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.
The two analyses concur, painting a picture of a great scholar anxious to avoid public controversy, but playing up his prestige behind the scenes to promote pseudoscientific theories on the inequality of the "human races." "Wilson and Rushton's relationship is not a story of 'guilt by association' or of honest mistakes," write Gibbons and Farina. "It is a story about how racist ideas are woven into the scientific record with the support of powerful allies who operate in secret."
In 1986, Wilson was already a member of the American Academy of Sciences. As such, he could "sponsor" the publication of articles in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). In the spring of 1986, Rushton asked Wilson to have one of his articles on the supposed "gene-culture coevolution of complex social behavior" published in PNAS.
At the time, Rushton was already highly controversial for his racist-tinged statements and research (many of which have been retracted). At Western University in Ontario, Canada, his own department published a statement in 2020, eight years after his death, completely disassociating itself from the former professor: "Although Rushton ceased teaching for the Department of Psychology in the early 1990s, he continued to conduct racist and flawed studies, sometimes without appropriate ethics approval, for two more decades."
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