This review first appeared in The New York Times.
About five minutes into “Lord of the Ants,” on Tuesday on the PBS “Nova” series, certain preconceptions you may have about ivory-tower types are likely to be exploded. That’s when Edward O. Wilson, the eminent Harvard biologist and the “Lord” of the title, demonstrates a point by plunging his hand into a nest of stinging fire ants. So much for aloof theorizing.
Dr. Wilson, 78, has two Pulitzer Prizes and enough degrees, earned and honorary, to intimidate most people, but here he seems like an ordinary guy who would make a fine dinner guest and even better hiking companion. He certainly does not come across as someone who would enrage you enough that you would dump a pitcher of ice water over his head.
Yet that is what happened at a conference in 1978, a moment when Dr. Wilson was generating controversy with his ideas on sociobiology, the notion that social behavior in animals has a biological basis. When he extended that theory to the human animal in “Sociobiology” (1975), daring to suggest that newborn babies aren’t blank slates after all, he drew sharp criticism from several directions, and the ice water bath.
The program recounts this and other pivotal points of Dr. Wilson’s career. Despite the title, ants, his lifelong fascination, are only part of the story. These days he is a crusader for biodiversity, and among the program’s most interesting segments is one in which he and a colleague return to a tiny island off Florida that they fumigated more than 40 years ago to see how it would replenish itself.
Harrison Ford narrates the program in an ominous voice that doesn’t match up well with the amiable fellow on the screen. It’s as if the movie star, not the scientist, is the one who had ice water dumped on his head.