Start with a circle

 A person who is interested in natural history gradually becomes aware of a cycle of learning and discovery. You can discover the relationship between yellow-billed cuckoos and the tent caterpillars in your neighborhood for yourself. But you can do so only if you’ve learned to identify some birds and bugs.

You have to learn some things from teachers and books to be able to discover things for yourself. Those discoveries might help you learn more things from teachers and books.

E.O. Wilson, the great naturalist, pointed out another element to that cycle. Here’s his description of his sophomore year in college:

 

My resolve to be a biologist was reinforced when I discovered the ideal social environment for developing a scientist — or at least one of several possible ideals. It is the same as for a political revolutionary. Start with a circle of ambitious students who talk and work together and conspire against their elders in order to make their way into a particular discipline. They can be as few as two or as many as five; more than five makes the unit unstable. Give them an exciting new idea that can transform the discipline and with which they can advance their ambitions: let them believe that they own a central truth shared by few others and therefore a piece of the future. Add a distant authority figure, in this case a scientist who has written a revolutionary text, or at least a circle of older revolutionaries who have generated the accepted canon. The farther away these icons are from their acolytes, the better. At midcentury, Europe was best of all.

 

I love that description of a circle of friends learning together. The notion of collegiality in colleges seems endangered to me, though I’m no expert.

Wilson wrote about science as a social activity. If I had another life to live, researching that activity — that cycle of learning and discovering — would be a good way to spend it

• Source: Edward O. Wilson, Naturalist; Washington, D.C.: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 1994, pp. 107-8.

For an explanation of cuckoos and tent caterpillars, see “The case of the missing caterpillars,” July 22, 2026. It’s here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2026/07/the-case-of-missing-caterpillars.html