E.O. Wilson of Ants and Men

♪ MAN: Ed Wilson is an extraordinary scientist.

♪ MAN: He essentially single-handedly created an entire field of science.

♪ MAN: Ed has become so important to us now because he talks about what it means to live.

♪ [crowd cheering] MAN: He's always been interested in the biggest questions.

MAN: Ed Wilson has changed the way all of us view the world.

♪ ♪ [birds squawking, insects buzzing] [frogs chirping] MAN: Scene 301, take 4.

B Camera marker.

E.O.

WILSON: When I'm, uh, you know, when I'm finished with this, I'm going to Hollywood and look for a career, applying for a slot as a zombie in one of those zombie movies where there are large numbers of zombies.

You never know what director might then pick me out, you know as an aging zombie.

I've now used up a lot of your valuable time.

MAN: No.

WILSON: Okay, may I begin again?

MAN: You may begin again.

WILSON: With the real stuff, okay?

♪ For my entire life, nature has been my inspiration, my fascination, and my delight.

That's amazing!

Here, let's see this.

Wow!

Look at this thing!

And what endless pleasure it's given me.

Isn't that incredible?

MAN: Do you need him?

WILSON: Yeah, stick it in there.

That's called a Mombasa train.

That's good.

Where did you get that?

MAN: Here.

WILSON: Okay, good for you!

Most people haven't got the slightest idea about how little known a planet Earth is.

Knock that down in.

That's for real.

That's a Staphylinid beetle, a rove beetle.

That's a nice one.

When you go to the living world, which is what I've spent my entire career studying, you realize that we've scarcely begun to find out what all of the species are on Earth.

Hold, hold, hold it, oh, yeah.

Pentatomid.

Oh, my God, that's amazing!

This could be a new species.

Look at that beautiful abdomen.

This is a kind of sport, you know.

It's the best sport in the world, particularly when you know the organisms.

It's the soccer of scientists.

STEVEN PINKER: Ed Wilson is an extraordinary scientist.

He changed the intellectual landscape by challenging the taboo against discussing human nature.

He became a champion of conservation and biodiversity, and he was a model of gentlemanly conduct as a scientist and of literate and passionate writing.

♪ GREG CARR: If someone develops a theory about human nature or biodiversity and in common living rooms across the world, it seems like common sense, but in fact, a generation ago, we didn't understand it, it tells you that that person, in this case, Ed Wilson, has changed the way all of us view the world.

WILSON: I'm going to speak a little bit on the subject of insects.

Of course, I like them.

♪ I began studying insects, butterflies, and ants when I was only nine years old.

I decided very early, I wanted to be an entomologist and have a career studying them.

And sure enough, I ended up here at this university, Harvard, teaching the subject and curating one of the largest insect collections in the world.

But there's another far more important reason for paying attention to what I like to call these little things that run the world.

♪ Ants alone weigh four times as much as all of the land vertebrates put together.

The ants, with other kinds of insects, dominate the world.

♪ And yet we don't pay any attention to them.

Most people don't care a hoot about anything that's smaller than a hummingbird.

JONATHAN HAIDT: One thing that's really clear about Ed is that his expertise comes from his study of the ants, but all along, from the very beginning, he wanted to talk about human nature, ethics, religion, and where we come from.

♪ WILSON: My very long lifetime as a scientist has supplied me, I believe, with a store of knowledge and insight that helps me to understand the human condition.

♪ But what I've come to learn is that humanity's troubles are due substantially to the fact that we are a dysfunctional species.

♪ ♪ Dysfunctional.

And why?

Because we have Paleolithic emotions.

We have medieval institutions.

And on top of all of that, we've developed God-like technology.

[rumbling] And that's a dangerous mix.

♪ I've been a happy man in a terrible century, forced to bear witness to not only our self-destruction but also the destruction of much of the biosphere, but I've never lost hope.

Where does my optimism come from?

I suppose, like everything else in my life, from my childhood.

♪ There is such a thing as Southern pride, Alabama pride.

I've got a lot of it.

I'm not a Harvard professor who was born and grew up in Alabama.

I'm an Alabamian who went up north to get work.

You've really busted an illusion for me.

I've... BEN RAINES: You know, if anything hidden is going to be somewhere, it would be in here.

I think we may have ivory-billed woodpeckers in here.

WILSON: I love to hear you talk.

[laughter] RAINES: I am Ben Raines.

I was the environment reporter at the local newspaper in Mobile, and I won a journalism contest, and Ed was one of the judges.

Is that going to be your pen name now?

WILSON: No, let me tell you a story.

RAINES: Of course I knew who he was, but I was stunned when a letter showed up at the house from Ed, and he was telling me that he had delivered the paper as a kid.

♪ So, a few months later, I had occasion to meet him.

There was a group of scientists doing one of Ed's bio blitzes up in the Red Hills, and I was late getting there.

I marched up into the woods, taking a shortcut.

I got to the top of the hill, and there was this old man laying on his back, staring at the sky, and I thought, "Oh, my gosh, E.O.

Wilson is dead."

And he moved and looked at me and said, "You must be Ben," and I said, "Yes, I am, Dr.

Wilson."

And he said, "Lay down here with me, and let's stare at the sky for a while."

♪ WILSON: Over in Brewton when I was 15, I decided I was going to find every snake species.

I swear I found at least 30 of them.

I kept a bunch of the species in my backyard.

You know, you always have some nickname or other down here.

"Hey, J.C., you going out for guard on the team this, this, this fall?"

"Oh, yeah, Bubba, I am."

Well, I was, I was Snake.

[laughter] RAINES: Look here, look here!

WILSON: What?

RAINES: There's a little goldfinch on the branch.

WILSON: Look at that, yeah!

RAINES: He's right over there.

There's two of them.

Now we have a lot of nature in the boat.

WILSON: Okay.

Oh, I love it.

[laughter] RAINES: You know, Ed's been all over the world.

He's this internationally acclaimed guy, he's won two Pulitzer Prizes, and here he takes time to write a letter to some guy at a tiny paper, telling him I liked your work.

He's always got time.

[laughter] WILSON: Tell me more.

What do you think?

The great thing about growing up in old Mobile was not the history that was all around me, and it was wonderful history, but the natural history that I had available to me.

♪ In just a few minutes, I could leave on my bike and be on my way to the Mobile dock area, or I could get on the causeway that cuts off Mobile Bay from the Mobile-Tensaw Delta Wilderness Area to the north.

♪ I wish every kid could have a chance to wander and experience natural environments, natural history, the way I was able to do it.

And I'm reminded of a wonderful thing that the French philosopher Camus said.

He said, "All of a man's life consists of the search for those few special images in the presence of which his soul first opened."

♪ It's 1936.

Seven years old, I stare down into the sea at a giant jellyfish suspended motionless in water so clear, it seems to be set in glass.

Everything about this creature is mysterious, spectacular.

I was able to observe that giant jellyfish at length without knowing what it was, why it was put together that way, what it was doing there, and I came away with this impression of some wonder of nature I had observed and only later was to learn the meaning of it.

♪ I never forgot that jellyfish.

It was one of the encounters that made me determined to become a naturalist.

Another encounter by the Gulf Coast determined what sort of a naturalist I would become.

I was fishing one day for pinfish.

I pulled one up too fast, and its sharp, needlelike fin hit my right eye, and ultimately I was blinded by traumatic cataract, so I would grow up from then on with vision in only one eye.

And when I started as a naturalist, I tried bird-watching-- everybody does that-- and I discovered that I was the world's worst bird-watcher, because when you have only one eye, you have a great deal of difficulty picking out the distance that the bird is.

You have to live in a flat, two-dimensional world.

Well, I always have.

It never bothered me, but what I did discover was I have unusual acuity in my remaining eye, so I picked for the subject I wanted to study--insects.

They're exactly what I wanted to study in fine detail, close up to what vision I did have.

♪ The attention of my surviving eye turned to the ground.

I would thereafter celebrate the little things of the world, the animals that can be picked up between thumb and forefinger and brought close to my one eye for inspection.

This is a praying mantis.

That is beautiful.

It says, "What are you?

I can't eat you."

[laughter] ♪ It never occurred to me, after my experiences in Mobile, that I would ever be anything but a naturalist.

I thought, entomology, insects, that was my thing.

From an early age, I was fascinated by the parallels between the worlds of insects and humans.

♪ We seemed to have so much in common.

♪ Later in my career, when my thinking moved from ants to humans, a lot of people were surprised.

They wondered, what's an entomologist doing talking about the human mind and emotions?

♪ But to me, it seemed very natural.

We share with insects the mysterious instinct to build complex societies.

Take a nest of leafcutter ants, for example.

It's a city to rival anything in the human world.

Researchers in Brazil wanted to discover just how big these nests could become.

Nobody knew.

So, when they found an abandoned nest, they had a clever idea.

The nest absorbed ten tons of concrete.

When it had set, they began to dig.

My colleague Luiz Forti was in charge of the excavation.

♪ For weeks, they dug.

♪ Finally, the astonishing dimensions of the leafcutter nest were revealed.

♪ Here was a labyrinthine web of underground highways, mini-colonies, gardens, and garbage dumps.

But it was the scale of it that was breathtaking.

This was an ant metropolis, a Manhattan of the insect world.

Now, how could an animal with a brain smaller than a pinhead possibly construct and maintain a city of this size and complexity?

♪ It was marvels of insect society such as this one that drew me to their world as a young boy.

How exciting, I thought, to spend a lifetime exploring these mysteries.

Insect behavior seemed so carefully controlled and predictable.

Human behavior less so.

I had a second disability early in my childhood that had quite an effect on me.

My parents divorced when I was seven, and at that time, people didn't get divorced, at least down in this part of the country.

It was a big family scandal.

Finally, as my parents went their separate ways, they packed me off to an institution I'm sure they thought would protect me, perhaps also give me some much needed discipline.

♪ The Gulf Coast Military Academy was a carefully planned nightmare... ♪ all gray wool cloth and ramrod straight, but it gave me a lifelong appreciation of our deep-seated instincts for group belonging and the values that go along with it-- loyalty, honor, and duty.

♪ To this day, I am stirred by accounts of soldiers and policemen and firemen who've died in the line of duty.

♪ I can be brought to tears with embarrassing quickness by the solemn ceremonies honoring these heroes.

♪ Cooperation, altruism, instinctive self-sacrifice-- these are the themes that would become the cornerstones of my thinking about human tribalism later in my career.

Having spent so much time working out the fine details of social behavior in the insects, like ants and termites, I became more and more impressed with the role of tribalism in human beings as an expression of the widespread need to be in groups that you find in the animal kingdom as well as in human beings.

[birds chirping] Ants are the dominant insect species on Earth, but when I started my career, we really didn't know much about them.

♪ In 1951, when I went up to Harvard, I knew I would make them the subject of my doctoral thesis, and ever since, I've placed ants at the center of my professional life, the focus of a near obsession.

♪ There are, we know, 16,000 kinds of ants at least because that's how many we've discovered and described.

We have, in this museum, specimens of about 6,000 to 8,000.

I estimate that at any given time, there are about 10,000 trillion ants on Earth.

All of the ants in the world, if you put them in one side of the scale and all the humans in the other side, on the other scale, on the other side of the scale, they would balance.

The weight of all the ants in the world is approximately equal to the all the weight of humans in the world.

Now, this is a box of specimens from which I drew out and classified and studied one particular group of species of ant, and I had the great pleasure, really, the aesthetic pleasure, of seeing how each species is formed, its anatomy... ♪ its exquisite detail of the sculpturing of the surface of the head, of the middle part of the body, of the waist, of the abdomen-- the gaster, we call it-- of the exact patterns of the hair, all exquisitely distinct in so many ways for each one of these species, in almost infinite variety.

♪ ♪ Apart from being beautiful, ants epitomize to me the mystery that has occupied most of my life-- the evolution of advanced social behavior.

How do ants organize their astonishingly intricate societies?

As a student and then young professor at Harvard in the 1950s, this was the question that fascinated me.

Ants must have some form of communication, but nobody at the time knew what it was.

♪ Compared with human beings, ants have weak vision and hearing.

So how do they communicate?

I started with the problem of how ants tell other members of their colony about the location of a source of food.

I noticed that, at regular intervals, they touched their abdomens to the ground.

Were they leaving chemical traces?

I began painstaking dissections of ant abdomens.

I thought that if I could crush each of the organs in a fire ant abdomen with a fine applicator stick, then draw the stick across a piece of paper in front of other fire ants, they might react.

As I worked through each of the almost microscopic organs in turn, the ants showed no interest.

Finally I came to a virtually unknown piece of ant anatomy called the Dufour's gland.

Their response was explosive.

♪ That was just the beginning.

Before long, I and others had discovered over 20 different pheromones, the chemical signals through which ants talk to each other.

PIOTR NASKRECKI: Entomologists had known for a long time that insects communicate chemically, but that was primarily work done on animals such as moths who use a long-range pheromonal communication.

Ed's contribution was to discover that ants not only use pheromones to communicate, but they essentially have a pheromonal language.

WILSON: Let me answer the question that I'm asked most commonly about ants, which is what to do about the ones in my kitchen.

People think that I'm the person to come to to get rid of ants, and my response is, I suggest putting a little cookie crumb down and then watching them, and what you'll see, if you watch carefully, is ants coming out and communicating with each other about the discovery of the food and then going back in, and the whole colony gets organized to pick up the food.

You're seeing a little bit of the intricate organization that binds the ant colonies together.

♪ Communication gives both ants and humans our amazing capacity to cooperate.

♪ This is the mystery at the heart of social behavior.

♪ In the late 1950s and early '60s, as I was trying to figure out the organization of ant society, I was also thinking about bigger natural systems-- ecosystems.

♪ Not many people thought like that back then.

♪ How, I wondered, did different species fit together to form an ecosystem?

A natural catastrophe gave me the key.

♪ [explosion] On August 27, 1883, one of the greatest volcanic eruptions ever recorded laid waste to the Indonesian island of Krakatoa.

[rumbling] It was, they say, the loudest explosion ever heard on Earth.

[rumbling] Over 36,000 people were killed.

Krakatoa was one of the worst natural disasters of modern times, but exactly because it was so destructive, it was an unexpected gift to later generations of biologists.

Life on the island had been completely wiped out.

That tragic event made Krakatoa the perfect laboratory in which to find out how species colonized and recreated an ecosystem.

And biologists quickly, even in the 1800s, saw the value of studying what kind of species would come back and settle Krakatoa and what kind of relationships they might have.

♪ Dutch naturalists visited the island repeatedly in the years after the eruption.

They carefully chronicled returning species.

It was a grand experiment, and we have been able to use the data to this day.

Those data revealed a fascinating fact.

[chirping] Almost exactly the same number of bird species repopulated the island as had inhabited it before.

The species were different, but their number was the same.

[chirping] This seemed to show that ecosystems naturally find their own equilibrium.

It made me think there might be a simple mathematical formula expressing this balance.

♪ But to confirm my intuition, we needed a more controlled experiment.

♪ So, I decided to create my own mini Krakatoa in the Florida Keys.

We went down to Florida, to Florida Bay, where there are thousands of little mangrove islands, little dots on the map.

♪ We got an exterminator from Miami.

We covered a number of islands different distances from the other islands so they could be fumigated, by the same technique used to fumigate warehouses, in order to eliminate all of the creatures on this little island.

Please don't think of me as a destroyer of biodiversity.

They were just one out of thousands.

We could then carefully record the rate at which insect species recolonized the little island and their number.

♪ The result strikingly confirmed our hypothesis.

That all ended up in a book by Robert MacArthur and me called The Theory of Island Biogeography.

NASKRECKI: Ed Wilson and MacArthur were the first people to actually quantify and create a theory of how communities behave on islands, how islands become populated by organisms and what happens next.

And they were the first ones to actually specify those rules and built equations that allow us to predict what will happen with organisms on islands.

WILSON: We figured out how to predict the number of species that will arrive and live and form an ecosystem on an island.

♪ [birds chirping] But the theory didn't just apply to islands.

I wanted it to apply to all ecosystems and the cause that's closest to my heart--conservation.

♪ NASKRECKI: Island biogeography has a tremendous application in conservation because as we modify the environment around us and leave behind little patches here and there of the natural habitat, we are actually creating functional islands of those natural habitats.

♪ WILSON: Later, after MacArthur and I had published The Theory of Island Biogeography, it became a centerpiece in ecology and also in conservation biology, you know, the planning, the study, the understanding of ecosystems.

♪ As I've come to understand even more about ecosystems, I've devoted more and more of my energy to the cause of biodiversity.

♪ The natural world has always been my greatest love.

If a biologist can't fight for it, who can?

♪ BILL FINCH: We evolved with places like this.

We evolved with a place where we could walk through the woods and pick berries off of bushes, and there was the scent of this mint that just permeates your morning, and where we could chew on toothache grass, and it made us feel better.

And just hearing the wind and hearing the sounds, these are things that we evolved with.

When we don't have those things, we're poorer as people.

There's a gap in our lives.

I'm Bill Finch.

I'm a writer and a natural historian.

I was writing for a newspaper.

I wrote a series looking at the forests in Alabama, and it got to Ed Wilson up in Cambridge, and we began a conversation about him wanting to see these places that he remembered as a child, and it was a very wonderful dialogue that we've continued almost two decades now.

WILSON: Oh, yeah.

FINCH: There's a beautiful swallowtail.

Palamedes, I think?

WILSON: I think it is.

That's a spicebush swallowtail.

I used to come to places like this.

I knew they were magical.

You don't have to go to Africa to enjoy the wonders of nature.

They're all around us.

FINCH: Out here, maybe as many as 65 species per square meter in places.

WILSON: I've been bragging about that by saying that's about the richest flora anywhere you'll find in America.

I mean, I'm just getting something brand-new.

Every time I look up, there's something different.

FINCH: Yep.

WILSON: I remember what Oliver Wendell Holmes said on his 90th birthday, "Oh, to be 80 again."

And that's my feeling.

[laughter] 80 again.

FINCH: Yeah.

When people think about Alabama, they think about strife, they think about violence, but there's an Alabama that's beneath that.

It is the most biologically diverse state east of the Mississippi River.

Smell one of the mints that we have, one of the native mints.

It's a...really a great odor.

WILSON: Oh, great!

FINCH: Isn't that great?

WILSON: I can see that in a gumbo.

Yeah, that is really terrific.

FINCH: Just a wonderful native mint.

WILSON: Over the years, my alarm over the destruction of the natural world has grown.

More and more of my time and writing has been devoted to the cause of biodiversity.

Back in 1986, I was, in fact, the first person to use the word.

The word biodiversity then spread around the world at an astonishing speed, and people began to use it to realize that there was something more to living nature than just occasional big pictures of jungles they see or elephants and rhinos and tigers.

We now estimate that there are about 10 million species on Earth.

Science has only discovered 2 million of them.

FINCH: And this is-- You want to try this?

WILSON: Yeah.

FINCH: This is toothache grass.

WILSON: So, we know only about 20 percent, roughly, of the species on this planet that make up the natural ecosystems that support us.

FINCH: Hmm, I don't know.

What would you say?

It's kind of a--mmm.

WILSON: Yeah, yeah, well, one thing is, it's making my mouth numb.

[laughs] Yeah, this is good stuff!

♪ So, I wanted that word biodiversity to remind us how little we know about the natural world and of the danger that we destroy it before we even know it's there.

The loggers and the corporate executives arrive at these forests before the scientists do, so by the time we show up, it's already cut down.

♪ We're beginning to understand the fragility, the elegance, the exquisite locking together of the relationships of these large numbers of plant and animal species we find in these surviving natural areas.

It isn't just a matter of number of species now.

It's a matter of the immense number of ways species interact with one another to form ecosystems.

♪ In all my work now, I want to drive home to people just how complex the natural world is, and just how precious.

Well, I love it.

♪ FINCH: Ed has become so important to us now.

His voice has become so important to us, I think, in part, because he talks about life, and he talks about what it means to live, and it's, I think, an increasing recognition that our path requires us to develop this relationship with all life.

♪ WILSON: If we allow it, natural diversity speaks to our innermost being and gives us profound pleasure.

But it's also true that we have a competing instinct to be obsessed only with our own kind.

♪ That's the call of complex society.

We're programmed for it to the detriment of all else.

♪ Humanity is a magnificent but fragile achievement.

We are an evolutionary chimera, living on intelligence steered by the demands of animal instincts.

This is the reason that we are mindlessly dismantling the biosphere and, with it, our own prospects for permanent existence.

♪ Our social instincts seem to have turned on the natural world that created them.

How could this conflict evolve?

Understanding that might just be our species' salvation.

♪ Why did any animal, whether human or insect, evolve complex societies?

♪ They don't seem to make much evolutionary sense.

To help us think about this enigma, we biologists have come up with a term--eusocial.

It signifies the most advanced form of social behavior.

In the history of life on Earth, we've discovered only 19 truly eusocial evolutionary lines.

16 of them are insects.

The only eusocial primate is Homo sapiens-- us.

♪ For a species to be eusocial, they have to have three things.

They have to have a group of individuals that live together for more than two generations.

They have to have adults caring for the young, usually intimately caring for them.

And they also have to have a reproductive division of labor.

In other words, some of those individuals in that society have to be giving up part of their longevity, perhaps, or at least reproductive capacity to serve the others.

In other words, real altruism inside the group.

♪ One of the first eusocial animals were ants.

In a nest, every ant works only for the good of the colony.

The activities and individuals in an ant colony are so perfectly integrated, it's almost as though they were part of a single organism.

♪ The insects do everything by instinct.

They literally are programmed automatons.

Seeing a particular stimulus, they do a particular act, and since we have this large array of specialists in the insect societies, each one with its own program activated, turned on, so to speak, ready to do a job, it can all be fitted together, and that's what we study when we study social insects.

What it is and how it all fits together to make what we call a superorganism.

♪ NASKRECKI: Since ants live in these massive colonies and in each colony usually only one individual is reproducing, some researchers, Ed included, look at the colony not as a group of individuals, but rather as one superorganism.

What that means is that the only individual that matters is the queen, whereas all the other members of the colony act in a way that would be similar to our appendages or even individual cells.

They only exist to help this one reproductive individual to reproduce and to pass on her genes.

WILSON: In the insect world, the formation of these superorganism societies seems to have given certain species an extraordinary capacity to conquer their immediate environment.

An amazing example of this is a raid by Matabele ants on a termite nest.

Wow!

Here is a real wildlife spectacle.

It's a raid by the Matabele ants.

They're on their way to raid a termite colony.

That's what they eat exclusively, and they are ferocious.

They're big, they're heavily armored, and they've got a terrific sting.

The first time I ever saw a Matabele column, I picked up one of these workers, and he gave me a sting I will remember forever.

I dropped it, and it was the first time an ant ever defeated me single-handedly.

These things march out almost every day in order to attack termite mounds.

Here's how it works.

Scouts go out, single workers, and they wander off by themselves, out random paths, as much as 100 meters from where the colony is, and when they locate a termite nest, the scout runs in a straight line back to the nest.

Don't ask me how they can wander all over the place and then know what a straight line to the nest is, but they do it.

And as soon as they get inside the nest, they're releasing pheromones, or odors, chemical signals.

We don't know what they are because we haven't had a chance to study them in a laboratory yet, but this has the effect of mobilizing the entire colony.

Within a few minutes, out they come.

♪ They're led by the scout, all going in the same direction, in fast march.

♪ These are the only social insects-- ants, bees, wasps, termites-- of which I'm aware anywhere in the world that all march in unison like that.

♪ They're met by a whole battalion of termite soldiers by this time, massed to fight back.

♪ And tough luck, because it's the soldiers that the Matabele eat.

They want to get those soldiers.

The more soldiers they meet, the better.

They kill the soldiers, the soldiers have no chance against them, and they gather them up in bunches and stuff them in their mouths and in between their jaws, and then, almost on signal, the whole thing turns around, and they all march back in unison to their nest and pour back inside.

♪ This capacity of an insect colony to act like a single superorganism became very important to me when I began to reconsider evolutionary theory later in my career.

It made me wonder if natural selection could operate not only on individuals and their genes, but on the colony as a whole.

That idea would cause quite a stir when I published it, but that was much later.

In the meantime, something else I wrote caused an even greater stir.

In the late 1960s, I started thinking seriously about our own species, comparing it to other eusocial animals.

I proposed that our behavior and instincts had evolved in nature just like theirs had.

It seemed so obvious, but that simple idea proved to be revolutionary.

It unleashed a firestorm.

♪ ♪ Here at Harvard, the 1970s were not an easy time for me.

In 1975, when I first proposed that a new discipline called sociobiology be begun, we were reaching a point then when we knew enough biology to formulate good theory about the mechanisms that bring creatures together, and this was very well received, particularly with reference to animals and insects, but it was badly received when I mentioned humans.

HAIDT: The key idea of sociobiology is just that behaviors evolved just the same way that hands and eyes and stomachs evolved, and everyone's fine with that for other animals.

The problem was just applying it to humans.

WILSON: And I did speak about human instincts and the origin of our emotions and so on.

This was not well received, particularly by the social scientists in those days, who, as almost a united body, believed that there was no such thing as instinct in human beings and that all of human social behavior is learned.

At the time, most people thought we became what we are through socialization, by learning and culture, not nature.

But in Sociobiology, I suggested that things like human bonding and morality must have a biological basis.

It must have evolved.

HAIDT: So in this famous 1975 book, in the last chapter that got Ed into such hot water and got so many people angry at him, he has a section on ethics, on my field, and he makes this extraordinary claim.

He says, "The time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized."

As you can guess, philosophers didn't like this very much.

This was an amazing claim in the 1970s.

You know, what we would say, full of chutzpah.

PINKER: To understand the backlash against Ed Wilson's Sociobiology in the 1970s, you really have to go back to the late 19th, early 20th century, when scientists had a number of beliefs that we would consider monstrous today, such as that different races were biologically on different rungs of a hierarchy of evolution, with whites at the top.

There were assumptions about women that we would consider horrific today, that women were incapable of brainwork, because biology prepared them to be child-rearers.

WILSON: People imagined that by talking about the evolutionary roots of human behavior, I was trying to revive those old, discredited ideas.

And so it was thought that I had made a terrible mistake and that I was setting a stage for biological interpretation of humans, which would depict them as subject to genetic manipulation and ideas of racism and so on.

That opposition was one of the most intense controversies of-- well, I would not exaggerate it when I'll say, scientific controversies of the century.

HAIDT: In the sixties and seventies, the most sacred value was antiracism and also related, antisexism, and so anything that remotely seems to threaten those values will trigger a nerve and people will go haywire, and that's what happened.

Ed, simply saying, "Well, maybe human nature is innate, maybe we evolved with a division of labor between men and women."

"Whoa!

You're saying that there could be genetic differences between men and women?

But that could justify sexism.

That could justify paying men and women differently.

Therefore it must be wrong."

♪ ♪ PINKER: There was a manifesto entitled Against Sociobiology, written by a number of his colleagues on the floor upstairs in the department of biology at Harvard University, in which they denounced sociobiology as a reactionary, regressive doctrine that could license racism and sexism and slavery and genocide.

♪ WILSON: The opposition was rather violent.

There were demonstrations organized at Harvard against me.

I had to give one major lecture at Harvard by being taken through the back door by police escort.

It was that bad.

PINKER: It didn't take long for Ed's lectures and classes to be picketed, and at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a panel on sociobiology was interrupted by demonstrators chanting, "Racist Wilson, you can't hide, we charge you with genocide."

And then one of them ran up to the podium saying, "E.O.

Wilson, you're all wet," and dumped a pitcher of ice water over his head.

WILSON: I believe I'm correct to say that I'm the only modern scientist ever to be attacked for an idea, physically attacked, that is.

PINKER: There's no small irony in the fact that the target of these flaming arrows was a courtly, charming, soft-spoken Southern gentleman and an empirical scientist.

But such was the consensus at the time and the moral charge that surrounded this consensus that he could be a target of controversy, merely for bringing up the topic of human nature.

HAIDT: That's one of the striking things, is that what comes out of Ed in person and in his writings is a man who is so gentle and decent and open and honest, and so to see him attacked on moral grounds is almost a little bit comical.

♪ WILSON: Those were testing times, but I stood my ground, just because what I was saying seemed so simple and so obviously right.

More and more evidence came in from psychology, from genetics, from anthropology, that in fact there are general properties of the way the human mind develops and children acquire culture and preferences, and biases are generally adopted by most people that do have a biological nature.

So, by the nineties, this, this controversy had pretty well died down, and it's made it a great deal easier to interpret human evolution with free-ranging ideas of the kind that I hope I'm presenting to you now.

PINKER: Ed Wilson made it safe for many other scientists to explore the topic of human nature.

♪ Psychologists who had read Sociobiology took inspiration from Wilson's example and started to study human sexuality, human aggression, human dominance, human emotions like fear and anger and pride and guilt and sympathy from a biological perspective.

♪ WILSON: But it is one thing to observe that we must have a human nature and quite another to discover what it is and how we came by it.

♪ ♪ ♪ Exalted we are, written to be the mind of the biosphere without a doubt, our spirits uniquely capable of awe, and ever more breathtaking leaps of imagination, but we are still part of Earth's fauna and flora, bound to it by emotion, physiology, and, not least, deep history.

In the battles of sociobiology, the point I wanted to make was a simple one-- we are part of the natural world.

Our minds and emotions evolved in nature.

To understand them, we have to understand that evolution, and that happened right here in Africa.

♪ This landscape and this land, this is where we were born as a species, somewhere in the vicinity of 100,000 to 200,000 years ago, on the continent of Africa.

And it was not just our physical form that was born and evolved here, but our human nature, too.

♪ So, now we know a lot about the origin of the body, in other words, how the human form came about and the rate at which the forebrain grew and the head shaped.

But the one thing that's been lacking in the explanation of the origin of humanity and, therefore, lacking in terms of-- shall we call it the meaning of humanity?

Is the origin of our social behavior.

♪ What interests me is the evolutionary period in which we went from being social in the way apes are social to our distinctively human type of intense cooperation.

MICHAEL TOMASELLO: If the last common ancestor of humans and apes was like modern-day great apes, it was a pretty competitive individual.

[growling] Fighting for food every day... [shrieking] ...and maybe cooperating a little bit.

And what had to happen in human evolution is that humans had to become more cooperative to live in the kind of societies that we live in today.

WILSON: That transition from being just quite social to being ultra social is what I call crossing the eusocial frontier.

Ants crossed it about 150 million years ago when they started to rear their young in nests.

♪ We crossed it about a million years ago when our ancestors developed advanced cooperation to defend their campsites.

♪ HAIDT: So, it's that transition from being like chimpanzees, that are highly social, to being eusocial, to being able to work in very large groups, even with strangers, as we're all doing here today.

None of us are siblings, but we're all working together really well because we got all these moral emotions.

We are built for this stuff.

[children chatting] WILSON: Psychologist Michael Tomasello has spent much of his career studying the social capabilities of children and chimpanzees.

He's designed experiments to compare their ability to cooperate.

TOMASELLO: So, here's an experiment.

There's food on a board, and a rope is strung through loops in the board, so that if one person pulls, it just comes out, so you have to pull at the same time to get the board to come in.

And if you split the food, one part of the food on one side of the board and one part on the other side, both children and chimpanzees pull in and are quite successful.

But when you pile the food in the middle, the children are still quite good at it, and they take around half each, and they keep cooperating trial after trial, but the chimpanzees, everything falls apart because the dominant takes all the food, the subordinate says, "What's in it for me?"

And that's the end of it.

WILSON: Humans don't have to be taught to cooperate.

We do it instinctively.

♪ Evolution has hardwired us for cooperation.

That's the key to eusociality.

HAIDT: So, you can see Ed throughout his career trying to tell the story of how we became as eusocial as the ants, but I think it's only in the last book or two where he really works out the story of how we made the jump.

WILSON: We made the jump when we evolved emotions that bound us together.

HAIDT: We develop these capacities to really care what other people think of us, to feel bad when we don't pitch in, to be afraid that others will ostracize us and gossip about us.

We evolved to have anger and shame and guilt and contempt and love and loyalty.

We evolved these as we became an ultra social or eusocial species.

♪ WILSON: Cooperation permeates our being.

Everything we do, everything we love and find beautiful is the fruit of cooperation.

♪ We like to be involved in it, and we like to observe it.

Our emotions gear us toward group activities but also our unique cognitive capacities.

♪ The ability to read each other's intentions and coordinate our actions.

We may never know exactly how all these emotions and behaviors evolved together, but they obviously gave us some evolutionary advantage.

Somehow they combined to push us over the eusocial frontier.

We became the last of the 19 evolutionary lines to develop the most advanced form of social behavior.

Just as with the others, it was the key to our success.

♪ This is 19 lines out of millions over long periods of evolution, produced animals that dominate the world.

That's the ants and the termites.

They are the dominant creatures on the land with humans, and they share with humans the quality of eusociality.

♪ In the history of life on Earth, advanced social behavior has been one of the great evolutionary success stories.

Most species that have crossed the eusocial frontier have conquered its environment.

♪ Ants, termites, the other eusocial insects, and now us.

♪ Thinking on this remarkable fact has made me reconsider in recent years the theory of natural selection and how it works in complex social animals.

It's made me think about what really makes us human and one of the great evolutionary puzzles.

♪ [horn blasts] BRIAN DELATE: Human nature, in my humble opinion, has an infinity to it.

We are capable of the deepest, darkest kinds of behavior you can imagine, and we can create incredible goodness.

I'm Brian Delate.

I was drafted into the army in August of 1968, and I went to Vietnam in 1969.

♪ SOLDIER: Taking enemy fire from over there.

DELATE: I was in this area called Duc Pho, very dangerous area.

a lot of people got hurt there.

[explosions] And there was a listening post maybe 150 feet away outside the perimeter.

It was almost dark.

There was this rocket mortar stuff coming in left and right.

♪ One of the guys of this listening post got hurt.

There was a guy there who, in one second, he just dropped what he was doing, and he ran out into the middle of this, just charged out.

There was no thought about it.

And then minutes later, brought the guy back.

♪ Watching that man charge out to get his man back, I was so moved by that behavior.

Like a primitive kind of, not even thinking, but a primitive behavior where this happens, and you do that.

[gunfire] It's kind of built-in.

Your survival is equal to the person's next to you.

[gunfire] I think that maybe it's like you have a collective survival instinct, along with an individual survival instinct.

♪ PINKER: Any kind of voluntary self-sacrifice is a puzzle to an evolutionary biologist.

Why would men give up their lives for their country?

That seemed to be kind of evolutionary madness, because any gene that would push a man in that direction would be very quickly weeded out of the gene pool and you'd wonder why any such genes would survive as opposed to genes for being cowardly or pacifistic?

WILSON: But time and time again, we see ants, humans, and other eusocial creatures give up their lives for the good of the group.

Remember the daily wars of Matabele ants against termites on the African plains.

As the phalanx of Matabele ants approaches the termite nest, termite soldiers rush to station themselves at the nest entrance.

♪ To stop the Matabeles entering the nest, they instinctively offer themselves to be slaughtered in their hundreds.

♪ Since the 1960s, the accepted way to explain this instinctive altruism in terms of evolutionary theory is what has been called kin selection.

The idea here is that if I give up my life for my kin group-- my brothers, cousins, or children-- even though I die, my genes live on in them.

PINKER: Starting in the 1960s, a number of biologists realized that if you think rigorously about what natural selection does, it operates on replicators.

Natural selection, Darwin's theory, is the theory of what happens when you have an entity that can make a copy of itself, and so it's very clear that the obvious target of selection in Darwin's theory is the gene.

♪ That became close to a consensus among evolutionary biologists, but I think it's fair to say that Ed Wilson was always ambivalent about that turn in evolutionary theory.

WILSON: I never doubted that natural selection works on individual genes or that kin selection is a reality, but I could never accept that that is the whole story.

Our group instincts, and those of other eusocial species, go far beyond the urge to protect our immediate kin.

After a lifetime studying ant societies, it seemed to me that the group must also have an important role in evolution, whether or not its members are related to each other.

[buzzing] HAIDT: So there have been a few revolutions in evolutionary thinking.

One of them happened in the 1960s and '70s, and it was really captured in Dawkins' famous book, The Selfish Gene, where if you just take the gene's eye view, you have the simplest elements, and then you sort of build up from there, and that works great for most animals, but Ed was studying ants, and of course you can make the gene's eye view work for ants, but when you're studying ants, you don't see the ant as the individual, you don't see the ant as the organism, you see the colony or the hive as the entity that really matters.

WILSON: Once you see a social insect colony as a superorganism, the idea that selection must work on the group as well as on the individual follows very naturally.

This realization transformed my perspective on humanity, too.

♪ So, I proposed an idea that goes all the way back to Darwin.

♪ It's called group selection.

♪ The idea is simple: Natural selection is about the survival, not just of the fittest individual... but the fittest group, too.

♪ HAIDT: Ed was able to see group selection in action.

It's just so clear in the ants, the bees, the wasps, the termites, and the humans.

WILSON: The fact of group selection gives rise to what I call multilevel evolution, in which natural selection is operating both at the level of the individual and the level of the group.

It binds together individual striving and group success.

There's a formula to keep the whole thing clear, and I'll give it to you, and that is, within groups, selfish individuals win, however, groups of altruistic individuals always beat groups of selfish individuals.

HAIDT: And that got Ed into one of the biggest debates of his career over multilevel selection, or group selection.

PINKER: Ed Wilson did not give up the idea that selection acted on groups, while most of his fellow biologists did.

Then several decades later, revived that notion in a full-throated manifesto, which I think it would be an understatement to say that he did not convince his fellow biologists.

♪ ♪ [laughs] WILSON: The brouhaha about group selection has brought me into conflict with defenders of the old faith, like Richard Dawkins and many others who believe that ultimately the only thing that counts in the evolution of complex social behavior is the gene, the selfish gene.

They believe the gene's eye view of social evolution can explain all of our groupish behavior.

I do not.

I've always been blessed with brilliant opponents, and on this issue, my friend Steven Pinker is one of them.

PINKER: Most people would say that if there's a burning building and there's-- your child is in one room and another child is in another room, then you are entitled to rescue your child first, that there is a special bond between, say, parents and children.

This is exactly what an evolutionary biologist would predict because any gene that would make you favor your child will have a copy of itself sitting in the body of that child.

By rescuing your child, the gene for rescuing children, so to speak, will be helping a copy of itself, and so those genes would proliferate in the population.

Not just the extreme case of saving your child from a burning building but for being generous and loyal to your siblings, your very close cousins.

The basis of tribalism, kinship, family feelings have a perfectly sensible evolutionary basis.

WILSON: The argument sounds compelling, but, as I and many others believe, it just doesn't work for social species.

NASKRECKI: For example, you cannot really use it very well to explain termite societies, where all the members are not females and clones of each other.

Each of them can potentially become a reproductive individual, and you have both males and female workers in the colony, so that mechanism doesn't quite explain those societies.

WILSON: I believe you just cannot understand the evolution of the eusocial species without the idea of group selection.

In all of us, insects and humans, natural selection works on both the individual and the group.

♪ In humans, this multilevel evolution has bequeathed to us our perplexing double nature.

♪ We are, on the one hand, engaged in an individual struggle for survival like all animals in which the best adapted will survive.

But we are, at the same time, genetically predisposed to sharing and cooperation... hence our divided selves... suspended between the warmest emotional bonds and selfish striving, between love and aggression, between the better angels of our nature and the darker ones.

It's this double nature, I believe, that predisposes us to the most deeply rooted of all human behaviors-- tribalism.

♪ [marching band playing WOLF SHIPMAN: My name is Wolf Shipman.

I go to Davidson High School.

I play the bassoon, and I am the drum major in marching band.

♪ The marching band family, there's a kind of, of unity to it.

Once you come into the band room after the first couple weeks of being called freshman and being made fun of, you become part of this family where you're the little brother and everyone wants to take care of you.

We become something of a unit, even in the school.

Everyone knows who the band nerds are.

We all kind of hang together.

It becomes a family setting, really.

It just feels like a place the band kids can call home.

WILSON: A home, a secure nest, a group.

We humans create tribes and cultures to give ourselves a feeling of belonging and security.

♪ They give us joy and a language to express our innermost feelings.

Exclusion makes us suffer.

Inclusion makes us thrive.

♪ ♪ CRAIG WORLEY: My name is Craig Worley.

I'm a 1990 graduate of the University of Alabama and a lifelong Crimson Tide supporter.

I would say, in Alabama, football is treated with the same reverence that religion is.

The traditions are honored.

The pageantry is honored, you know, from generation to generation.

PENNY JO LAMBERT: My name is Penny Jo Lambert, and I've been an Alabama fan my entire life.

Being an Alabama fan means pride, passion, respect, tradition.

♪ HAIDT: These collective sentiments, the emotions that we feel only when we are doing something with the group and as a group.

I think modern people can best identify this if they've been to a World Cup game or any sort of major sporting event.

There is a kind of collective ecstasy that happens when the group is competing with another group, and people love it, and that's why we have sports in the first place.

Sports make no sense unless you see that we are group-selected creatures who love being a group competing with another group.

I mean, why waste the time and money otherwise?

LAMBERT: It's a way of life.

It's a tradition that's been passed down from generation to generation, and for so many during football season, that Saturday, you know, they wake up, they cook out, they spend the time with their family and their friends, and it becomes a way of life.

WILSON: Nothing displays our desire for group belonging and identification better than sports.

At my alma mater, the University of Alabama, football is virtually a religion.

The adulation for our team, the Crimson Tide, is something to behold.

Okay, you ready?

BRANDON GIBSON: Yes, sir.

WILSON: All right.

[laughter] GIBSON: My name is Brandon Gibson.

I came to the University of Alabama to play football for the Crimson Tide in 2007.

I had the opportunity to play on two national championship teams.

WILSON: This was the Alabama that I lived in-- the mansion was there, the law school-- GIBSON: So, that was still there?

WILSON: Oh, that's been there since the 1800s, yeah.

GIBSON: Really!

WILSON: Can you imagine in your mind being here as a student in the 1940s?

I'm beginning to have difficulties thinking of it myself.

GIBSON: It's awesome to be a part of a team, you know, because you're working towards the same thing.

You know, every time we would go out for practice, there's a quote with a picture on the wall that says, "Out of yourself and into the team."

WILSON: I like that.

I, too, have been a lifelong fan of the Crimson Tide.

I know at firsthand the passion sports can arouse.

You know, I'm going to ask you a request, and you can turn me down if you want to, but I sure would like to look at that championship ring you're wearing.

GIBSON: Oh, hey, hey, you know, I pass it to a lot of people.

It would be an honor to pass it to you, so you have at it, for right now.

WILSON: Okay.

[laughs] I get to hold it.

GIBSON: You get to hold it right now.

WILSON: I'm not going to put it on, but at least I'll get to hold it.

The mother of all sporting events here in Alabama is the Iron Bowl, the game with our old college rivals Auburn.

It's the wildest spectacle I know of humanity's primordial group instincts.

♪ Auburn University is just 80 miles away, and its students are, to all intents and purposes, exactly the same as those of the University of Alabama, so this rivalry has no basis except pure tribal instinct.

[cheering] WORLEY: It's one of those things where you get so many people pulling in the same direction.

[cheering] It just creates a momentum that is just hard to explain, but you feel it when you're in a crowd where everybody is pulling in the same direction.

♪ WILSON: As they approach the stadium, the players are like gladiators preparing for combat.

♪ It's not too much to call the game that's coming up this afternoon a ritualization of war.

[cheering] ♪ People love it.

They love the ritualized version.

It brings out an instinct that is deep and powerful as any that directs the human psyche.

[cheering] ♪ ♪ There's a reason why the spectacle of teams on a field of battle excites such powerful emotions in us.

[cheering] In Darwinian terms, they've acquired territory and prestige and rank and power relevant to all the other competing teams.

Along the sides of the field of battle, there are young, nubile women dancing and shouting to the young men to encourage them to stronger and more violent action to carry the victory home.

[cheering] LAMBERT: When you're in the stadium, it's like having 100,000 of your closest friends and family nearby.

Alabama fans say, "Roll Tide," and use it as a greeting, a salutation, and also a war cry.

♪ WILSON: This is the profound identity we can feel with the group as it competes with another group.

It's a sort of communion that transcends our individual selves.

[cheering] There is an ecstasy that is almost religious.

[cheering] In fact, I believe that religion has its roots right here, in this sense of profound communion we can feel in these situations of collective euphoria, of being lifted out of ourselves.

That sense of collective belief, of bonding in the service of a greater cause.

♪ HAIDT: From Ed's writings, I don't get the impression that he believes in God or is a religious man, but yet he can't stop writing about religion.

He's fascinated by it, and I suspect he's interested in it for the same reason that I am, which is that if you try to understand this extraordinary groupishness of human beings, you've got to see religion as something that we evolved to facilitate that.

In other words, religion is one of our biological and cultural adaptations for crossing that divide from being solitary individuals to becoming a superorganism.

♪ WILSON: Religion is the highest expression of our tribal longings to be part of a greater whole, a celebration of the collective communion that group selection has predisposed us to.

♪ But tribalism is a double-edged sword.

The collective communion it promises isn't open to us all.

The flip side of tribal belonging is brutal exclusion.

No human institution easily escapes the darker angels of our divided self.

Humanity today is like a waking dreamer, caught between the fantasies of sleep and the chaos of the real world.

We thrash about.

We are terribly confused by the mere fact of our existence, and we are a danger to ourselves and to the rest of life.

[birds chirping] Our redemption, I believe, lies in understanding ourselves.

[chirping] Evolution has equipped us with a terrible capacity for destruction, but also a sublime one for cooperation.

We just have to decide which one we will honor.

The key, I believe, is to reclaim our place in the natural world.

We belong to nature.

Save that, and we can certainly save ourselves.

♪ CARR: The moment that I first met Ed, I happened to be at a restaurant, and he happened to be sitting at a table, and I did the most embarrassing thing, which is, you know, what groupies, right, and people do to a famous and amazing person like that, is I walked up to his table, and I said, "Professor Wilson, my name's Greg, and I'm going to go to Mozambique and work with the government there to restore Gorongosa National Park," and he looked up at me, and he said, "That makes my heart go pitter-patter."

♪ WILSON: In the 1960s, Gorongosa was one of the most beautiful parks in Africa.

Its wildlife was spectacular.

♪ People came from all over the world to see it.

♪ By the turn of the century, it had been destroyed.

CARR: Mozambique had a generation of war.

[gunfire] [yelling] First the Mozambicans fought for their freedom from Portugal, and when that ended, sadly, there was a civil conflict that raged for another 16 years.

[gunfire] And a lot of that civil war took place here in the national park.

[gunfire] 95 percent of the large animals were killed.

Of course, the soldiers were hungry.

They were eating the animals.

They were killing the elephants, trading the ivory for weapons.

[gunfire] ♪ Finally in 1992, the two sides of this civil disagreement in Mozambique signed a peace accord, but Gorongosa lay in ruins.

♪ ♪ WILSON: When Greg approached me to be the biological advisor to a project to restore Gorongosa, I had no hesitation.

This is what I live for-- conservation and science going hand in hand and the chance to make new discoveries.

You know, every scientist, who remains active through their whole life, is pursuing a dream.

Usually it goes all the way back to their childhood, and mine is ultra simple.

A physicist might dream of discovering a new particle while he stays in an accelerator somewhere.

I look for lost worlds.

♪ I always wanted to come to places where some scientist has not yet explored, and since that has stayed with me so long, it was a culminating experience for me to come to Gorongosa Park to this spot and the magnificent piece of rain forest, it was a little lost world down below us.

I mean, this is what I've always dreamed of.

This what people dream of!

It's an archetype.

It's what stories are based on.

It's where people want to go.

This is the real thing.

[insects chirping] Gorongosa has also given me the chance to do the other thing I love-- teach and encourage budding scientists.

Hey, wait a minute.

I got an idea.

Put this back.

You take it, and you keep that for your reference because we don't need another specimen, and I'll keep this.

So, you keep it for your collection.

You'll know there's a Crematogaster around.

Don't be afraid of science, because there are a lot of people who say, "Oh, you have to know mathematics," or, "Oh, no, you can't do science unless you have a huge building, you know, for splitting atoms."

"You can't do science, you know, unless you have this super microscope, you know, you can see down to, almost down to a little atom."

You do just as good science here, just what we are doing.

♪ In just the few years since I first came here, I've watched the park come back to life.

At last count, there were 72,000 large animals.

We've discovered hundreds of new species of insects, and we've just scratched the surface.

What a great demonstration of how little we know about the natural world, how much there is still to be discovered and how urgent it is that we conserve what is left to us.

CARR: Ed coming here has inspired us.

In fact, he's expanded our mind into the urgency of our mission.

WILSON: And then there's this question of, why parks?

You know, we're running up against this tendency to say, "Well, people are all that really count.

Animals are interesting, but if something has to give, it's got to be nature."

There's this kind of thinking that we're about to inaugurate the next great phase when everything is human, that is human, for human, by humans, of humans.

But I think parks are the buttress against that.

♪ ♪ Humanity has entered Gorongosa and begun to pull it down to humanity's level.

However, it has come back, and it's going to be restored, before very long, to its full glory.

And so, what kind of a lesson is there in that?

Many people have given up on the natural world.

They believe a planet totally dominated by mankind is the inevitable future, but Gorongosa tells us it doesn't have to be like that.

Here is a sort of Eden, its wildlife destroyed by greed and senseless conflict, but it can be remade.

And this isn't some moral obligation.

It's a pleasure.

♪ I don't want to lecture people about saving the planet.

I want to share with them the joy of the natural world.

It's where we belong.

By looking after it, we're looking after ourselves.

♪ We are biological species of the biological world.

It's part of us.

We adapted over millions of years to wild environments like this, and we really need them because... because it's home.

♪ My whole life has been an exploration of nature... insect nature and human nature.

[cheering] They fascinated me, filled me with delight, and transfixed me with wonder.

If my life and my work make even a handful of people open their eyes and hearts to the natural world and make them think about our place in it, well, I'll die a happy man.

♪ ♪ ANNOUNCER: E.O.

Wilson: Of Ants and Men is available on DVD.

To order, visit shopPBS.org or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS.

♪