‘If you have men who will exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity,” wrote Saint Francis of Assisi, “you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.” The Golden Rule, it turns out, has a naturalist sequitur. We can call it “biophilia,” the term coined by the zoologist Edward O. Wilson to describe the love of all living things.
Biophilia, and the wonders of creatures great and small, inspired Wilson from an early age. It led him to become, while still quite young, the world’s leading authority on ants: It was he who discovered that ants communicate by leaving pheromone trails for one another; and he went on to discover more than 3 percent of all known ant species. Now, 60 years after he started teaching at Harvard, Wilson is one of the most influential scientists of modern times.
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