E.O. Wilson on Pheromones and the Hidden World of Other Senses | Big Think.

E.O. Wilson on Pheromones and the Hidden World of Other Senses

Watch the newest video from Big Think

Join Big Think Edge for exclusive videos

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Biologist Edward O. Wilson takes us through several natural stimuli that humans don't understand yet are used by various animals to navigate and communicate within communities. Examples include infrared sensing, echolocation, electrical perception, and pheromones. As the world's leading expert on ants, Wilson explains how entire colonies structure their societies around the sense of smell and taste via pheromones.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

EDWARD O. WILSON:

Edward Osborne Wilson is an American biologist (Myrmecology, a branch of entomology), researcher (sociobiology, biodiversity), theorist (consilience, biophilia), and naturalist (conservationism). Wilson is known for his career as a scientist, his advocacy for environmentalism, and his secular humanist ideas concerned with religious and ethical matters.

A Harvard professor for four decades, he has written twenty books, won two Pulitzer prizes, and discovered hundreds of new species. Considered to be one of the world's greatest living scientists, Dr. Wilson is often called "the father of biodiversity," (a word that he coined). He is the Pellegrino University Research Professor, Emeritus in Entomology for the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He is a Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIPT:

E.O. Wilson: We know less and we understand less of the world around us than any person who doesn't know the evidence can even imagine. We live entirely within a microscopic section of the stimuli that are possible and that flood in on us all the time. Let me give you an example. We think we see everything but we only see the electromagnetic radiation across almost literally relatively a microscopic section of the entire spectrum, you know, running from ultra low frequency radiation to gamma radiation, this vast array we read, we get and we can understand only a tiny, tiny fraction. We're not aware of that. Other animals in the world can read infrared and others can't see red, and some move primarily directed by ultraviolet and so on and we don't know exactly what else is out there. We know that a number of organisms use echolocation; bats are the familiar example. Others echolocate with electrical impulses. They broadcast from their bodies like electric fish and electric eels. We have no sense of that whatsoever and yet bats, for example, can maneuver with fantastic speed and accuracy just using echo locations from their own voices.

But that's just the beginning. We are completely ignorant or unknowing except when we discover it by instruments of the magnetic field of the earth. Birds migrate with it. Many species do. The entire world of electrical perception. We sense electricity or electric flow only by maybe a sound that it creates or a strange sense of vibration in comfort. Other organisms use it all the time. But most important of all is that we are among the few creatures in the world that live in a primarily audio/visual world. Birds are another example. That's why we love them so perhaps, part of the reason we love them so because they're using the same channels we are. And humans, when you think about it, communicate and they see and they understand almost entirely with hearing and sight. We are miserable when it comes to taste and smell. And I don't care how exquisite the finest restaurants and cuisines of New York's restaurants, we still only sense a tiny fraction of what most of the animal world is sensing.

They live by pheromones. It means that they communicate by chemical smell and taste and they can communicate in a complex manner in this way. For example, in my work, which I began in the late '50s with natural products chemists, I and others found out that ants are communicating by pheromones and that actually they have, according to species, ten to 20 substances that they use to smell and taste in organizing their society. We have no sense of that whatsoever, you know, no way of knowing what they're doing. We just see them running around; they look like they're little particles in brownian movement or forming lines and so on. With those ten to 20 pheromones they use they can vary meaning greatly by how much of the pheromone they release. Sometimes they release it only in billionths of a gram to send a signal, by the context,....

To read the transcript, please go to