Letters to a Young Scientist by Edward O. Wilson Read Free Book Online

doing professionally ten years from now, twenty years, fifty? Next, imagine that you are much older and looking back on a successful career. What kind of great discovery, and in what field of science, would you savor most having made?
    I recommend creating scenarios that end with goals, then choosing ones you might wish to pursue. Make it a practice to indulge in fantasy about science. Make it more than just an occasional exercise. Daydream a lot. Make talking to yourself silently a relaxing pastime. Give lectures to yourself about important topics that you need to understand. Talk with others of like mind. By their dreams you shall know them.
    Speaking of dreams, I once had dinner with Michael Crichton, the renowned thriller and science fiction writer. We talked about our respective professions. The movie Rising Sun , based on his book of the same name, had recently been released, and at the time we met it was stirring criticism over its perceived political message. The plot was about the effort of a Japanese high-tech corporation to expand its control in American industry by espionage and cover-up. At the time of the movie’s release (1993), the Japanese economy was surging and its companies were buying pieces of America, from Rockefeller Center to Hawaiian real estate. The overreaching theme that might be read into the story was that Japan, having failed to build an empire through force, was now trying to build one through economic dominance.
    Crichton knew of earlier struggles over my 1975 book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis , which created a firestorm of protest from social scientists and radical leftist writers. They were incensed by my argument that human beings have instincts, and therefore that a gene-based human nature exists. At times the protest reached the level of interruption of my classes and public demonstrations. One in Harvard Square demanded my dismissal from Harvard.
    Crichton asked, “How did you handle all that pressure?” It was embarrassing at times for me and my family, I said, but intellectually not difficult. It was obviously a contest of science against political ideology, and past history has shown that if the research is sound, science always eventually comes out on top. And it did this time, in favor of sociobiology, already at the time of our dinner conversation a well-established discipline. I suggested that the controversy over Rising Sun , which in any case is a work of fiction, was not a bad thing. It helped to sharpen different viewpoints over an important issue. Better to let it play out than encouraged to fester.
    I took the opportunity to share with Crichton a thought experiment I had conducted that had been stimulated by his book and the movie Jurassic Park , the latter released the same year as Rising Sun . In Jurassic Park a billionaire hires a paleontologist and other experts to create dinosaurs for a park he wants to set up. This being science fiction, the project of course succeeds. The method devised was ingenious. First acquire pieces of amber formed as fossilized tree resin at the time of dinosaurs. Some of the fragments will contain well-preserved remains of mosquitoes. That much works in principle: I’ve studied hundreds of real fossil ants in amber from the Cretaceous Period, near the end of the Age of Dinosaurs. The next step in the plot was to find mosquitoes that still hold remnants of blood sucked from the veins of dinosaurs. Extract the dinosaur DNA they contain, and implant it in chicken eggs to grow dinosaurs. This is good science fiction. Each step verges on the far end of probability even though it is almost (notice that as a scientist I say almost!) certainly impossible.
    I told Crichton of a somewhat similar experiment I had imagined that was really and truly possible. In the Harvard collection are large numbers of ants preserved in amber from the Dominican Republic, roughly twenty-five million years in age (younger than hundred-million-year-old dinosaurs,