OEB News
Edward O. Wilson delivers Prather
Lectures April 5, 6, 7, 2010.
View the lectures online.
The annual John M. Prather
Lectures in Biology were
presented by Edward O. Wilson,
Pellegrino Research Professor
Emeritus and Honorary Curator
in Entomology at Harvard,
and one of the world’s
leading voices for conservation
of global biodiversity. Wilson
is one of the most influential
and accomplished biologists
of the last half-century.
He is known for his groundbreaking
research on the biology and
behavior of ants, as well
as his celebrated work
in such broad fields as
island biogeography, sociobiology,
and conservation biology.
He is the author of two
Pulitzer Prize-winning
books, On Human Nature
(1978) and The Ants (1990,
with Bert Hölldobler),
as well as the recipient
of many fellowships, honors,
and awards. Wilson’s
Prather lectures will
encapsulate his remarkable
55-year career in biology
at Harvard, and look forward
to the critical challenges
ahead.
Monday, April 5: "Biodiversity
and the Future of Biology."
View lecture online.
Global
biodiversity is richer than
thought even 20 years ago, but
it and the ecosystems supporting
it are disappearing at an accelerating
rate--to the great and enduring
loss to future humanity. Science
is not well prepared to handle
this issue. We live on a poorly
explored planet: only a tiny
fraction, probably fewer than
ten percent, of species are
known to science, when microorganisms
are included; and of these,
only a minute fraction have been
studied at any depth. There are
remedies to this ignorance, and
when they are applied, a major
new front of biology will open,
equal and complementary to molecular,
cellular, and developmental biology.
Tuesday, April 6: "The
Superorganism."
View lecture online.
The study
of insect societies is today
one of the fastest growing
major branches of evolutionary
biology. It has revealed a great
deal about the general principles
of the origin and evolution
of advanced social behavior,
and has shed light on the enormous
ecological success of the
social insects (with ants and
termites making up over half
of the insect biomass around
the world). The evolution from
organism to superorganism has
been the major transition between
levels of biological organization,
easiest to penetrate and understand.
Wednesday,
April 7: "Consilience."
View lecture online.
The
boundary between science on
one side and the humanities
and humanistic social sciences
on the other is not an intrinsic
epistemological divide but
a broad borderland of previously
poorly understood causal relationships.
The borderland is now being
explored, and offers increasing
opportunities for collaboration
across three great branches
of learning. A definition of
human nature will be offered
and examples from the borderland
will be used to illustrate it.
The John M. Prather Lectures in Biology were founded in 1939 by a bequest of $25,000 from John McClellan Prather, A.B. in 1894. The annual income of the fund is to be used to pay for the services of eminent lecturers on botany and zoology alternatively. The Prather Lecture Series on Biology is sponsored by the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and the Science Center Lecture Series.
