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Lenny Wilkens
Basketball Hall of Fame
I'll never forget my first day in logic my first year, and we had this professor named Father Heath -- Dominican Fathers taught at Providence College at that time I was there -- and he was about six-three, six-four, big commanding guy. And we had to fill out these attendance cards and turn them in the first day. And so he went through them and finally he said, "Mr. Wilkens, Mr. Whalen." There was a kid named Dick Whalen who was also a freshman on the basketball team. "Would you please stand up, gentlemen?" And we both stood up and he said, "I want you to know that I don't like athletes, and in particular I don't like basketball players, so don't ever cut my class without a good reason." So right then and there he made us understand that we were there for an education, no matter what we thought, and I was always prepared. I mean, I had my logic book with me on trips and stuff, and I guess I impressed him because I never asked out of an exam. I was always there, and I had a B average all the way through college so, you know, I think, hopefully, I changed his attitude towards athletes.
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E.O. Wilson
Father of Sociobiology
We went on with connecting up what we could think of and discover about immigration into islands and extinction of species, connecting it up, what was known with ecology, which was then emerging into a new phase based upon demography, the life and death of organisms. So here we were, for the first time, able to start at the level of individual organisms and individual species -- living, reproducing, dying at a certain rate, interacting with one another as species that aggregate, and then dispersing -- as a result of having actually produced models that were predictive about what the outcome would be, in terms of diversity on islands. It was crude. It was very crude, and it's been largely replaced by more sophisticated models, but that, in essence, was the theory of island biogeography.
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E.O. Wilson
Father of Sociobiology
I wanted to make evolutionary biology experimental, and no one had thought of making biogeography experimental. How could you make biogeography experimental? And it dawned on me -- because I was doing all this field work, more from the experience of natural history -- that we weren't going to be able to experiment with New Guinea or Fiji, or even a small island in the West Indies. Because what I had in mind was to eliminate all the species in a place where they could be eliminated without any real damage to the total fauna, and then study the return of those, and see how that accorded with the basic patterns predicted by the theory of island biogeography. And it dawned on me that whereas you have to have an island the size of Cuba, say, for a real population of woodpeckers or small mammals, that a very small island, like a mangrove island in the Florida Keys, would be an island for tiny insects where thousands of a species could live.
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E.O. Wilson
Father of Sociobiology
We pulled it off. We actually followed the recolonization of an empty island, in fact a whole series of them, with controls, and that was the first experiment in island biogeography. And although the data had certain limitations -- we couldn't really figure out the turnover rate exactly -- we did affirm the main conclusions of the theory of island biogeography. The closer the island is and the smaller it is, the more quickly it fills up. The farther away it is, the larger it is, the more slowly it fills up. We learned a lot about the colonization of our islands in that experiment. It was very satisfying.
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E.O. Wilson
Father of Sociobiology
Today, 25 years later, gradually the malodor drifted away, and today it is one of the most popular subjects, particularly going under the name "evolutionary psychology." There is an entire library of books it seems, almost every year, published. It never was rejected as heavily as the criticism seemed to indicate -- that is, the conspicuous criticism. I made a count not too long ago of books published from 1975 to '95 -- in my library, which is nearly complete -- on human sociobiology, and in that period, the books favorable, predominantly favorable, ran something like 20 to one against those that were unfavorable. The ones that were unfavorable were often paid a great deal of attention to because everybody likes a fight.
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E.O. Wilson
Father of Sociobiology
It was with distance running, and making my best effort at it, that I discovered (that) at the end of the day, maybe biology is destiny. In other words, there was a limit. There is no question, there was a limit in me and, I think, others -- some very high, some in the middle, and some quite low -- in any kind of physical effort, and it may turn out eventually in any kind of a mental effort where then achievement in mental effort depends substantially on context and opportunity and other character traits. But in the late '40s, I was spellbound by the notion of -- you know, I was just a kid, I was a teenager still -- I was spellbound by the notion of the four-minute mile, the unattainable goal, that humans couldn't break it. It was a period when there was a Swedish runner named Gunder Hagg, who was coming up for the '48 Olympics, who had come up within a second of it. He was my hero, because here was someone who had made supreme effort to attain the ultimate and may be on the edge of doing something historic like that. So I believed at that time, quite contrary to being a genetic determinist, that there was something about excellence in athletics -- in some forms of athletics, but particularly in this one -- that depended upon character and self-determination and ability to endure pain, and I always wanted to be an athlete.
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