Read Online Letters to a Young Scientist by Edward O. Wilson - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Edward O. Wilson
Tags: science, Non-Fiction
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facilitator: in the course of your successful career, you may well fill each of these roles at one time or another.
The author with sweep net looking at insects: Mobile, Alabama, 1942 (left), and the summit of Gorongosa Mountain, Mozambique, 2012 (right). Photographers: 1942, Ellis MacLeod; 2012, © Piotr Naskrecki.
Eight
I N EVER C HANGED
A PPROACHING THE END of more than sixty years of research, I have been fortunate to have been given complete freedom in choosing my subjects. Because I no longer look to very much in the way of a future, and the fires of decent ambition have been accordingly damped, I can tell you, without the debilitating drag of false modesty, how and why some of my discoveries were made. I’d like you to think, as I thought early in my career of older scientists, “If he could do it, so can I, and maybe better.”
I started very young, even before my snake-handling triumph in Camp Pushmataha. Maybe you started young too, or else you are young and just starting. Back in 1938 when I was nine years old, my family moved from the Deep South to Washington, D.C. My father was called there for a two-year stint as an auditor in the Rural Electrification Administration, a Depression-era federal agency charged with bringing electric power to the rural South. I was an only child, but not especially lonely. Any kid that age can find a buddy or fit into some small neighborhood group, maybe at the risk of a fistfight with the alpha boy. (For years I carried scars on my upper lip and left brow.) Nevertheless, I was alone that first summer and was left to my own devices. No stifling piano lessons, no boring visits to relatives, no summer school, no guided tours, no television, no boys’ clubs, nothing. It was wonderful ! I was enchanted at this time by Frank Buck movies I’d seen about his expeditions to distant jungles to capture wild animals. I also read National Geographic articles that told about the world of insects—big metallic-colored beetles and garish butterflies, also mostly from the tropics. I found an especially absorbing piece in a 1934 issue entitled “Ants, Savage and Civilized,” which led me to search for these insects—searches that were always successful due to the overwhelming abundance of ants everywhere I looked.
There were postage stamps to collect and comic books, of course, but also butterflies and ants. Nothing complicated about collecting and studying insects. For a while anyway, they served as my lions and tigers, not exactly big game snared in nets by a hundred native assistants, but nevertheless the real thing. Thus fired up, I put some bottles in a cloth bag and walked over to the nearby woods of Rock Creek Park on my first expedition, venturing into second-growth deciduous woodland crisscrossed by paths. I remember vividly the animals I brought home that day. They included a wolf spider and the red and green nymph of a long-horned grasshopper.
Subsequently I decided to add butterflies as my quarry. My stepmother made me a butterfly net. (I put together a lot of them in the years to follow. In case you would like to do the same, bend a wire coat hanger into a circular loop, straighten the hook, heat the hook until it can burn wood, then push it into the end of a sawed-off broomstick. Finally, sew a net of cheesecloth or mosquito netting around the hoop.)
Thus accoutered, my butterfly collection grew furiously. Early in this career of mine, my best friend Ellis MacLeod, who years later was to be a professor of entomology at the University of Illinois, told me he had seen a medium-sized butterfly, black with brilliant red stripes across both wings, fluttering back and forth around the bushes in front of his apartment building. We found a book on butterflies and identified it as Red Admiral. The book was the beginning of my library on insects. At this point my mother, living with her second husband in Louisville, Kentucky, sent me a larger, beautifully illustrated book on
The author with sweep net looking at insects: Mobile, Alabama, 1942 (left), and the summit of Gorongosa Mountain, Mozambique, 2012 (right). Photographers: 1942, Ellis MacLeod; 2012, © Piotr Naskrecki.
Eight
I N EVER C HANGED
A PPROACHING THE END of more than sixty years of research, I have been fortunate to have been given complete freedom in choosing my subjects. Because I no longer look to very much in the way of a future, and the fires of decent ambition have been accordingly damped, I can tell you, without the debilitating drag of false modesty, how and why some of my discoveries were made. I’d like you to think, as I thought early in my career of older scientists, “If he could do it, so can I, and maybe better.”
I started very young, even before my snake-handling triumph in Camp Pushmataha. Maybe you started young too, or else you are young and just starting. Back in 1938 when I was nine years old, my family moved from the Deep South to Washington, D.C. My father was called there for a two-year stint as an auditor in the Rural Electrification Administration, a Depression-era federal agency charged with bringing electric power to the rural South. I was an only child, but not especially lonely. Any kid that age can find a buddy or fit into some small neighborhood group, maybe at the risk of a fistfight with the alpha boy. (For years I carried scars on my upper lip and left brow.) Nevertheless, I was alone that first summer and was left to my own devices. No stifling piano lessons, no boring visits to relatives, no summer school, no guided tours, no television, no boys’ clubs, nothing. It was wonderful ! I was enchanted at this time by Frank Buck movies I’d seen about his expeditions to distant jungles to capture wild animals. I also read National Geographic articles that told about the world of insects—big metallic-colored beetles and garish butterflies, also mostly from the tropics. I found an especially absorbing piece in a 1934 issue entitled “Ants, Savage and Civilized,” which led me to search for these insects—searches that were always successful due to the overwhelming abundance of ants everywhere I looked.
There were postage stamps to collect and comic books, of course, but also butterflies and ants. Nothing complicated about collecting and studying insects. For a while anyway, they served as my lions and tigers, not exactly big game snared in nets by a hundred native assistants, but nevertheless the real thing. Thus fired up, I put some bottles in a cloth bag and walked over to the nearby woods of Rock Creek Park on my first expedition, venturing into second-growth deciduous woodland crisscrossed by paths. I remember vividly the animals I brought home that day. They included a wolf spider and the red and green nymph of a long-horned grasshopper.
Subsequently I decided to add butterflies as my quarry. My stepmother made me a butterfly net. (I put together a lot of them in the years to follow. In case you would like to do the same, bend a wire coat hanger into a circular loop, straighten the hook, heat the hook until it can burn wood, then push it into the end of a sawed-off broomstick. Finally, sew a net of cheesecloth or mosquito netting around the hoop.)
Thus accoutered, my butterfly collection grew furiously. Early in this career of mine, my best friend Ellis MacLeod, who years later was to be a professor of entomology at the University of Illinois, told me he had seen a medium-sized butterfly, black with brilliant red stripes across both wings, fluttering back and forth around the bushes in front of his apartment building. We found a book on butterflies and identified it as Red Admiral. The book was the beginning of my library on insects. At this point my mother, living with her second husband in Louisville, Kentucky, sent me a larger, beautifully illustrated book on
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