Interesting show on E.O. Wilson, who discovered how ants communicate with one another, and tell larger stories about humans. May 19 (Bloomberg) -- E.O. Wilson, the world's foremost authority on ants, has profoundly bugged some people during his storied career. Described by narrator Harrison Ford as the ``most controversial evolutionist since Darwin,'' Wilson doesn't look like a troublemaker. Now 78 and gray, the retired Harvard professor came from the calm backwoods of southern Alabama, where he spent countless hours pursuing turtles, snakes and insects. In ``Lord of the Ants,'' a one-hour program airing tomorrow on PBS at 8 p.m. New York time, Wilson lovingly describes those years as ``my little savage period,'' during which he lost most of the sight in one eye in a fishing accident. He gravitated toward studying ants, he explains, because they can be gingerly held between the thumb and forefinger for a closer look. Like his beloved ants, Wilson can't hear very well. (Ants also have poor vision.) So he wondered how they communicate, which in turn led to a major scientific controversy. Wilson discovered that ants secrete chemicals that tell colleagues when danger lurks, where food is, and even what ``caste'' they belong to. He eventually concluded that the ability to send and receive those signals is encoded and that ants aren't the only creatures whose behavior is genetically determined. Nazi Label In his 1975 book, ``Sociobiology: The New Synthesis,'' Wilson argued that human behavior also has a genetic component, a position that drew fire and brimstone from social scientists, who denounced Wilson as a proponent of biological determinism. They likened him to a Nazi -- Hitler in a smock. All of which is recalled by Wilson with some amusement, especially when he describes being doused with a pitcher of cold water during a lecture. He claims to be the ``only scientist in modern times to be physically assaulted for an idea,'' which might come as a surprise to Andrei Sakharov and other dissident scientists who challenged the Soviet system. The show includes high praise from famed naturalist David Attenborough, looking a bit long in the tooth these days but still highly spirited. He says Wilson ``is able to step back not just one pace but three paces and see the entire panorama of not just invertebrates but of the whole magic complex web of organisms -- animals and plants.'' That ability turned Wilson into a committed conservationist -- and not of the armchair variety. Extinction? One segment recounts a 1965 experiment in which he and biologist Daniel Simberloff catalogued every species on a small island off the Florida coast, then hired an exterminator to fumigate the place. They studied how the island was re-colonized and concluded that the smaller the space, the greater the chance of extinction. Wilson says rich countries should establish large land reserves to protect threatened species. He estimates it would cost about $50 billion, which he calls ``chump change.'' Otherwise, he warns, we are heading toward a mass extinction like the one that eliminated dinosaurs 65 million years ago. (
