FROM NYTIMES
Life Lessons, Taught by Insects
Life Lessons, Taught by Insects
“Anthill” is E. O. Wilson’s 25th book. It is also the slightest of them, perhaps because it’s his first novel. Mr. Wilson begins with an epigraph from Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, a definition of “anthill” that suggests a parallel between ant and human societies — a potent analogy, you’d think, for a great entomologist and the founder of sociobiology.
ANTHILL
By E. O. Wilson
Illustrated. 378 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $24.95.
But let me offer a more useful epigraph. It comes from Mr. Wilson’s “Naturalist,” his 1994 foray into autobiography. “I instinctively respect authority,” Mr. Wilson writes, “and believe emotionally if not intellectually that it should be perturbed only for conspicuous cause. At my core I am a social conservative, a loyalist. I cherish traditional institutions, the more venerable and ritual-laden the better.” So might an ant have written.
“Anthill” is the tale of young Raphael Semmes Cody — Raff, as everyone calls him. As a child he discovers in the wildlands of Nokobee — a privately owned tract of longleaf pine savanna — a refuge from his parents’ troubled marriage. To Raff, Nokobee has a clarity that is lacking in the society that surrounds him, for Raff is the scion of two Southern worlds. On his mother’s side there are the deep proprieties — and the social and financial expectations — of the Semmes family, minor aristocracy on the Gulf Coast of southern Alabama. On his father’s side there is a code of honor clouded with cigarette smoke and befuddled with drink. When Raff’s father, Ainsley, gives voice to his code, it seems to rise, as Mr. Wilson writes elsewhere, “through the limbic system to pre-empt the thinking brain.”
Poor Raff. Not only does he have to find his way into manhood — troubling enough anywhere and at all times — but he also has to save Nokobee in the bargain. He knows Nokobee better than any adult except Frederick Norville, his mentor, a family friend, professor of ecology at Florida State University and sometime first-person narrator of “Anthill.” Will it surprise you to learn that Raff succeeds in the end? It shouldn’t. You can tell from the taste of Mr. Wilson’s prose in the very first paragraph that Raff will save Nokobee. And that’s one of the troubles with “Anthill.” It’s a house of cards, stacked entirely in Raff’s favor.
Suffice it to say that Raff goes to Florida State, gives up entomology for Harvard Law and becomes in-house counsel at the very corporation that wants to develop Nokobee. This trajectory gives Mr. Wilson, who is, of course, a Harvard emeritus professor of entomology as well as a Gulf Coast native, a chance to dilate on the anthill qualities of the university and to arrange the kind of encounters that a reasonable young Southern environmentalist is likely to encounter as he respects authority and perturbs it as little as possible while saving the creek and the lake and the longleaf pine savanna and all the creatures therein, all the while upsetting only a few unreasonable, end-times Christians who believe that the sooner the earth is wasted, the sooner their savior will return.
There is a prescriptive flavor to this tale, a sense that this is ideally how conservation should be done, never mind the shocking demise of a few benighted, if genuinely threatening Christians.
The book comes to life only during the section called “The Anthill Chronicles,” a tale of existence within three different ant colonies in a clearing on the edge of Lake Nokobee. Everything in Mr. Wilson’s entomological career has prepared him to write this section of the book: 73 pages that are passed off, improbably, as Raff’s brilliant senior thesis, without the measurements and tables and with prose smoothed out by his thesis advisers.
“The Anthill Chronicles” really deserves to stand on its own, without the human narrative that surrounds it. It is a generalized account of how ant colonies grow and perpetuate themselves, or fail to do so. Though written in miniature — from within the colony — it never presumes to speak from the ant’s perspective because that is inconceivable. As Mr. Wilson reminds us, “the human mind cannot imagine the tumult of chemical stimuli by which such a traveling ant guides every moment in her life, and thus survives.”
For all the beauty of “The Anthill Chronicles,” it sets up an open-ended correlation between ant and human societies (a parallel urged upon us by Mr. Wilson in his prologue) that spins out of control. “The ant societies” — this is now Professor Norville speaking — “proved different in most fundamental ways from those of humans — of course — yet also convergent to them in other, also important ways.” Mr. Wilson — a k a Raff — is careful, of course, to avoid anthropomorphism as he writes about the ant colonies at Lake Nokobee. But there is no stinting a veiled, almost structural anthropomorphism here.
Every ant colony is a superorganism, the subject of one of Mr. Wilson’s most important books. But one of the Nokobee colonies mutates, thanks to “one gene in the hereditary code of the ants,” into what the novel calls Supercolony, a rapacious, devouring ant-empire that, unlike most colonies, tolerates the coexistence of many queens.
At its apex the Supercolony “had mastered the environment, subdued its rivals and enemies, increased its space, drawn down new sources of energy, and raised the production of ant flesh to record levels.” Its death is not natural, not a matter of exhausting its resources. The Supercolony is sprayed out of existence by humans, who look to the ants like “tree-trunk gods.” What has changed in ant history is that now “the entirety of all of it, ant, colony, and ecosystem was at stake.”
Uh huh. Got it. Ant Supercolony equals human Supercolony. But what’s being suggested here? That the human Supercolony is the result of a chance genetic mutation? That we should be gassed?
The moral of “The Anthill Chronicles” is that life moves in cycles, and nature will right itself. Balance will be restored. But what keeps the world of Nokobee in balance in “Anthill” is an in-house lawyer, a small-scale environmental holocaust and — I won’t go into it — a shotgun in the hands of a possible lunatic. This is perturbation indeed. It makes me eager for Mr. Wilson’s next work of nonfiction, in which he will be more careful, as he has nearly always been, to shepherd his implications.
ANTHILL
By E. O. Wilson
Illustrated. 378 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $24.95.
But let me offer a more useful epigraph. It comes from Mr. Wilson’s “Naturalist,” his 1994 foray into autobiography. “I instinctively respect authority,” Mr. Wilson writes, “and believe emotionally if not intellectually that it should be perturbed only for conspicuous cause. At my core I am a social conservative, a loyalist. I cherish traditional institutions, the more venerable and ritual-laden the better.” So might an ant have written.
“Anthill” is the tale of young Raphael Semmes Cody — Raff, as everyone calls him. As a child he discovers in the wildlands of Nokobee — a privately owned tract of longleaf pine savanna — a refuge from his parents’ troubled marriage. To Raff, Nokobee has a clarity that is lacking in the society that surrounds him, for Raff is the scion of two Southern worlds. On his mother’s side there are the deep proprieties — and the social and financial expectations — of the Semmes family, minor aristocracy on the Gulf Coast of southern Alabama. On his father’s side there is a code of honor clouded with cigarette smoke and befuddled with drink. When Raff’s father, Ainsley, gives voice to his code, it seems to rise, as Mr. Wilson writes elsewhere, “through the limbic system to pre-empt the thinking brain.”
Poor Raff. Not only does he have to find his way into manhood — troubling enough anywhere and at all times — but he also has to save Nokobee in the bargain. He knows Nokobee better than any adult except Frederick Norville, his mentor, a family friend, professor of ecology at Florida State University and sometime first-person narrator of “Anthill.” Will it surprise you to learn that Raff succeeds in the end? It shouldn’t. You can tell from the taste of Mr. Wilson’s prose in the very first paragraph that Raff will save Nokobee. And that’s one of the troubles with “Anthill.” It’s a house of cards, stacked entirely in Raff’s favor.
Suffice it to say that Raff goes to Florida State, gives up entomology for Harvard Law and becomes in-house counsel at the very corporation that wants to develop Nokobee. This trajectory gives Mr. Wilson, who is, of course, a Harvard emeritus professor of entomology as well as a Gulf Coast native, a chance to dilate on the anthill qualities of the university and to arrange the kind of encounters that a reasonable young Southern environmentalist is likely to encounter as he respects authority and perturbs it as little as possible while saving the creek and the lake and the longleaf pine savanna and all the creatures therein, all the while upsetting only a few unreasonable, end-times Christians who believe that the sooner the earth is wasted, the sooner their savior will return.
There is a prescriptive flavor to this tale, a sense that this is ideally how conservation should be done, never mind the shocking demise of a few benighted, if genuinely threatening Christians.
The book comes to life only during the section called “The Anthill Chronicles,” a tale of existence within three different ant colonies in a clearing on the edge of Lake Nokobee. Everything in Mr. Wilson’s entomological career has prepared him to write this section of the book: 73 pages that are passed off, improbably, as Raff’s brilliant senior thesis, without the measurements and tables and with prose smoothed out by his thesis advisers.
“The Anthill Chronicles” really deserves to stand on its own, without the human narrative that surrounds it. It is a generalized account of how ant colonies grow and perpetuate themselves, or fail to do so. Though written in miniature — from within the colony — it never presumes to speak from the ant’s perspective because that is inconceivable. As Mr. Wilson reminds us, “the human mind cannot imagine the tumult of chemical stimuli by which such a traveling ant guides every moment in her life, and thus survives.”
For all the beauty of “The Anthill Chronicles,” it sets up an open-ended correlation between ant and human societies (a parallel urged upon us by Mr. Wilson in his prologue) that spins out of control. “The ant societies” — this is now Professor Norville speaking — “proved different in most fundamental ways from those of humans — of course — yet also convergent to them in other, also important ways.” Mr. Wilson — a k a Raff — is careful, of course, to avoid anthropomorphism as he writes about the ant colonies at Lake Nokobee. But there is no stinting a veiled, almost structural anthropomorphism here.
Every ant colony is a superorganism, the subject of one of Mr. Wilson’s most important books. But one of the Nokobee colonies mutates, thanks to “one gene in the hereditary code of the ants,” into what the novel calls Supercolony, a rapacious, devouring ant-empire that, unlike most colonies, tolerates the coexistence of many queens.
At its apex the Supercolony “had mastered the environment, subdued its rivals and enemies, increased its space, drawn down new sources of energy, and raised the production of ant flesh to record levels.” Its death is not natural, not a matter of exhausting its resources. The Supercolony is sprayed out of existence by humans, who look to the ants like “tree-trunk gods.” What has changed in ant history is that now “the entirety of all of it, ant, colony, and ecosystem was at stake.”
Uh huh. Got it. Ant Supercolony equals human Supercolony. But what’s being suggested here? That the human Supercolony is the result of a chance genetic mutation? That we should be gassed?
The moral of “The Anthill Chronicles” is that life moves in cycles, and nature will right itself. Balance will be restored. But what keeps the world of Nokobee in balance in “Anthill” is an in-house lawyer, a small-scale environmental holocaust and — I won’t go into it — a shotgun in the hands of a possible lunatic. This is perturbation indeed. It makes me eager for Mr. Wilson’s next work of nonfiction, in which he will be more careful, as he has nearly always been, to shepherd his implications.
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