The Origins of Creativity review – stick to the ants, professor
At 88, Professor EO Wilson has become festooned with the kind of accolades that might unhinge any scholar, however sober and down-to-earth. For his publishers, he is simply "the world's greatest living scientist"; to Ian McEwan, he is "an intellectual hero". On Wikipedia he is, variously, "the father of sociobiology", or "the father of biodiversity", a theorist, a naturalist, a two-time Pulitzer prize winner, and the author of more than 20 books; while Jeffrey Sachs describes him as "Darwin's successor". Lately, on the evidence of his latest volume, this grandeur seems to have got the better of his brilliance.
Wilson is the author of three titles that have shaped contemporary philosophical and scientific thought: Sociobiology (1975); On Human Nature (1978); and Consilience (1998). He is, finally, the world expert in the study of ants, whose peculiar lives and customs have inspired many of his finest biological observations. The Ants (1990) is probably the last word on the subject.
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