EDWARD O. WILSON AND HIS CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANT SYSTEMATICS

This Festschrift celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the Ph.D. thesis of the world’s most prominent myrmecologist. Edward O. Wilson is a towering figure in ant biology, and his influence extends well beyond myrmecology to broader aspects of science and society. Yet many of his research accomplishments, especially from the earlier years, reflect a particular concern with ant systematics and evolution. Among Wilson’s many contributions to this field, his doctoral dissertation—a monographic revision of the ant genus Lasius—is a particularly significant milestone. Published in March 1955, it represents one of the first serious attempts to incorporate into ant systematics the principles of population biology and evolution. Wilson and his associate, William L. Brown, Jr., pioneered the introduction of these ideas into ant taxonomy, often in the face of resistance from more traditional workers. The “new systematics”, as it was called by Julian Huxley (1940), drew inspiration from the writings of Ernst Mayr, Bernard Rensch, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Sewall Wright and other architects of the neodarwinian synthesis. Mayr’s (1942) Systematics and the origin of species had an especially influential role. Species were envisaged as groups of interbreeding populations, reproductively isolated from other such groups, and frequently containing a substantial amount of variation. This biological species concept stood in contrast to the typological view of species that was implicit in much earlier taxonomic work. Ant taxonomy itself was burdened with a peculiar and unwieldy pentanomial nomenclature (Brown, 1955), and was associated with the profligate naming of “species”, “subspecies”, and “varieties”, often poorly diagnosed and with little thought directed to the nature of these forms or their relationships to one another. An early assault on infraspecific names in ant taxonomy was carried out by William S. Creighton, most notably in his monumental Ants of North America (1950). Buhs (2000) credits Creighton with introducing the “new systematics” to myrmecology, but Wilson and Brown went further than Creighton and they had a more lasting impact. They argued compellingly against the use of subspecies names in systematics (Wilson & Brown, 1953; Brown & Wilson, 1954); they advocated a global approach to revisionary taxonomy; they were concerned with the higher classification and phylogeny of ants; and they paid greater attention than other workers to the quantification of intra- and interspecific variation. Wilson’s (1955) Lasius monograph exemplified these ideals. It dealt with the world fauna, offered a provisional phylogeny, abandoned the use of subspecies names, and attempted to delineate species while allowing for a measure of intraspecific variation. It made extensive use of metric measurements and indices, based on large population samples, and it introduced standardized terms—still in use today—for describing the appearance of pilosity in ants. These progressive features were not adopted by all workers. Creighton and other North American-centered ant taxonomists became quite critical of the work of the “Happy Harvard Team”, as they referred to Wilson and Brown. In retrospect, most of the criticisms appear to be rather defensive and to miss their mark. One of the most persistent was that the Harvard researchers lacked sufficient field experience to make prudent judgments about species