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

but still old ). I had analyzed this fossil collection thoroughly and described a number of species new to science. Among these the most abundant was one I named Azteca alpha . A living species Azteca muelleri , which appears to be a direct evolutionary descendant or otherwise close relative of Azteca alpha , still lives in Central America. These ants use large quantities of pheromones, acrid-smelling terpenoids, which they release into the air to alarm nestmates whenever the colony is threatened by invaders.
    I told Crichton that I might be able to extract remnants of the pheromone from the Azteca alpha remains, inject them into an Azteca muelleri nest, and get the alarm response. In other words, I could deliver a message from one ant colony to another across a span of twenty-five million years. This had Crichton’s attention. He asked if I planned to do it. I said, not yet. I didn’t have time, and still don’t. In this particular dream there is too much of the circus trick and too little of real science—too little chance, that is, to discover something really new.
    I’ll end this letter by telling you how I conceive of the creative process of both a novelist like Crichton and a scientist. (I have been both.) The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and only later works like a bookkeeper. Keep in mind that innovators in both literature and science are basically dreamers and storytellers. In the early stages of the creation of both literature and science, everything in the mind is a story. There is an imagined ending, and usually an imagined beginning, and a selection of bits and pieces that might fit in between. In works of literature and science alike, any part can be changed, causing a ripple among the other parts, some of which are discarded and new ones added. The surviving fragments are variously joined and separated, and moved about as the story forms. One scenario emerges, then another. The scenarios, whether literary or scientific in nature, compete with one another. Some overlap. Words and sentences (or equations or experiments) are tried to make sense of the whole thing. Early on, an end to all the imagining is conceived. It arrives at a wondrous denouement (or scientific breakthrough). But is it the best, is it true? To bring the end safely home is the goal of the creative mind. Whatever that might be, wherever located, however expressed, it begins as a phantom that rises, gains detail, then at the last moment either fades to be replaced, or, like the mythical giant Antaeus touching Mother Earth, gains strength. Inexpressible thoughts throughout flit along the edges. As the best fragments solidify, they are put in place and moved about, and the story grows until it reaches an inspired end.

A fire ant laying an odor trail. Drawing by Thomas Prentiss. Modified from “Pheromones,” by Edward O. Wilson, Scientific American 208(5): 100–114 (May 1968).

Six

    W HAT I T T AKES

    I F YOU CHOOSE a career in science, and particularly in original research, nothing less than an enduring passion for your subject will last the remainder of your career, and life. Too many Ph.D.s are creatively stillborn, with their personal research ending more or less with their doctoral dissertations. It is you who aim to stay at the creative center whom I will now specifically address. You will commit your career, some good part of it, to being an explorer. Each advance in research you achieve will be measured, as scientists constantly do among themselves, by completing one or more of the following sentences:
    “He [or she] discovered that . . .”
    “He [or she] helped to develop the successful theory of . . .”
    “He [or she] created the synthesis that first tied together the disciplines of . . .”
    Original discoveries cannot be made casually, not by anyone at any time or anywhere. The frontier of scientific knowledge, often referred to as the cutting edge, is reached with maps drawn by earlier investigators. As Louis