“Ant Man,” “Father of Sociobiology,” “Father of Biodiversity”: these epithets were how E. O. Wilson became affectionately known due to his lifelong work with insects and in environmental advocacy. He was also known for his secular humanist ideas pertaining to religion and ethics. Wilson died on December 26, 2021, in Burlington, Massachusetts, at the age of ninety-two.

Edward Osborne Wilson was born on June 10, 1929, in Birmingham, Alabama. He attended the University of Alabama, where he earned his bachelor’s in science and master’s in science degrees in biology in 1950. In 1951, Wilson transferred to Harvard University, where he would spend his academic career from 1956 until retiring in 1996. After retiring from Harvard, he founded the E. O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation, which finances the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and is an independent foundation at the Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University. Wilson became a special lecturer at Duke University due to this relationship.

During his life, Wilson received more than 150 prestigious awards and medals from various organizations around the world. He was an honorary member of more than thirty world-renowned and prestigious organizations, academies, and institutions. Wilson was the Pellegrino University Research Professor, Emeritus in Entomology for the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, and a Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism. The Royal Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel Prize, awarded him the Crafoord Prize, an award designed to cover areas not covered by Nobel Prizes.

Not only was Wilson recognized for his scientific efforts, but he was a prolific and accomplished writer. In 1981 after collaborating with Charles Lumsden, Wilson published Genes, Mind and Culture, a theory of gene-culture coevolution. In 1990, he published The Ants, cowritten with Bert Hölldobler. He was a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction (for On Human Nature in 1979 and The Ants in 1991) and a New York Times best-selling author for The Social Conquest of Earth, Letters to a Young Scientist, and The Meaning of Human Existence. In the 1990s, Wilson published The Diversity of Life (1992), an autobiography: Naturalist (1994), and Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998) about the unity of the natural and social sciences. Additionally, he authored hundreds of scientific papers and articles for various publications, including Free Inquiry.

Wilson created two new scientific disciplines—sociobiology and global conservation—and coined the term scientific humanism as “the only worldview compatible with science’s growing knowledge of the real world and the laws of nature.” In a New Scientist interview published on January 21, 2015, Wilson said that “Religion ‘is dragging us down’ and must be eliminated ‘for the sake of human progress’” and “So I would say that for the sake of human progress, the best thing we could possibly do would be to diminish, to the point of eliminating, religious faiths.” It was because of these views that Wilson was among those who signed the Humanist Manifesto 2000.

The Council for Secular Humanism and Free Inquiry extend our deepest condolences to Dr. Wilson’s daughter, Catherine. His legacy in our world will live on for many generations to come.

For a complete tribute to Wilson, please see the May/June 2022 issue of Skeptical Inquirer.