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Book Review: Letters to a Young Scientist, by E.O. Wilson
Citation:
Berry, W. Book Review: Letters to a Young Scientist, by E.O. Wilson. Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management. Allen Press, Inc., Lawrence, KS, 15(3):486, (2019). https://doi.org/10.1002/ieam.4143
Impact/Purpose:
This product is a book review for the journal, Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management. The review will help increase the visibility of E.O Wilson's book "Letters to a Young Scientist." This is useful because there is a lot of good advice in the book for young scientists and the people who mentor them.
Description:
Almost every scientist knows who E.O. Wilson is: he is the guy who popularized Sociobiology, who has written more prize-winning books than many scientists will write journal articles, and has forgotten more about ants than most entomology departments will ever know. So, when E.O. Wilson writes a book entitled, “Letters to a Young Scientist,” you might want to take note of it, particularly if you are an early career scientist or if you mentor one. Wilson provides a treasure trove of advice useful for anyone setting out to be a scientist, from how to choose a field of endeavor (look for a field that is not too heavily studied so that you can more easily make an important contribution) to why you should take as much math and statistics as you can, but not worry about it a lot. Much of this is distilled in a core set of “Principles” he outlines in the book, like Principal Number One: It is easier for scientists to find mathematicians and statisticians who will collaborate with them than it is for the mathematicians and statisticians to find scientists who can use their skills. For me, Wilson’s most salient piece of advice is to follow the dictum of “Passion, then training”: find something that you are really interested in, and then take it as far as you can. The principles are illustrated with very personal examples from Wilson’s own career. One word of caution. The book is not that old, but it is decidedly old school. I could not find the word “applied” even once in the text, nor a mention of how any of the research that Wilson has ever done was or could be used, except to lead to more research. This is despite the fact that the research is certainly “useful”. Ants are hugely important to the ecosystem. We cannot find ways to control them or protect them or the ecosystem of which they are such a large part unless we know how they are related to each other or communicate or organize their communities. However, I do believe that nowadays the vast majority of scientists, particularly SETAC scientists, need to be thinking very early on in the research process about who will use their science, and what they will use it for. But that does not mean that Wilson’s emphasis on passion and a systematic approach to a career in science is not useful for applied scientists. If anything, it may be more important, so that we more applied scientists do not lose sight of why we became scientists in the first place.
