Born in 1929 and died on December 26, 2021, the renowned biologist and myrmecologist (ant specialist) Edward Osborne Wilson – better known as E. O. Wilson – did not only bequeath his peers a body of scientific work that has inspired generations of conservationists and evolutionary biologists. He also left them with embarrassing questions about his affinities with supremacist scientific circles – heirs to the “race science” of the 19th century. For several months, the discovery of disturbing letters in his correspondence has sparked heated debate in the scientific community. All the more so as Wilson is an icon of biology and environmental protection – he popularized the notion of “biodiversity” – and is considered by some to be Darwin’s successor.
The revelation of his links with one of the leading exponents of North American “scientific racism,” Canadian psychologist John Philippe Rushton (1943-2012), comes from two separate examinations of his personal archives, bequeathed to the Library of Congress. It was in February 2022 that historians of science Mark Borrello (University of Minnesota) and David Sepkoski (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), on the one hand, and Matthew Gibbons and Stacy Farina (Howard University in Washington, DC), on the other, published the results of their dive into the great biologist’s correspondence in the New York Review of Books and Science for the People, respectively.
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