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EO WILSON BIO. “Edward Osborne Wilson (born June 10, 1929), usually cited as E. O. Wilson, is an American biologist, naturalist, and writer. Wilson is considered the most important and outstanding living biologist in the world and on numerous occasions he has been nicknamed "The New Darwin", "Darwin's natural heir" or "The Darwin of the 21st century". His biological specialty is myrmecology, the study of ants, on which he has been called the world's leading expert.” https://lnkd.in/d7GFY6n View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE focuses on a lovely article by the extraordinary Professor E.O. Wilson, titled “One Giant Leap: How Insects Achieved Altruism and Colonial Life.” This man put the ant on coffee tables all over the world, and changed entomology from a sleepy descriptive backwater largely confined to museums and academics to a dynamic study of social group structures that profoundly impacted many non scholars. This is the David Attenborough of insects. https://lnkd.in/drgWvGT View in LinkedIn

If you look carefully on the right of this path, you can see the faint trace of an old wall, almost erased with time. View in LinkedIn

UNACCEPTABLE. “We cannot make artificial life because we cannot agree on what life is. We cannot find life on Mars because we cannot agree what life represents. This is intolerable for any science. You can take a science in which there are two or three definitions for one thing. But a science in which the most important object has no definition? That’s absolutely unacceptable.” https://lnkd.in/gNSZgDT View in LinkedIn

TRANSITIONAL STRUCTURES. “A second preadaptation that favors the transition to eusociality is the propensity, documented in solitary bees, to behave like eusocial species when forced together experimentally.” https://lnkd.in/drgWvGT View in LinkedIn

THE NUMBERS. “Among the 50,000 to 60,000 known aculeates, at least 7 independent lines have reached the eusocial condition. In contrast, of the more than 70,000 parasitoid and other apocritan hymenopteran species, whose females travel from prey to prey to lay their eggs, none is known to be eusocial, nor is any one of the hugely diverse 5000 described species of sawflies and horntails. Larvae of some sawfly species form aggregations, but not eusocial colonies, and the adults lead solitary lives.” https://lnkd.in/drgWvGT View in LinkedIn

There is something peversely special about rotting food. View in LinkedIn

HOW NUMEROUS ARE STARS?" "Assuming 10(11) to 4x10(11) stars in our Galaxy" "Assuming 2.46 x10(11) galaxies in the Cosmos" "We would have the equivalent of 2.46 x10(22) to 10(23) stars in the Universe. https://lnkd.in/dMS3ksU View in LinkedIn

EUSOCIALITY TRAITS. “In all the species that display the earliest stages of eusociality, behavior protects a persistent, defensible resource from predators, parasites, or competitors. The resource invariably consists of a nest and dependable food within foraging range of the nest. The females of many species of aculeate wasps, for example, construct nests and then provision them with paralyzed prey for the larvae to consume.” https://lnkd.in/drgWvGT View in LinkedIn