INTRODUCTION

In a lecture to the philosophical Royce Club of Harvard in 1917, William Morton Wheeler jovially referred to Lamarckism as “the ninth mortal sin.” Wheeler (1865–1937) was by then the world's leading figure in myrmecology (the study of ants), and there was a serious comment underlying his remark; something about his practice of myrmecology had placed him outside the orthodoxy of biology. A sketch of his career hints at why this might be so. Wheeler had formalized an early interest in natural history when he went to Chicago to study embryology under C. O. Whitman. Moving to Texas some time later, he became intrigued by the local ant fauna and returned to his earlier natural-historical passions. The fascination with myrmecology lasted for the remaining forty or so years of his life, to the virtual exclusion of all other types of animal – humans excepted. Most of this time (1908–37) was spent at Harvard. A romantic natural historian at heart, Wheeler was uncomfortably lodged with the applied biologists in the graduate school; by preference he mixed with Cambridge's philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists, along with the zoologists in the Museum of Comparative Zoology.

Ants had long been a riddle to evolutionists like Wheeler; though individually simple, their group behavior was extremely complex, embracing activities that were variously interpreted as fungus farming, aphid farming, slave making, mutual feeding, brood nursing, nest building, caste creation, and warfare, not to mention their manifold ecological relationships with other species, both within and without the nest.