Like Darwin, E.O. Wilson's story is remarkable: a boy who never managed to outgrow his childhood fascination with bugs and other animals becomes the world's leading expert on ants. That might not seem all that surprising, but it's his expertise on the social lives of ants that also allowed him to theorize on the grandest of scales and come to see that the human mind itself could also be understood in terms of evolutionary processes.
The source of incredible controversy, his thoughts on Sociobiology revealed the ire of a generation unable to see itself as part of the animal kingdom, but leading scientific work from the last few decades has now vindicated his insight.
As if all of that weren't enough, Wilson has become one of the leading conservationists in the world, leading to the development of The Encyclopedia of Life, a world-wide attempt to catalogue and make publicably available information on all the species discovered all over the world.
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