[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hello, Jad here. This is Radiolab, the podcast. Coming to you now with not one of our big hour-long situations, but rather one of the in-betweens that we do between seasons. Our next season is about two months' off, and one of the programs that we're gonna be presenting is about people who fall in love with science and then fall out of love with science. And in that spirit, we thought we'd play a conversation for you now which is more on the falling in love side. Robert Krulwich, my esteemed co-host, who you will hear in just a moment, recently interviewed maybe one of the greatest scientists alive, really, E.O. Wilson.

JAD: He is a biologist, he is an entomologist, meaning he studies bugs. He's an author, a world-famous conservationist. He recently started the Encyclopedia of Life, which tries to make a list of every single species on the planet. He discovered so many things about how animals communicate, which you will hear in a moment. Particularly ants. And if you heard our Emergence show, you will recognize a bit from that show that repeats in this conversation. But it's really cool to hear the whole conversation without too many edits, which is what we're gonna play for you now.

JAD: So here it is. Here's Robert Krulwich speaking with E.O. Wilson at the 92 Street Y here in Manhattan.

ROBERT KRULWICH: Let's see. For starters, I'm just curious, did you know—do you remember the moment when you said the words, "Scientist, I want to be one?"

E.O. WILSON: Not scientist. I guess, entomologist. You know, I just wanted to work on ...

ROBERT: You said "entomologist?"

E.O. WILSON: Yes. Bug. Oh, yes. When I was about eight or nine, I discovered that there were people that actually made their living chasing bugs. And, you know, I—every kid has a bug period. I was just set now never to grow out of mine. You were right about what you said. And I—down in Alabama, we had people who were driving around in green trucks for the Department of Agriculture, and some of them were exterminating insects. And they made their living by finding and studying bugs, and I said, "Well, that's what I want to do." Never mind being a fireman or anything like that. I want to do that.

ROBERT: Kill bugs?

E.O. WILSON: I was—yeah, I was frozen in that—in that ambition.

ROBERT: At the age of seven?

E.O. WILSON: Eight or nine.

ROBERT: Eight or nine.

E.O. WILSON: When I really settled for—with the ...

[audience laughs]

ROBERT: [laughs] Now did—did science seize you or did science rescue you? Because you were—how many schools did you go to before you were the age of 14 or whenever it was?

E.O. WILSON: Yeah, it was about 13 or 14 schools in 11 grades. I skipped one grade, but that made me always the runt of the class, which didn't help ...

ROBERT: So you were the runt kid ...

E.O. WILSON: ... with my social skills.

ROBERT: ... and the new kid every time?

E.O. WILSON: I was always the new kid in the neighborhood, yeah.

ROBERT: So that means what? Now you have a choice here: you could be the class clown or something, or you could go off into the forest and make a worm or something like that.

E.O. WILSON: Well yeah, I guess that's a way of looking at it. I turned to nature and the woods and so on, and then I discovered that this eccentricity made me socially acceptable in an odd way. So I had the nickname "Bugs" when I was ...

[audience laughs]

E.O. WILSON: ... in my grammar school. But then I had a snake period.

ROBERT: A snake period?

E.O. WILSON: And this was in Southern Alabama. I guess I was about 15 or 16 by that time. And there were about 40 species of snakes found down there. And in a period of time, about a year, I managed to find them all. I kept a lot of them in the backyard alive, and so I was now known as "Snake" Wilson. It wasn't because in this intense football culture, I went out for football at this point at the Bruton High School in Alabama. And I weighed 112 pounds.

[audience laughs]

E.O. WILSON: I was the second-lightest kid.

ROBERT: There were probably a couple of snakes heavier than you.

E.O. WILSON: Hold on, I'm gonna finish the story.

[audience laughs]

E.O. WILSON: You're a tough competitor. Anyways, so it turned out, you see, there were 23 people on the squad, and I was the entire third string.

ROBERT: [laughs]

E.O. WILSON: But anyway, I got respect in part because I was doing all these strange things, and—and Alabamians are really—they're really very tolerant of eccentricity. They kinda like it. You know, the old—the odd aunt that lives up in the attic. You know, that kind of thing.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

E.O. WILSON: I got along very well both as a naturalist, you know, fanatical collector and naturalist at the same—and in high school, too. At any rate, so at the age of 16, I decided that the time had come to get serious about professional entomology, and so I decided to select a group of insects to study. And I said, "Flies. They're marvelous. Tremendous diversity." And so I would start collecting flies. I wanted to become the world expert on flies. But the year was 1945, and in order to study flies, as many of you understand, you have to have insect pins, special pins to put through the body of the specimens.

ROBERT: Hmm.

E.O. WILSON: Insect pins are—were available at that time only from Czechoslovakia. And the supply had been cut off in the United States. Insect pins were unavailable, so I said, "What's my favorite group of insects, you know, that I don't have to stick pins through?" And that's the ants. So I got started my collection by going down to the drug store and collecting these little pill bottles. And that, with rubbing alcohol, which is isopropyl alcohol, that's how my collection started. I built a large collection of—of ants that I took with me to the University of Alabama.

ROBERT: Could you say that ...

E.O. WILSON: And I was launched.

ROBERT: ... that but for the lack of pins and for the availability of rubbing alcohol therefore ants? Or was ants always going to be it, and you would've gotten to it by whatever route?

E.O. WILSON: I think I eventually would've ended up with ants, but I would've been retarded there. I don't think I would've been able to do serious research until maybe I was 18.

[audience laughs]

ROBERT: Now let's get onto the joy of—this may not be obvious to a lot people, the joy of ant studies, because, you know, if you think about it, they do seem like somewhat indifferent to anyone who's observing them and so on, and you might wonder exactly why somebody would get the light out of looking at ants. But I want to take you back to one moment which I think is one of my favorites ever. The question is: how do these little ants communicate with one another? The year is 1953, and you're considering the problem. We know that, at least for us, most of our communication goes because of things we hear or things we see. This does not seem to be the habit of ants.

ROBERT: So you have some fire ants, and the question is: you notice that they—that a scout will find a piece of food and somehow tell the other ants, "Look what I found. Come here and get the food." How do you figure out how the scout ant tells the other ants that A) there is food, and where it is?

E.O. WILSON: We had the idea even back then, people did, or biologists, that the ants were somehow laying a trail down, and then they were telling the other ants, "Go out and follow that trail." But nobody knew where the trail came from, and they didn't know really how it worked. And they didn't know how ants communicated otherwise. And you're perfectly right, human beings are really unusual, along with birds, they—we are audio-visual. And—and that puts us in a tiny minority of all of the creatures on Earth, which are primarily chemical in their communication.

E.O. WILSON: It wasn't understood or appreciated at that time. Pheromones. Many of you have heard the word "pheromone." Pheromones are the key to understanding communication of the vast majority of animal species. We didn't know it then. And so one day I set out. I was culturing fire ants in the laboratory at Harvard, and I said, "I'm gonna get to the bottom of this." And the way I did it was to dissect these tiny, tiny ants. Very difficult to do, but I dissected them.

ROBERT: Now wait a second. Wait a second. So you're watching the ant going along, and it's laying its abdomen or some part of its body laying it on the ground?

E.O. WILSON: That's right. I can see the ant running along, and under magnification I can see that it's sticking out its sting and dragging the sting. Something's coming out of that sting.

ROBERT: Like, kind of like a fountain pen or something?

E.O. WILSON: A little bit like that, yeah.

ROBERT: Yeah.

E.O. WILSON: And so I proceed to—believe me, folks, this is the way science goes. I mean, it really is simple-minded.

[audience laughs]

E.O. WILSON: It's only later when you're doing the technical paper, you know, and you're producing the mathematical models and you're describing the micro-analysis and so on that it looks tough. It's really—this is the way you're thinking when you're doing science. So I said, "I'm gonna find out what the organs are inside this ant, and I'm gonna track down where that stuff is coming from." So what I did was to do anatomy, and then, you know, just dissect it. I knew approximately what the different glands were and so on.

ROBERT: I mean, you snipped—you snipped off the parts where the glands were?

E.O. WILSON: Well, you just dissect open ...

ROBERT: Oh, you opened it.

E.O. WILSON: Yeah, an ant. And just the way you would any animal, although it's exceedingly difficult when it's about the size of a grain of salt. That's the tough part. But anyway ...

ROBERT: [laughs] Aren't your hands going [shakes]?

E.O. WILSON: Well yes, your hand is vibrating. And in fact, it was down at the limit. I didn't go to a micro-manipulator, you know, which is when you're doing it with controls. I did it raw, manually. But it was right at the limit. So the way I did it was I got these very fine needles in, and because there was this inevitable vibration in your hand, you can see it when you put it under the microscope, it's—everybody has it. It's a little vibration. But highly magnified, it—it allowed me to use the needle like a jackhammer.

ROBERT: Like a jackhammer?

E.O. WILSON: I could do it if I did it just right. I just opened up the ant. Anyway, I took out the various organs one after the other, and I made a preparation, and I made an artificial trail.

ROBERT: Wait a second. Make sure I follow this.

E.O. WILSON: Yeah.

ROBERT: You've now got, like, six organs and you've smooshed each one of the six organs, and then you're gonna take—let me just see if I can remember this. You're gonna take a—hmm—a sharpened birchwood applicator stick.

E.O. WILSON: Yes. And then I smeared out one organ after another. No effect.

ROBERT: Well, wait a second. Where are there ants? Are there ants yet? You brought ants?

E.O. WILSON: I'm—I'm leading my artificial trails from the colony that I have in the lab.

ROBERT: Oh, so there's ants over here.

E.O. WILSON: Yeah.

ROBERT: And you got your birch stick here, and you're drawing lines of gut stuff, I guess.

E.O. WILSON: That's basically what it is, yeah. Just different organs. I've washed each one in turn and then smeared it out. And finally I came to a little finger-shaped organ which we didn't know the function of. It's just a tiny little thing tucked down there. And I smeared that out and it was incredible. It wasn't—I didn't have to tell them to follow that trail, they exploded out of the nest running along that thing.

ROBERT: [gasps] Does that mean, like, if you'd taken the stick, could you go doop-de-doop-de-doop-de-doo, and all the ants would go doop-de-doop-de-doop-de-doo?

E.O. WILSON: Yeah, well what I actually—I started playing around with this. It was so effective. For demonstrations I would write my name.

[audience laughs]

ROBERT: [laughs]

E.O. WILSON: And a column of 100, 200, 300 ants would come pouring out back and forth, and they'd actually write my name in ant.

ROBERT: [laughs]

E.O. WILSON: Well, that was the beginning, you know, just to show that there is some seriousness to this. That was the beginning, and we were ...

[audience member yells]

ROBERT: An offended ant lover somewhere in the room.

E.O. WILSON: [laughs]

ROBERT: All right, now I want to finish this little section because this is my favorite story of all. When you get bad, you get bad. This is—once you begin to figure out how these chemicals and the phero—and the smells that they give off become communicating devices, you discover that when an ant dies—this doesn't happen to be exactly in that category—when an ant dies, ants not being the smartest creatures around, it just sort of dies and it just sits there. And for the first day or two, all the other ants just don't even notice it. And then when it begins to decompose, it begins to give off a smell and then the first time it gives off a smell, I guess the next ant that passes by goes, "Oh!" And says, "We have a dead ant here."

E.O. WILSON: That's right.

ROBERT: And he takes the ant and puts it in the dead place. I guess the ant dead place.

E.O. WILSON: Yeah. I'll tell you about the experiment because I had a lot of fun with it. But first—but let me say that my chemist colleagues and I quickly worked out the chemical code of the ants. We found somewhere—or a good part of it—we found that the ants were communicating somewhere between 10 and—10 to 20 chemical signals. They have glands all over their bodies that the function of which were unknown, and many of these glands produce pheromones. Some for—to alarm, some to recruit, some to identify themselves as a member of a caste and so on.

ROBERT: And one of them says, "I am dead?" The "I am dead" smell?

E.O. WILSON: I'm coming to that, yeah.

[audience laughs]

E.O. WILSON: Well, how does an ant—when it dies, how does it identify—how does it let the others know? When an ant dies, then for a while it just lies there. You know, if we saw—if we saw one of us just lying on the ground like this we'd probably do something. Maybe not in New York, but I mean ...

ROBERT: [laughs]

[audience laughs]

E.O. WILSON: But usually we'd do something because, you know, we're audio-visual. But in the case of the ants ...

ROBERT: That's an interesting idea: New York, most ant-like city in America.

[audience laughs]

ROBERT: Anyway, go ahead.

E.O. WILSON: Anyway, the—so the ant begins to decompose, and I was really going crazy with this—we were so successful. I mean, we were making one discovery after another. It was wonderful. And I was going crazy with this, so I said, "How does an ant identify a corpse?" It's got to be in the substances that are being produced by decomposition. It's gotta be—and in those days, we had just hit upon—animal behaviors generally had just hit upon the idea of sign stimuli, that animals don't grasp a whole lot of stimuli the way we do. You know, and assess the gestalt in a variety of signals. They usually work out of one substance or a very small number of substances or a site, and then that releases their complex behavior. So I was gonna find that. What's the corpse substance?

E.O. WILSON: It turns out well, this is how science works: across. It turns out for some reason I never found out a chemist had already identified a large number of decomposition substances in rotting insects. And so with that as my guide, I gathered in pure form on my laboratory shelf a whole variety of them. And the place for a while smelled like a combination between an outhouse and a charnel house.

ROBERT: I'll list you some of the smells: you have rotten fish smell ...

E.O. WILSON: That's trimethylene.

ROBERT: ... feces smell, rancid body smell.

E.O. WILSON: Oh, that's—that's the fatty acids that you have in body odor.

ROBERT: So when people were walking up the corridor at your—in your building, what—did they, like, stay ...

E.O. WILSON: I never tried to explain to them.

[audience laughs]

E.O. WILSON: But there were—it was a very strange-smelling place. You know, skatole, that's the essence of feces.

ROBERT: Yeah.

E.O. WILSON: Well at any rate, I then started with my, you know, typical experiments. I started daubing dummy ants with tiny, tiny amounts of these different substances and observing. And nothing happened until finally I came to one of the substances, oleic acid.

ROBERT: Oleic acid.

E.O. WILSON: Yes, it's a fatty acid of a particular kind. Bingo! The ants then picked it up, and the dummy, with nothing but—the only signal he had was oleic acid, and they took it and dropped that dummy on the refuse pile. And so I had it. I essentially had it.

ROBERT: Now here's where you get bad.

E.O. WILSON: Ah, yeah. That's right. Okay. Well, you know, you get to play around at this point, so I said, "What would happen if I put oleic acid on a live ant?"

[audience laughs]

E.O. WILSON: What happens is that nothing this ant says, if they said anything, you know, nothing the ant does does any good because now it is a corpse. And the other ants pick this live, kicking ant up and out it goes and it's dropped on the refuse pile.

ROBERT: So it's a wiggly, obviously alive ant.

E.O. WILSON: Oh, perfectly healthy.

ROBERT: And the other ants' thinking, "You're dead. You're dead. You're dead." All the way to the grave.

E.O. WILSON: Yeah, goodbye.

ROBERT: Goodbye.

E.O. WILSON: What happened then was that ant would proceed to clean itself. Ants are always cleaning themselves. And finally—but if it didn't clean itself enough, when it got back, it got picked up and brought out to the pile. Until finally it's clean enough, and then it can re-enter the realm of the living.

[audience laughs]

ROBERT: You have sometimes described the process of science as you do it as a form of storytelling.

E.O. WILSON: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: What did you mean by that?

E.O. WILSON: Well, I mean, I think as everyone here understands that human beings are the storytelling species. We—the way we think is in narrative. You know, we build—we build scenarios forward, and when we're making a decision, we're running one scenario after another. Well, we're telling a story to ourselves. "I'm going to do this, then that will follow, and so and so. We'll probably do this" and so on. "And I will lose that or I'll gain this or I will finish that."

E.O. WILSON: And they tell stories of real past—what happened to me. And then, of course, this allows them to make fictional stories. The scientist tells stories, and he hopes they will be true stories. He's thinking, "Oh, there's this, there's that. This creature is doing this, that creature must be detecting this or have evolved in such a way." And then you make a series of stories. And these are called "hypotheses." And the fancy term then for doing science by storytelling is "The method of multiple competing hypotheses." And then you figure—you do the experiments to find out which of the stories is true.

[audience applauds]

JAD: That was a conversation between E.O. Wilson and Robert Krulwich, my co-host. And let us know what you thought: radiolab(@)wnyc.org is our email address. I want to thank the 92nd Street Y for making that available to us. Also want to thank, as always, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Science Foundation for making all this possible.

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad. Thanks for listening to this podcast from Radiolab. Hope you enjoyed it. See you in a couple weeks.

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