「Anthill」（E.O. Wilson教授）

▼ウイキペディア：http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/エドワード・オズボーン・ウィルソン▼ハーバード大学比較動物学博物館は一般公開しているのかしら。

WSJ（張付け開始）

BOOKSMARCH 26, 2010

'The Iliad'—With Ants?

A world-renowned biologist tackles fiction in his latest book; of insects and men

By ALEXANDRA ALTER

Humans may think we run the show, but ants dominate the planet. Ants outnumber people by roughly a million to one, and collectively weigh about as much as humanity. Without their soil-tilling skills, entire ecosystems would collapse.

They also make surprisingly compelling fictional protagonists.

Renowned biologist and naturalist E.O. Wilson, who has studied ants for more than 60 years and has won two Pulitzer Prizes, is publishing his first novel, "Anthill," an epic tale of men and insects that centers on the fate of an ant colony in rural Alabama.

Mr. Wilson, 80 years old, says he aimed to draw "a parallel between the epics of the ants and the epics of competing human societies."

The parallels are plentiful: in "Anthill," Mr. Wilson describes how ants build elaborate cities, grow and store food to prevent famine, form social hierarchies with worker and soldier castes, keep their young in nurseries and deposit their dead in cemeteries.

Literary bloggers and reviewers have likened Mr. Wilson's narrative treatment of warring ant colonies to the "Iliad." Mr. Wilson describes a miniature version of the Trojan War as battles between rival tribes of ants escalate, an ant city gets invaded and plundered and a once-thriving ant civilization collapses.

Mr. Wilson, who's published more than 20 nonfiction books, says he turned to fiction because he figured a novel about environmental conservation could reach more readers than a science book. "People respect nonfiction, but they read novels," he says.

Mr. Wilson's prose in "Anthill" at times resembles his detailed descriptions of nature in his memoir, "Naturalist." He cites Sinclair Lewis's novel, "Arrowsmith," about a doctor, and other books about scientists as influences.

"Anthill" also allowed Mr. Wilson to revisit his Alabama childhood. Its central human character, Raff Cody, is an Alabama native who's drawn to nature and fascinated by ants. Rather than becoming a biologist, Raff goes to law school. He eventually tries to stop real estate developers with plans to build homes on pristine land where Raff studied ant colonies as a college student.

"The Anthill Chronicles," a 72-page novella at the center of the 378-page novel, is a retelling of Raff's college anthill thesis, which details the rise and collapse of rival ant colonies. In it, Mr. Wilson describes how the death of one colony's queen leads to its invasion by a rival colony, and how a genetic mutation in another group of ants gave rise to a super colony (normally, only the queen is permitted to lay eggs, but a mutation suppresses the ants' ability to distinguish their queen's smell, so other ants begin breeding).

Mr. Wilson says all the natural descriptions in the book are fact-based. When pressed, he offers a qualification: the ants are a "compound" character based on four different species—fire ants, harvesting ants, honey-pot ants and spiny tree ants.

"I wanted these ants, in one species, to tell some of the most interesting stories that you can find in ants collectively," he said.

The martial tournaments he describes, where soldier ants from rival colonies parade in front of one another and push each other to assess each other's strengths, are based on honey-pot ant behavior, he says. The soldier ants, with their heavy armament, resemble spiny ants. The ants' ultra-aggressive behavior is modeled on fire ants, he says.

Mr. Wilson says the novel's descriptions of ants' emotions is "the one real stretch," although he adds that ants respond to threats and other stimuli in ways that resemble humans. "Ants show behavior which is closely similar to human behavior expressing emotions of fear, anger and panic," he says.

"Anthill" marks another milestone in Mr. Wilson's long and sometimes turbulent career. A professor of entomology at Harvard University, Mr. Wilson has written books on evolution, genetics, conservation and religion. In the 1950s and 1960s, he led pioneering research on ant communication. One of his key discoveries involved teaming up with chemists to detect miniscule traces of the pheromones, or chemical markers, that ants use to send messages.

In the 1970s, Mr. Wilson ventured into the often controversial field of sociobiology, and was widely criticized for arguing that genes drive human behavior. Some critics compared his ideas to Nazi ideology; one group of protesters poured water on him at a public lecture. But a he later won a Pulitzer Prize for his book "On Human Nature," which explains how various human behaviors arose through gene selection and evolution. He won a second Pulitzer for his 1990 book, "The Ants," co-written with Bert Hölldobler.

Mr. Wilson says it was refreshing to write fiction late in life, after so many years of writing scientific exposition. Then he tries to downplay the remark.

"Maybe you shouldn't mention that I'm 80 years old," he says. "I wouldn't want to read a novel by an 80-year-old."

（張付け終わり）