For immediate release -- May 17, 2000
Contact: Trish Brink (860) 439-2508
Pulitzer Prize-winning biologist E.O. Wilson to speak at Connecticut College Commencement
NEW LONDON, Conn. - Pulitzer Prize-winning biologist and environmentalist Edward O. Wilson will be the keynote speaker at Connecticut College's 82nd Commencement on May 27 at 10 a.m.
He was nominated for the honor by William A. Niering, the former Lucretia L. Allyn Professor of Botany who passed away Aug. 30, 1999, only minutes after having addressed the freshman class. Wilson's name is familiar not only to biologists but to Pulitzer Prize award judges as well. He won the award twice, for two of his books, On Human Nature (1978) and The Ants (1990).
The professor emeritus at Harvard University will be awarded an honorary degree of doctor of science at Commencement. At Harvard, he is the Pellegrino University Research Professor and Honorary Curator in Entomology of the Museum of Comparative Zoology. He has received the 1977 National Medal of Science, the Crafoord Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1990, the International Prize for Biology from Japan (1993), and, for his conservation efforts, the Gold Medal of the Worldwide Fund for Nature (1990) and the Audubon Medal of the National Audubon Society (1995).
Wilson is on the boards of directors of The Nature Conservancy, Conservation International and the American Museum of Natural History.
He received his B.S. and M.S. in biology from the University of Alabama and, in 1955, his Ph.D. in biology from Harvard, where he has taught since, and where he has received both of its college-wide teaching awards.
In his nomination, Niering had written of Wilson: "He is a rare scientist: having over a long career made signal contributions to population genetics, evolutionary biology, entomology, and ethology, he has also steeped himself in philosophy, the humanities and the social sciences.The result of his lifelong, wide-ranging investigations is Consilience (the word means 'a jumping together,' in this case of the many branches of human knowledge), a wonderfully broad study that encourages scholars to bridge the many gaps that yawn between and within the cultures of science and the arts.
"No such gaps should exist, Wilson maintains, for the sciences, humanities, and arts have a common goal: to give understanding a purpose, to lend to us all 'a conviction, far deeper than a mere working proposition, that the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws.' "
Visit our Web site at: http://camel2.conncoll.edu/commencement/
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