every aspect of ant societies: how they divide labour and spread knowledge, how they mate and fight, live and die.

Wilson has used this wisdom - "sociobiology" - to make arguments about genetics and conditioning that have applications thoughout the living world, and which extend to our understanding of human nature and society.

Much of that wisdom he has now brought to bear on Anthill, his debut novel, which has at its heart an extraordinary ant's eye view of the world, a social realist book-within-a-book of the rise and fall of a particular ant colony.

The novel was something of a homecoming, returning the biologist, along overgrown neural pathways, to that Alabama swampland of his teenage awakening.

"Part of the ambition for the novel," he says, "was that it allowed me to close a circle and regain that childhood experience, which was very much like growing up in another country."

In his book he reimagines his younger self in Raff Cody, a kind of Huck Finn figure, with a deep relationship with his environment, who leaves "Clayville, Alabama" only to return as a lawyer to fight the encroachment of the developers' bulldozers.

Ecology comes to be represented in the novel by the ant colony.

The central section is an extraordinary act of what you might call species empathy, of the biologist imagining exactly what it is like to be an ant.

By concentrating on the struggles of the ant colony in this way, he makes the ecosystem virtually a character in the book, to which the ants give body and life.

Wilson sensed that this would work as effectively as it does "because ants are so complex in their societies, so intricate in the way they communicate and fight among themselves."

Did he ever fear he was risking his sober scientific credentials, I wonder, in this leap of imagination?

He laughs. "There was a point that I realised I was pushing it," he says, "when I tried to work out how to convey that ants could be conscious of their predicament in the way of remembering the previous year's experiences. I waited for the response from my more literal-minded entomologist colleagues, but so far nothing has come back but praise."

Wilson knows that we underestimate ant societies at our - and the planet's - peril. The manifold ant species, evolved over 100 million years, represents nearly two-thirds of the world's entire insect biomass.

"An individual ant has a brain one-millionth the size of our brain, but still they are capable of quite complicated behaviour," Wilson suggests and goes on to explain how "many ant species are capable of learning a maze about half as fast as a rat".

Or how "they can retain five locations where they can get food, and they can recall how to get there, and retain what time of day the food is offered if it comes regularly".

In addition to that, of course, there is such a thing as the mind of the colony, which has been utilised by computer designers and brain scientists, at least as a metaphor.

"If you have a group of ants that are foraging," Wilson says, "that group has, in its communal mind, a pretty clear idea of every square inch of the terrain around the nest. Then there is a lot of experience in the colony among ants who only nurse larvae, or who only build the nest, or who only manage disposal of the dead. If you put all that together and grant that ants can communicate knowledge very quickly with pheromones [their complex hormonal language of scent] then what you've got is a super organism, an impressive community."

The Anthill chronicle begins, dramatically, with the death of the queen and the subsequent, almost Shakespearean, tumult that event unleashes on the life of the colony.

The parallels between ant colony and man extend into genetics: Wilson has argued that not only is a co-operative spirit of altruism hard-wired, but also a war-mongering capacity. "Within those two facts we see the whole human dilemma," he says.

Wilson has clearly never lost his ingrained sense of amazement at the complexities of the worlds he divides his time between - the "brainy anthill" of Harvard Yard, and the workaholic ingenuity of the superorganism.

Have any of these things, I wonder, become less strange and magical to him the longer he has studied them?

"I think people who have spent their lives studying social insects remain full of wonder," he says, "but I have been doing this since I was 16, and I'm now 81, and I feel I know ants well enough to not be surprised at least by what their limits are collectively and individually."

With his first novel entrenched in the New York Times bestseller lists he is about to embark on a book-length argument that will, he suggests, overturn conventional thinking on the origins of altruism. I guess he is never lost, in his work, for examples of industry. "I think I am a workaholic," he says. "I'm not ashamed. As you know, we workaholics, we run the world and turn the wheels ..."

- OBSERVER

Anthill: A Novel
By E. O. Wilson
(W. W. Norton & Company, $47.95)

A LIFE IN SCIENCE

* Edward Osborne Wilson was born on June 10, 1929 in Birmingham, Alabama. He spent much of his childhood exploring outdoors, developing a lifelong fascination with nature, biology and entomology (the study of insects).

* At 13, he discovered a colony of non-native fire ants in Alabama and raised the alarm. Five years later, the State of Alabama commissioned him to complete a report to see how far the (agriculturally toxic) fire ant had spread. This was his first scientific study, published in 1949.

* He studied entomology at the University of Alabama and went on to Harvard to complete his PhD, where he earned the nickname "Dr Ant". He spent his student years tirelessly collecting different forms of the ant species, from South America to Australasia.

* He is most famously known as the father of sociobiology: the scientific study of the biological basis of social behaviour, which when extended beyond social insects to other animals - including humans - has proved highly controversial.

* Wilson's 20 books and hundreds of papers have won him prizes throughout his career, including two Pulitzers in 1979 and 1991. He officially retired from Harvard in 1996, but continues to hold the posts of Professor Emeritus and Honorary Curator in Entomology.

- Octavia Morris