The humanities are academic disciplines that study the human condition, using methods that are primarily analytical, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural sciences.

The humanities include ancient and modern languages, literature, history, philosophy, religion, and visual and performing arts such as music and theatre. The humanities that are also regarded as social sciences include technology, history, anthropology, area studies, communication studies, cultural studies, law and linguistics. Scholars working in the humanities are sometimes described as "humanists". However, that term also describes the philosophical position of humanism, which some "antihumanist" scholars in the humanities reject.

Humanities fields

Classics

The classics, in the Western academic tradition, refer to cultures of classical antiquity, namely the Ancient Greek and Roman cultures. The study of the classics is considered one of the cornerstones of the humanities; however, its popularity declined during the 20th century. Nevertheless, the influence of classical ideas in many humanities disciplines, such as philosophy and literature, remains strong.

Outside of its traditional and academic meaning, the classics can be understood as including foundational writings from other major cultures. In other traditions, classics would refer to the Hammurabi Code and the Gilgamesh Epic from Mesopotamia, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Vedas and Upanishads in India and various writings attributed to Confucius, Lao-tse and Chuang-tzu in China.

History

History is systematically collected information about the past. When used as the name of a field of study, ''history'' refers to the study and interpretation of the record of humans, societies, institutions, and any topic that has changed over time. Knowledge of history is often said to encompass both knowledge of past events and historical thinking skills.

Traditionally, the study of history has been considered a part of the humanities. In modern academia, history is occasionally classified as a social science.

Languages

The study of individual modern and classical languages forms the backbone of modern study of the humanities.

While the scientific study of language is known as linguistics and is a social science, the study of languages is still central to the humanities. A good deal of twentieth-century and twenty-first-century philosophy has been devoted to the analysis of language and to the question of whether, as Wittgenstein claimed, many of our philosophical confusions derive from the vocabulary we use; literary theory has explored the rhetorical, associative, and ordering features of language; and historians have studied the development of languages across time. Literature, covering a variety of uses of language including prose forms (such as the novel), poetry and drama, also lies at the heart of the modern humanities curriculum. College-level programs in a foreign language usually include study of important works of the literature in that language, as well as the language itself. What would we do if we couldnt talk?

Law

thumb|right|A trial at a criminal court, the Old Bailey in London In common parlance, law means a rule which (unlike a rule of ethics) is capable of enforcement through institutions. The study of law crosses the boundaries between the social sciences and humanities, depending on one's view of research into its objectives and effects. Law is not always enforceable, especially in the international relations context. It has been defined as a "system of rules", as an "interpretive concept" to achieve justice, as an "authority" to mediate people's interests, and even as "the command of a sovereign, backed by the threat of a sanction". However one likes to think of law, it is a completely central social institution. Legal policy incorporates the practical manifestation of thinking from almost every social science and discipline of the humanities. Laws are politics, because politicians create them. Law is philosophy, because moral and ethical persuasions shape their ideas. Law tells many of history's stories, because statutes, case law and codifications build up over time. And law is economics, because any rule about contract, tort, property law, labour law, company law and many more can have long lasting effects. The noun ''law'' derives from the late Old English ''lagu'', meaning something laid down or fixed and the adjective ''legal'' comes from the Latin word ''lex''.

Literature

Performing arts

The performing arts differ from the plastic arts insofar as the former uses the artist's own body, face, and presence as a medium, and the latter uses materials such as clay, metal, or paint, which can be molded or transformed to create some art object. Performing arts include acrobatics, busking, comedy, dance, magic, music, opera, film, juggling, marching arts, such as brass bands, and theatre.

Artists who participate in these arts in front of an audience are called performers, including actors, comedians, dancers, musicians, and singers. Performing arts are also supported by workers in related fields, such as songwriting and stagecraft. Performers often adapt their appearance, such as with costumes and stage makeup, etc. There is also a specialized form of fine art in which the artists ''perform'' their work live to an audience. This is called Performance art. Most performance art also involves some form of plastic art, perhaps in the creation of props. Dance was often referred to as a ''plastic art'' during the Modern dance era.

Music

Music as an academic discipline can take a number of different paths, including music performance, music education (training music teachers), musicology, music theory and composition. Undergraduate music majors generally take courses in all of these areas, while graduate students focus on a particular path. In the liberal arts tradition, music is also used to broaden skills of non-musicians by teaching skills such as concentration and listening.

Theatre

Theatre (or theater) (Greek "theatron", ''θέατρον'') is the branch of the performing arts concerned with acting out stories in front of an audience using combinations of speech, gesture, music, dance, sound and spectacle — indeed any one or more elements of the other performing arts. In addition to the standard narrative dialogue style, theatre takes such forms as opera, ballet, mime, kabuki, classical Indian dance, Chinese opera, mummers' plays, and pantomime.

Dance

Dance (from Old French ''dancier'', perhaps from Frankish) generally refers to human movement either used as a form of expression or presented in a social, spiritual or performance setting. Dance is also used to describe methods of non-verbal communication (see body language) between humans or animals (bee dance, mating dance), and motion in inanimate objects (''the leaves danced in the wind''). Choreography is the art of making dances, and the person who does this is called a choreographer.

Definitions of what constitutes dance are dependent on social, cultural, aesthetic, artistic, and moral constraints and range from functional movement (such as Folk dance) to codified, virtuoso techniques such as ballet. In sports, gymnastics, figure skating and synchronized swimming are ''dance'' disciplines while Martial arts 'kata' are often compared to dances.

Philosophy

Philosophy — etymologically, the "love of wisdom" — is generally the study of problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, justification, truth, justice, right and wrong, beauty, validity, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing these issues by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on reasoned argument, rather than experiments (Experimental philosophy being an exception).

Philosophy used to be a very comprehensive term, including what have subsequently become separate disciplines, such as physics. (As Immanuel Kant noted, "Ancient Greek philosophy was divided into three sciences: physics, ethics, and logic.") Today, the main fields of philosophy are logic, ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology. Still, there continues to be plenty of overlap with other disciplines; the field of semantics, for example, brings philosophy into contact with linguistics.

Since the early twentieth century, the philosophy done in universities (especially in the English-speaking parts of the world) has become much more ''analytic.'' Analytic philosophy is marked by a clear, rigorous method of inquiry that emphasizes the use of logic and more formal methods of reasoning. This method of inquiry is largely indebted to the work of philosophers such as Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Religion

New philosophies and religions arose in both east and west, particularly around the 6th century BC. Over time, a great variety of religions developed around the world, with Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism in India, Zoroastrianism in Persia being some of the earliest major faiths. In the east, three schools of thought were to dominate Chinese thinking until the modern day. These were Taoism, Legalism, and Confucianism. The Confucian tradition, which would attain predominance, looked not to the force of law, but to the power and example of tradition for political morality. In the west, the Greek philosophical tradition, represented by the works of Plato and Aristotle, was diffused throughout Europe and the Middle East by the conquests of Alexander of Macedon in the 4th century BC.

Abrahamic religions are those religions deriving from a common ancient Semitic tradition and traced by their adherents to Abraham (circa 1900 BCE), a patriarch whose life is narrated in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, where he is described as a prophet (Genesis 20:7), and in the Quran, where he also appears as a prophet. This forms a large group of related largely monotheistic religions, generally held to include Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and comprises over half of the world's religious adherents.

Visual arts

History of visual arts

The great traditions in art have a foundation in the art of one of the ancient civilizations, such as Ancient Japan, Greece and Rome, China, India, Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica.

Ancient Greek art saw a veneration of the human physical form and the development of equivalent skills to show musculature, poise, beauty and anatomically correct proportions. Ancient Roman art depicted gods as idealized humans, shown with characteristic distinguishing features (e.g., Zeus' thunderbolt).

In Byzantine and Gothic art of the Middle Ages, the dominance of the church insisted on the expression of biblical and not material truths. The Renaissance saw the return to valuation of the material world, and this shift is reflected in art forms, which show the corporeality of the human body, and the three-dimensional reality of landscape.

Eastern art has generally worked in a style akin to Western medieval art, namely a concentration on surface patterning and local colour (meaning the plain colour of an object, such as basic red for a red robe, rather than the modulations of that colour brought about by light, shade and reflection). A characteristic of this style is that the local colour is often defined by an outline (a contemporary equivalent is the cartoon). This is evident in, for example, the art of India, Tibet and Japan.

Religious Islamic art forbids iconography, and expresses religious ideas through geometry instead. The physical and rational certainties depicted by the 19th-century Enlightenment were shattered not only by new discoveries of relativity by Einstein and of unseen psychology by Freud, but also by unprecedented technological development. Increasing global interaction during this time saw an equivalent influence of other cultures into Western art.

Media types

Drawing

Drawing is a means of making an pictureimage, using any of a wide variety of tools and techniques. It generally involves making marks on a surface by applying pressure from a tool, or moving a tool across a surface. Common tools are graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, wax color pencils, crayons, charcoals, pastels, and markers. Digital tools which simulate the effects of these are also used. The main techniques used in drawing are: line drawing, hatching, crosshatching, random hatching, scribbling, stippling, and blending. An artist who excels in drawing is referred to as a ''draftsman'' or ''draughtsman''.

Painting

Painting taken literally is the practice of applying pigment suspended in a carrier (or medium) and a binding agent (a glue) to a surface (support) such as paper, canvas or a wall. However, when used in an artistic sense it means the use of this activity in combination with drawing, composition and other aesthetic considerations in order to manifest the expressive and conceptual intention of the practitioner. Painting is also used to express spiritual motifs and ideas; sites of this kind of painting range from artwork depicting mythological figures on pottery to The Sistine Chapel to the human body itself.

Colour is highly subjective, but has observable psychological effects, although these can differ from one culture to the next. Black is associated with mourning in the West, but elsewhere white may be. Some painters, theoreticians, writers and scientists, including Goethe, Kandinsky, Isaac Newton, have written their own colour theories. Moreover the use of language is only a generalization for a colour equivalent. The word "red", for example, can cover a wide range of variations on the pure red of the spectrum. There is not a formalized register of different colours in the way that there is agreement on different notes in music, such as C or C# in music, although the Pantone system is widely used in the printing and design industry for this purpose.

Modern artists have extended the practice of painting considerably to include, for example, collage. This began with cubism and is not painting in strict sense. Some modern painters incorporate different materials such as sand, cement, straw or wood for their texture. Examples of this are the works of [] or Anselm Kiefer. Modern and contemporary art has moved away from the historic value of craft in favour of concept; this has led some to say that painting, as a serious art form, is dead, although this has not deterred the majority of artists from continuing to practise it either as whole or part of their work.

History of the humanities

In the West, the study of the humanities can be traced to ancient Greece, as the basis of a broad education for citizens. During Roman times, the concept of the seven liberal arts evolved, involving grammar, rhetoric and logic (the trivium), along with arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music (the quadrivium). These subjects formed the bulk of medieval education, with the emphasis being on the humanities as skills or "ways of doing."

A major shift occurred with the Renaissance humanism of the fifteenth century, when the humanities began to be regarded as subjects to be studied rather than practiced, with a corresponding shift away from the traditional fields into areas such as literature and history. In the 20th century, this view was in turn challenged by the postmodernist movement, which sought to redefine the humanities in more egalitarian terms suitable for a democratic society.

Humanities today

In the United States

The Humanities Indicators, unveiled in 2009 by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, are the first comprehensive compilation of data about the humanities in the United States, providing scholars, policymakers and the public with detailed information on humanities education from primary to higher education, the humanities workforce, humanities funding and research, and public humanities activities. Modeled after the National Science Board’s Science and Engineering Indicators, the Humanities Indicators are a source of reliable benchmarks to guide analysis of the state of the humanities in the United States.

Many American colleges and universities believe in the notion of a broad "liberal arts education", which requires all college students to study the humanities in addition to their specific area of study. The University of Chicago and Columbia University were among the first schools to require an extensive core curriculum in philosophy, literature, and the arts for all students. Other colleges with nationally recognized, required two year programs in the liberal arts are St. John's College, Saint Anselm College and Providence College. Prominent proponents of liberal arts in the United States have included Mortimer J. Adler and E. D. Hirsch, Jr..

The 1980 United States Rockefeller Commission on the Humanities described the humanities in its report, ''The Humanities in American Life'':

Through the humanities we reflect on the fundamental question: What does it mean to be human? The humanities offer clues but never a complete answer. They reveal how people have tried to make moral, spiritual, and intellectual sense of a world in which irrationality, despair, loneliness, and death are as conspicuous as birth, friendship, hope, and reason.

"Increasing numbers of critics view education in the liberal arts as irrelevant" or as "learning more and more about less and less" which no longer prepares the students for the American job market in the face of increased competition due to more graduates . After World War II, many millions of veterans took advantage of the GI Bill. Further expansion of federal education grants and loans have expanded the number of adults in the United States that have attended a college. In 2003, roughly 53% of the population had some college education with 27.2% having graduated with a Bachelor's degree or higher, including 8% who graduated with a graduate degree. The counter view is that "A familiarity with the body of knowledge and methods of inquiry and discovery of the arts and sciences and a capacity to integrate knowledge across experience and discipline may have far more lasting value in such a changing world than specialized techniques and training, which can quickly become outmoded."

In the digital age

Researchers in the humanities have developed numerous large- and small-scale digital corpora, such as digitized collections of historical texts, along with the digital tools and methods to analyze them. Their aim is both to uncover new knowledge about corpora and to visualize research data in new and revealing ways. The field in which much of this activity occurs is called the Digital Humanities.

Legitimation of the humanities

Compared to the growing numbers of undergraduates enrolled in private and public post-secondary institutions, the percentage of enrollments and majors in the humanities is shrinking, although in absolute terms, overall enrollment in the humanities has not significantly changed (and by some measurements has actually increased slightly).

The modern "crisis" facing humanities scholars in the university is multifaceted: universities in the United States in particular have adopted corporate guidelines requiring profit both from undergraduate education and from academic scholarship and research, resulting in an increased demand for academic disciplines to justify their existence based on the applicability of their disciplines to the world outside of the university. Increasing corporate emphasis on "life-long learning" has also affected the university’s role as educator and researcher. Responses to those changing institutional norms, and to changing emphasis on what constitutes "useful skills" in an increasingly technological world, have varied greatly both inside and outside of the university system.

Citizenship, self-reflection, and the humanities

Since the late 19th century, a central justification for the humanities has been that it aids and encourages self-reflection, a self-reflection which in turn helps develop personal consciousness and/or an active sense of civic duty.

Wilhelm Dilthey and Hans-Georg Gadamer centered the humanities’ attempt to distinguish itself from the natural sciences in humankind’s urge to understand its own experiences. This understanding, they claimed, ties like-minded people from similar cultural backgrounds together and provides a sense of cultural continuity with the philosophical past.

Scholars in the late 20th and early 21st centuries extended that “narrative imagination” to the ability to understand the records of lived experiences outside of one’s own individual social and cultural context. Through that narrative imagination, it is claimed, humanities scholars and students develop a conscience more suited to the multicultural world in which we live. That conscience might take the form of a passive one that allows more effective self-reflection or extend into active empathy which facilitates the dispensation of civic duties in which a responsible world citizen must engage. There is disagreement, however, on the level of influence humanities study can have on an individual and whether or not the understanding produced in humanistic enterprise can guarantee an “identifiable positive effect on people.”

Truth, meaning, and the humanities

The divide between humanistic study and natural sciences informs arguments of meaning in humanities as well. What distinguishes the humanities from the natural sciences is not a certain subject matter, but rather the mode of approach to any question. Humanities focuses on understanding meaning, purpose, and goals and furthers the appreciation of singular historical and social phenomena—an interpretive method of finding “truth”—rather than explaining the causality of events or uncovering the truth of the natural world. Apart from its societal application, narrative imagination is an important tool in the (re)production of understood meaning in history, culture and literature.

Imagination, as part of the tool kit of artists or scholars, serves as vehicle to create meaning which invokes a response from an audience. Since a humanities scholar is always within the nexus of lived experiences, no "absolute" knowledge is theoretically possible; knowledge is instead a ceaseless procedure of inventing and reinventing the context in which a text is read. Poststructuralism has problematized an approach to the humanistic study based on questions of meaning, intentionality, and authorship. In the wake of the death of the author proclaimed by Roland Barthes, various theoretical currents such as deconstruction and discourse analysis seek to expose the ideologies and rhetoric operative in producing both the purportedly meaningful objects and the hermeneutic subjects of humanistic study. This exposure has opened up the interpretive structures of the humanities to criticism humanities scholarship is “unscientific” and therefore unfit for inclusion in modern university curricula because of the very nature of its changing contextual meaning.

Pleasure, the pursuit of knowledge, and humanities scholarship

Some, like Stanley Fish, have claimed that the humanities can defend themselves best by refusing to make any claims of utility. (Fish may well be thinking primarily of literary study, rather than history and philosophy.) Any attempt to justify the humanities in terms of outside benefits such as social usefulness (say increased productivity) or in terms of ennobling effects on the individual (such as greater wisdom or diminished prejudice) is ungrounded, according to Fish, and simply places impossible demands on the relevant academic departments. Furthermore, critical thinking, while arguably a result of humanistic training, can be acquired in other contexts. The notion that 'in today's day and age,' with its focus on the ideals of efficiency and practical utility, scholars of the humanities are becoming obsolete was perhaps summed up most powerfully in a remark that has been attributed to the artificial intelligence specialist Marvin Minsky: “With all the money that we are throwing away on humanities and art - give me that money and I will build you to be a better student."

Minsky's faith in the superiority of technical knowledge and his reduction of the humanities scholar of today to an obsolete relic of the past supported by the tax dollars of romantics fondly recalling the days of the G.I. Bill echoes arguments put forth by scholars and cultural commentators that call themselves "post-humanists" or "transhumanists." The idea is that current trends in the scientific understanding of human beings are calling the basic category of "the human" into question. Examples of these trends are assertions by cognitive scientists that the mind is simply a computing device, by geneticists that human beings are no more than ephemeral husks used by self-propagating genes (or even memes, according to some postmodern linguists), or by bioengineers who claim that one day it may be both possible and desirable to create human-animal hybrids. Rather than engage with old-style humanist scholarship, transhumanists in particular tend to be more concerned with testing and altering the limits of our mental and physical capacities in fields such as cognitive science and bioengineering in order to transcend the essentially bodily limitations that have bounded humanity. Despite the criticism of humanities scholarship as obsolete, however, many of the most influential post-humanist works are profoundly engaged with film and literary criticism, history, and cultural studies as can be seen in the writings of Donna Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles. And in recent years there has been a spate of books and articles re-articulating the importance of humanistic study. Examples include: Harold Bloom, ''How to Read and Why'' (2001), Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, ''Production of Presence'' (2004), Frank B. Farrell, ''Why Does Literature Matter?'' (2004), John Carey, W''hat Good Are the Arts?'' (2006), Lisa Zunshine, ''Why We Read Fiction'' (2006), Alexander Nehamas, ''Only A Promise Of Happiness'' (2007), Rita Felski, ''Uses of Literature'' (2008).

See also

Great Books

Great Books Programs in Canada

Liberal Arts

Social sciences

Phronetic social science

Human science

Digital humanities

The Two Cultures

List of academic disciplines

Public humanities

"Periodic Table of Human Sciences" in Tinbergen's four questions

References

External links

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences - USA

Humanities Indicators - USA

National Humanities Center - USA

The Humanities Association - UK

National Humanities Alliance

National Endowment for the Humanities - USA

Institute: Arts and Humanities

Australian Humanities Review

Australian Academy of the Humanities

European Science Foundation - Humanities

National Humanities Institute

Saint Anselm College">Dana Center for the Humanities at Saint Anselm College

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name	Bill Gates
birth date	October 28, 1955
birth place	Seattle, Washington, U.S.
birth name	William Henry Gates III
occupation	Chairman of MicrosoftChairman of CorbisCo-Chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates FoundationDirector of Berkshire HathawayCEO of Cascade Investment
years active	1975–present
nationality	American
net worth	US$56 billion (2011)
religion	Agnostic
spouse
children	3
residence	Medina, Washington, U.S.
alma mater	Harvard University (Dropout)
website	Bill Gates
signature	BillGates Signature.svg
parents	William H. Gates, Sr.Mary Maxwell Gates }}

William Henry "Bill" Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American business magnate, philanthropist, author and chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen. He is consistently ranked among the world's wealthiest people and was the wealthiest overall from 1995 to 2009, excluding 2008, when he was ranked third. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of CEO and chief software architect, and remains the largest individual shareholder, with more than 8 percent of the common stock. He has also authored or co-authored several books.

Gates is one of the best-known entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution. Although he is admired by many, a number of industry insiders criticize his business tactics, which they consider anti-competitive, an opinion which has in some cases been upheld by the courts. In the later stages of his career, Gates has pursued a number of philanthropic endeavors, donating large amounts of money to various charitable organizations and scientific research programs through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, established in 2000.

Gates stepped down as chief executive officer of Microsoft in January 2000. He remained as chairman and created the position of chief software architect. In June 2006, Gates announced that he would be transitioning from full-time work at Microsoft to part-time work, and full-time work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He gradually transferred his duties to Ray Ozzie, chief software architect, and Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer. Gates' last full-time day at Microsoft was June 27, 2008. He remains at Microsoft as non-executive chairman.

Early life

Gates was born in Seattle, Washington, to William H. Gates, Sr. and Mary Maxwell Gates, of English, German, and Scotch-Irish descent. His family was upper middle class; his father was a prominent lawyer, his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem and the United Way, and her father, J. W. Maxwell, was a national bank president. Gates has one elder sister, Kristi (Kristianne), and one younger sister, Libby. He was the fourth of his name in his family, but was known as William Gates III or "Trey" because his father had the "II" suffix. Early on in his life, Gates' parents had a law career in mind for him. When Gates was young, his family regularly attended a Congregational church.

At 13 he enrolled in the Lakeside School, an exclusive preparatory school. When he was in the eighth grade, the Mothers Club at the school used proceeds from Lakeside School's rummage sale to buy an Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric (GE) computer for the school's students. Gates took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC, and was excused from math classes to pursue his interest. He wrote his first computer program on this machine: an implementation of tic-tac-toe that allowed users to play games against the computer. Gates was fascinated by the machine and how it would always execute software code perfectly. When he reflected back on that moment, he said, "There was just something neat about the machine." After the Mothers Club donation was exhausted, he and other students sought time on systems including DEC PDP minicomputers. One of these systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation (CCC), which banned four Lakeside students—Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans—for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.

At the end of the ban, the four students offered to find bugs in CCC's software in exchange for computer time. Rather than use the system via Teletype, Gates went to CCC's offices and studied source code for various programs that ran on the system, including programs in FORTRAN, LISP, and machine language. The arrangement with CCC continued until 1970, when the company went out of business. The following year, Information Sciences, Inc. hired the four Lakeside students to write a payroll program in COBOL, providing them computer time and royalties. After his administrators became aware of his programming abilities, Gates wrote the school's computer program to schedule students in classes. He modified the code so that he was placed in classes with mostly female students. He later stated that "it was hard to tear myself away from a machine at which I could so unambiguously demonstrate success." At age 17, Gates formed a venture with Allen, called Traf-O-Data, to make traffic counters based on the Intel 8008 processor. In early 1973, Bill Gates served as a congressional page in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Gates graduated from Lakeside School in 1973. He scored 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT and enrolled at Harvard College in the autumn of 1973. While at Harvard, he met Steve Ballmer, who later succeeded Gates as CEO of Microsoft.

In his sophomore year, Gates devised an algorithm for pancake sorting as a solution to one of a series of unsolved problems presented in a combinatorics class by Harry Lewis, one of his professors. Gates' solution held the record as the fastest version for over thirty years; its successor is faster by only one percent. His solution was later formalized in a published paper in collaboration with Harvard computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou.

Gates did not have a definite study plan while a student at Harvard and spent a lot of time using the school's computers. Gates remained in contact with Paul Allen, joining him at Honeywell during the summer of 1974. The following year saw the release of the MITS Altair 8800 based on the Intel 8080 CPU, and Gates and Allen saw this as the opportunity to start their own computer software company. He had talked this decision over with his parents, who were supportive of him after seeing how much Gates wanted to start a company.

Microsoft

BASIC

After reading the January 1975 issue of ''Popular Electronics'' that demonstrated the Altair 8800, Gates contacted Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), the creators of the new microcomputer, to inform them that he and others were working on a BASIC interpreter for the platform. In reality, Gates and Allen did not have an Altair and had not written code for it; they merely wanted to gauge MITS's interest. MITS president Ed Roberts agreed to meet them for a demo, and over the course of a few weeks they developed an Altair emulator that ran on a minicomputer, and then the BASIC interpreter. The demonstration, held at MITS's offices in Albuquerque, was a success and resulted in a deal with MITS to distribute the interpreter as Altair BASIC. Paul Allen was hired into MITS, and Gates took a leave of absence from Harvard to work with Allen at MITS in Albuquerque in November 1975. They named their partnership "Micro-Soft" and had their first office located in Albuquerque. Within a year, the hyphen was dropped, and on November 26, 1976, the trade name "Microsoft" was registered with the Office of the Secretary of the State of New Mexico. Gates never returned to Harvard to complete his studies.

Microsoft's BASIC was popular with computer hobbyists, but Gates discovered that a pre-market copy had leaked into the community and was being widely copied and distributed. In February 1976, Gates wrote an Open Letter to Hobbyists in the MITS newsletter saying that MITS could not continue to produce, distribute, and maintain high-quality software without payment. This letter was unpopular with many computer hobbyists, but Gates persisted in his belief that software developers should be able to demand payment. Microsoft became independent of MITS in late 1976, and it continued to develop programming language software for various systems. The company moved from Albuquerque to its new home in Bellevue, Washington on January 1, 1979.

During Microsoft's early years, all employees had broad responsibility for the company's business. Gates oversaw the business details, but continued to write code as well. In the first five years, Gates personally reviewed every line of code the company shipped, and often rewrote parts of it as he saw fit.

IBM partnership

In 1980, IBM approached Microsoft to write the BASIC interpreter for its upcoming personal computer, the IBM PC. When IBM's representatives mentioned that they needed an operating system, Gates referred them to Digital Research (DRI), makers of the widely used CP/M operating system. IBM's discussions with Digital Research went poorly, and they did not reach a licensing agreement. IBM representative Jack Sams mentioned the licensing difficulties during a subsequent meeting with Gates and told him to get an acceptable operating system. A few weeks later Gates proposed using 86-DOS (QDOS), an operating system similar to CP/M that Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products (SCP) had made for hardware similar to the PC. Microsoft made a deal with SCP to become the exclusive licensing agent, and later the full owner, of 86-DOS. After adapting the operating system for the PC, Microsoft delivered it to IBM as PC-DOS in exchange for a one-time fee of $50,000. Gates did not offer to transfer the copyright on the operating system, because he believed that other hardware vendors would clone IBM's system. They did, and the sales of MS-DOS made Microsoft a major player in the industry.

Gates oversaw Microsoft's company restructuring on June 25, 1981, which re-incorporated the company in Washington state and made Gates President of Microsoft and the Chairman of the Board.

Windows

Microsoft launched its first retail version of Microsoft Windows on November 20, 1985, and in August, the company struck a deal with IBM to develop a separate operating system called OS/2. Although the two companies successfully developed the first version of the new system, mounting creative differences undermined the partnership. Gates distributed an internal memo on May 16, 1991, announcing that the OS/2 partnership was over and Microsoft would shift its efforts to the Windows NT kernel development.

Management style

From Microsoft's founding in 1975 until 2006, Gates had primary responsibility for the company's product strategy. He aggressively broadened the company's range of products, and wherever Microsoft achieved a dominant position he vigorously defended it. He gained a reputation for being distant to others; as early as 1981 an industry executive complained in public that "Gates is notorious for not being reachable by phone and for not returning phone calls."

As an executive, Gates met regularly with Microsoft's senior managers and program managers. Firsthand accounts of these meetings describe him as verbally combative, berating managers for perceived holes in their business strategies or proposals that placed the company's long-term interests at risk. He often interrupted presentations with such comments as, "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard!" and, "Why don't you just give up your options and join the Peace Corps?" The target of his outburst then had to defend the proposal in detail until, hopefully, Gates was fully convinced. When subordinates appeared to be procrastinating, he was known to remark sarcastically, "I'll do it over the weekend."

Gates' role at Microsoft for most of its history was primarily a management and executive role. However, he was an active software developer in the early years, particularly on the company's programming language products. He has not officially been on a development team since working on the TRS-80 Model 100, but wrote code as late as 1989 that shipped in the company's products. On June 15, 2006, Gates announced that he would transition out of his day-to-day role over the next two years to dedicate more time to philanthropy. He divided his responsibilities between two successors, placing Ray Ozzie in charge of day-to-day management and Craig Mundie in charge of long-term product strategy.

Antitrust litigation

Many decisions that led to antitrust litigation over Microsoft's business practices have had Gates' approval. In the 1998 ''United States v. Microsoft'' case, Gates gave deposition testimony that several journalists characterized as evasive. He argued with examiner David Boies over the contextual meaning of words like "compete", "concerned" and "we". ''BusinessWeek'' reported:

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Gates later said he had simply resisted attempts by Boies to mischaracterize his words and actions. As to his demeanor during the deposition, he said, "Did I fence with Boies? ... I plead guilty. Whatever that penalty is should be levied against me: rudeness to Boies in the first degree." Despite Gates's denials, the judge ruled that Microsoft had committed monopolization and tying, and blocking competition, both in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.

Appearance in ads

Gates appeared in a series of ads to promote Microsoft in 2008. The first commercial, co-starring Jerry Seinfeld, is a 90-second talk between strangers as Seinfeld walks up on a discount shoe store (Shoe Circus) in a mall and notices Gates buying shoes inside. The salesman is trying to sell Mr. Gates shoes that are a size too big. As Gates is buying the shoes, he holds up his discount card, which uses a slightly altered version of his own mugshot of his arrest in New Mexico in 1977 for a traffic violation. As they are walking out of the mall, Seinfeld asks Gates if he has melded his mind to other developers, after getting a yes, he then asks if they are working on a way to make computers edible, again getting a yes. Some say that this is an homage to Seinfeld's own show about "nothing" (''Seinfeld''). In a second commercial in the series, Gates and Seinfeld are at the home of an average family trying to fit in with normal people.

Post-Microsoft

Since leaving Microsoft, Gates continues his philanthropy and, among other projects, purchased the video rights to the Messenger Lectures series called ''The Character of Physical Law'', given at Cornell University by Richard Feynman in 1964 and recorded by the BBC. The videos are available online to the public at Microsoft's Project Tuva.

In April 2010, Gates was invited to visit and speak at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he asked the students to take on the hard problems of the world in their futures.

Personal life

Gates married Melinda French on January 1, 1994. They have three children: daughter Jennifer Katharine Gates (born 1996), son Rory John Gates (born 1999), and daughter Phoebe Adele Gates (born 2002). The Gates's home is an earth-sheltered house in the side of a hill overlooking Lake Washington in Medina. According to King County public records, as of 2006 the total assessed value of the property (land and house) is $125 million, and the annual property tax is $991,000.

His estate has a swimming pool with an underwater music system, as well as a gym and a dining room.

Also among Gates' private acquisitions is the Codex Leicester, a collection of writings by Leonardo da Vinci, which Gates bought for $30.8 million at an auction in 1994. Gates is also known as an avid reader, and the ceiling of his large home library is engraved with a quotation from ''The Great Gatsby''. He also enjoys playing bridge, tennis, and golf.

Gates was number one on the Forbes 400 list from 1993 through to 2007 and number one on ''Forbes'' list of The World's Richest People from 1995 to 2007 and 2009. In 1999, Gates's wealth briefly surpassed $101 billion, causing the media to call him a "centibillionaire". Since 2000, the nominal value of his Microsoft holdings has declined due to a fall in Microsoft's stock price after the dot-com bubble burst and the multi-billion dollar donations he has made to his charitable foundations. In a May 2006 interview, Gates commented that he wished that he were not the richest man in the world because he disliked the attention it brought. Gates has several investments outside Microsoft, which in 2006 paid him a salary of $616,667 and $350,000 bonus totalling $966,667. He founded Corbis, a digital imaging company, in 1989. In 2004 he became a director of Berkshire Hathaway, the investment company headed by long-time friend Warren Buffett. In March 2010 Bill Gates was bumped down to the second wealthiest man behind Carlos Slim.

Philanthropy

Gates began to appreciate the expectations others had of him when public opinion mounted suggesting that he could give more of his wealth to charity. Gates studied the work of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, and in 1994 sold some of his Microsoft stock to create the William H. Gates Foundation. In 2000, Gates and his wife combined three family foundations into one to create the charitable Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is the largest transparently operated charitable foundation in the world. The foundation allows benefactors access to information regarding how its money is being spent, unlike other major charitable organizations such as the Wellcome Trust. The generosity and extensive philanthropy of David Rockefeller has been credited as a major influence. Gates and his father met with Rockefeller several times, and modeled their giving in part on the Rockefeller family's philanthropic focus, namely those global problems that are ignored by governments and other organizations. As of 2007, Bill and Melinda Gates were the second-most generous philanthropists in America, having given over $28 billion to charity.

The foundation was at the same time criticized because it invests assets that it has not yet distributed with the exclusive goal of maximizing return on investment. As a result, its investments include companies that have been charged with worsening poverty in the same developing countries where the Foundation is attempting to relieve poverty. These include companies that pollute heavily, and pharmaceutical companies that do not sell into the developing world. In response to press criticism, the foundation announced in 2007 a review of its investments, to assess social responsibility. It subsequently canceled the review and stood by its policy of investing for maximum return, while using voting rights to influence company practices.

Gates's wife urged people to learn a lesson from the philanthropic efforts of the Salwen family, which had sold its home and given away half of its value, as detailed in ''The Power of Half''. Gates and his wife invited Joan Salwen to Seattle to speak about what the family had done, and on December 9, 2010, Gates, investor Warren Buffett, and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook's CEO) signed a promise they called the "Gates-Buffet Giving Pledge", in which they promised to donate to charity at least half of their wealth over the course of time.

Recognition

In 1987, Gates was officially declared a billionaire in the pages of Forbes' 400 Richest People in America issue, just days before his 32nd birthday. As the world's youngest self-made billionaire, he was worth $1.25 billion, over $900 million more than he'd been worth the year before, when he'd debuted on the list.

''Time'' magazine named Gates one of the 100 people who most influenced the 20th century, as well as one of the 100 most influential people of 2004, 2005, and 2006. ''Time'' also collectively named Gates, his wife Melinda and U2's lead singer Bono as the 2005 Persons of the Year for their humanitarian efforts. In 2006, he was voted eighth in the list of "Heroes of our time". Gates was listed in the ''Sunday Times'' power list in 1999, named CEO of the year by ''Chief Executive Officers magazine'' in 1994, ranked number one in the "Top 50 Cyber Elite" by ''Time'' in 1998, ranked number two in the ''Upside'' Elite 100 in 1999 and was included in ''The Guardian'' as one of the "Top 100 influential people in media" in 2001.

In 1994, he was honoured as the twentieth Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society. Gates has received honorary doctorates from Nyenrode Business Universiteit, Breukelen, The Netherlands, in 2000; the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, in 2002; Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan, in 2005; Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in April 2007; Harvard University in June 2007; the Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, in January 2008, and Cambridge University in June 2009. He was also made an honorary trustee of Peking University in 2007. Gates was also made an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) by Queen Elizabeth II in 2005, in addition to having entomologists name the Bill Gates flower fly, ''Eristalis gatesi'', in his honor.

In November 2006, he and his wife were awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle for their philanthropic work around the world in the areas of health and education, particularly in Mexico, and specifically in the program "''Un país de lectores"''. In October 2009, it was announced that Gates will be awarded the 2010 Bower Award for Business Leadership of The Franklin Institute for his achievements in business and for his philanthropic work. In 2010 he was honored with the Silver Buffalo Award by the Boy Scouts of America, its highest award for adults, for his service to youth.

Investments

Cascade Investments LLC, a private investment and holding company, incorporated in United States, is controlled by Bill Gates, and is headquartered in the city of Kirkland, Washington.

bgC3, a new think-tank company founded by Bill Gates.

Corbis, a digital image licensing and rights services company.

TerraPower, a nuclear reactor design company.

Bibliography

Gates has authored two books:

''The Road Ahead'' (1995)

''Business @ the Speed of Thought'' (1999)

Filmography

Gates has appeared in at least one film: ''Waiting For Superman''

See also

List of billionaires (also see List of college dropout billionaires and List of wealthiest non-inflated historical figures)

Paul Allen – Microsoft's co-founder, friend, and fellow billionaire

Books

References

Further reading

"The Meaning of Bill Gates: As his reign at Microsoft comes to an end, so does the era he dominated", ''The Economist'', June 28, 2008.

External links

The Gates Notes ''official site''

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Profile at Microsoft

Profile at Forbes

How I Work: Bill Gates, ''Fortune'', March 30, 2006

Category:1955 births Category:American billionaires Category:American computer businesspeople Category:American chief executives Category:American computer programmers Category:American philanthropists Category:American technology writers Category:Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation people Category:Businesspeople in software Category:Harvard University people Category:Honorary Knights Commander of the Order of the British Empire Category:Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering Category:Microsoft employees Category:History of Microsoft Category:National Medal of Technology recipients Category:Living people Category:People from Seattle, Washington Category:People from King County, Washington Category:Windows people Category:Fellows of the British Computer Society Category:American people of Scottish descent

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Name	E. O. Wilson
Birth date	June 10, 1929
Birth place	Birmingham, Alabama, United States
Nationality	American
Fields	Biologist
Workplaces	Harvard University
Alma mater	University of AlabamaHarvard University
Doctoral students	Daniel Simberloff Donald J. Farish
Notable students	Steven Pinker
Known for	Coining the terms 'sociobiology', Epic of Evolution
Awards	Pulitzer Prize (1979)Crafoord Prize (1990)Pulitzer Prize (1991) Kistler Prize (2000) Nierenberg Prize (2001)
Signature
Footnotes	}}

Edward Osborne Wilson (born June 10, 1929) is an American biologist, researcher (sociobiology, biodiversity), theorist (consilience, biophilia), naturalist (conservationist) and author. His biological specialty is myrmecology, the study of ants.

Wilson is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. He is known for his scientific career, his role as "the father of sociobiology", his environmental advocacy, and his secular-humanist and deist ideas pertaining to religious and ethical matters.

As of 2007, he is Pellegrino University Research Professor 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.

Early life

Wilson was born in Birmingham, Alabama. According to his autobiography ''Naturalist'', he grew up mostly around Washington, D.C. and in the countryside around Mobile, Alabama. From an early age, he was interested in natural history. His parents, Edward and Inez Wilson, divorced when he was seven. In that same year, he blinded himself in one eye in a fishing accident. The young naturalist grew up in several cities and towns, moving around with his father and his stepmother. His reduced ability to observe mammals and birds led him to concentrate on insects. At nine, Wilson undertook his first expeditions at the Rock Creek Park in Washington, DC. He earned the Eagle Scout award and served as Nature Director of his Boy Scout summer camp. At the age of 18, intent on becoming an entomologist, he began by collecting flies, but the shortage of insect pins caused by World War II caused him to switch to ants, which could be stored in vials. With the encouragement of Marion R. Smith, a myrmecologist from the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, Wilson began a survey of all the ants of Alabama. This study led him to report the first colony of fire ants in the US, near the port of Mobile. (first-hand account, Smithsonian Institution talk, April 22, 2010).

Concerned that he might not be able to afford to go to a university, Wilson attempted to enlist in the United States Army. His plan was to earn U.S. government financial support for his education, but he failed his Army medical examination due to his impaired eyesight. Wilson was able to afford to enroll in the University of Alabama after all. There, he earned his B.S. and M.S. degrees. He later earned his Ph.D. degree from Harvard University.

Theories and beliefs

Epic of evolution

"The evolutionary epic," Wilson wrote in his book on human nature, "is probably the best myth we will ever have." Wilson's intended usage of the word "myth" does not denote falsehood - rather, a grand narrative that provides people with placement in time—a meaningful placement that celebrates extraordinary moments of shared heritage. Wilson was not the first to use the term, but his fame prompted its usage as the morphed phrase epic of evolution.

Wilson explained the need for the epic of evolution:

The worth of the epic, he said is, "The true evolutionary epic retold as poetry, is as intrinsically ennobling as any religious epic."

Cosmologist Brian Swimme concludes in a 1997 interview:

Naturalistic and liberal religious writers have picked up on Wilson's term and have used it in a number of texts. These authors however have at times used other terms to refer to the idea: ''Universal Story'' (Brian Swimme, John F. Haught), ''Great Story'' (Connie Barlow, Michael Dowd), ''Everybody's Story'' (Loyal Rue), ''New Story'' (Thomas Berry, Al Gore, Brian Swimme) and ''Cosmic Evolution'' (Eric Chaisson).

Sociobiology

Michael McGoodwin paraphrasing and quoting Wilson (pp. 16 and 222) on sociobiology

Although much human diversity in behavior is culturally influenced, some has been shown to be genetic - rapid acquisition of language, human unpredictability, hypertrophy (extreme growth of pre-existing social structures), altruism and religions. "Religious practices that consistently enhance survival and procreation of the practitioners will propagate the physiological controls that favor the acquisition of the practices during single lifetimes." Unthinking submission to the communal will promotes the fitness of the members of the tribe. Even submission to secular religions and cults involve willing subordination of the individual to the group. Religious practices confer biological advantages.

Wilson used sociobiology and evolutionary principles to explain the behavior of the social insects and then to understand the social behavior of other animals, including humans, thus established sociobiology as a new scientific field. He argued that all animal behavior, including that of humans, is the product of heredity, environmental stimuli, and past experiences, and that free will is an illusion. He has referred to the biological basis of behaviour as the "genetic leash." The sociobiological view is that all animal social behavior is governed by epigenetic rules worked out by the laws of evolution. This theory and research proved to be seminal, controversial, and influential.

The controversy of sociobiological research is in how it applies to humans. The theory established a scientific argument for rejecting the common doctrine of tabula rasa, which holds that human beings are born without any innate mental content and that culture functions to increase human knowledge and aid in survival and success. In the final chapter of the book ''Sociobiology'' and in the full text of his Pulitzer Prize-winning ''On Human Nature'', Wilson argues that the human mind is shaped as much by genetic inheritance as it is by culture (if not more). There are limits on just how much influence social and environmental factors can have in altering human behavior.

Ants and social insects

Wilson, along with Bert Hölldobler, has done a systematic study of ants and ant behavior, culminating in their encyclopedic work, ''The Ants'' (1990). Because much self-sacrificing behavior on the part of individual ants can be explained on the basis of their genetic interests in the survival of the sisters, with whom they share 75% of their genes (though the actual case is some species' queens mate with multiple males and therefore some workers in a colony would only be 25% related), Wilson was led to argue for a sociobiological explanation for all social behavior on the model of the behavior of the social insects. In his more recent work, he has sought to defend his views against the criticism of younger scientists such as Deborah Gordon, whose results challenge the idea that ant behavior is as rigidly-predictable as Wilson's explanations make it.

Edward O. Wilson, referring to ants, once said that "Karl Marx was right, socialism works, it is just that he had the wrong species", meaning that while ants and other eusocial species appear to live in communist-like societies, they only do so because they are forced to do so from their basic biology, as they lack reproductive independence: worker ants, being sterile, need their ant-queen to survive as a colony and a species and individual ants cannot reproduce without a queen, thus being forced to live in centralised societies. Humans, however, do possess reproductive independence so they can give birth to offspring without the need of a "queen", and in fact humans enjoy their maximum level of Darwinian fitness only when they look after themselves and their families, while finding innovative ways to use the societies they live in for their own benefit.

Consilience

In his 1998 book ''Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge'', Wilson discusses methods that have been used to unite the sciences, and might be able to unite the sciences with the humanities. Wilson prefers and uses the term "''consilience''" to describe the synthesis of knowledge from different specialized fields of human endeavor. He defines human nature as a collection of epigenetic rules, the genetic patterns of mental development. He argues that culture and rituals are products, not parts, of human nature. He says art is not part of human nature, but our appreciation of art is. He argues that concepts such as art appreciation, fear of snakes, or the incest taboo (Westermarck effect) can be studied using scientific methods. Previously, these phenomena were only part of psychological, sociological, or anthropological studies. Wilson proposes that they can be part of interdisciplinary research.

The unit and target of selection

Wilson has argued that the ''"unit'' of selection is a gene, the basic element of heredity. The ''target'' of selection is normally the individual who carries an ensemble of genes of certain kinds." With regards to the use kin selection in explaining the behavior of eusocial insects, Wilson said to ''Discover'' magazine, the "new view that I'm proposing is that it was group selection all along, an idea first roughly formulated by Darwin."

Spiritual and political beliefs

Views on religion

As paraphrased by Michael McGoodwin

Scientific humanism

Wilson coined the phrase ''scientific humanism'' as "the only worldview compatible with science's growing knowledge of the real world and the laws of nature". Wilson argues that it is best suited to improve the human condition.

God and religion

On the question of God, Wilson has described his position as ''provisional deism''. He has explained his faith as a trajectory away from traditional beliefs: "I drifted away from the church, not definitively agnostic or atheistic, just Baptist & Christian no more." Wilson argues that the belief in God and rituals of religion are products of evolution. He argues that they should not be rejected or dismissed, but further investigated by science to better understand their significance to human nature. In his book ''The Creation'', Wilson suggests that scientists "offer the hand of friendship" to religious leaders and build an alliance with them, stating that "Science and religion are two of the most potent forces on Earth and they should come together to save the creation."

Wilson makes a similar suggestion, and appeal to the religious community, on the lecture circuit. An article on his September 17, 2009 lecture at Midland College, Texas, reports, "he said the appeal received a 'massive reply' and a covenant has been written. 'I think that partnership will work to a substantial degree as time goes on,' Wilson said."

Wilson appears in the upcoming documentary ''Behold The Earth'', which inquires into America's "divorce from nature", and the relationship between the forces of science and religion.

Ecology

When discussing the reinvigoration of his original fields of study since the 1960s, Wilson has said that if he could start his life over he would work in microbial ecology. He studied the mass extinctions of the 20th century and their relationship to modern society, arguing strongly for an ecological approach:

His understanding of the scale of the extinction crisis has led him to advocate a number of strategies for forest protection, including the Forests Now Declaration, which calls for new markets-based mechanisms to protect tropical forests.

Criticism of human sociobiology

Wilson experienced significant criticism for his sociobiological views from several different communities. The scientific response included several of Wilson's colleagues at Harvard, such as Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, who were strongly opposed to his ideas regarding sociobiology. Marshall Sahlins's work ''The Use and Abuse of Biology'' was a direct criticism of Wilson's theories.

Politically, Wilson's sociobiological ideas have offended some liberals and conservatives who favored the idea that human behavior was culturally based. Sociobiology re-ignited the nature-versus-nurture debate, and Wilson's scientific perspective on human nature led to public debate. He was accused of racism, misogyny, and eugenics. In one incident, a member of the International Committee Against Racism poured a pitcher of water on Wilson's head and chanted "Wilson, you're all wet" at an AAAS conference in November 1978. Wilson later spoke of the incident as a source of pride: "I believe...I was the only scientist in modern times to be physically attacked for an idea."

Religious objections included those of Paul E. Rothrock, who said: "... sociobiology has the potential of becoming a religion of scientific materialism."

The history of the Sociobiology controversy is detailed in Stephen Pinker's The Blank Slate.

Awards and honors

Wilson's scientific and conservation honors include:

Member, National Academy of Sciences, 1969

U.S. National Medal of Science, 1976

Pulitzer Prize for ''On Human Nature'', 1979

Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, 1984

ECI Prize, International Ecology Institute, terrestrial ecology, 1987

Academy of Achievement Golden Plate Award, 1988

Crafoord Prize, 1990, a prize awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in certain sciences not covered by the Nobel Prize, and therefore considered the highest award given in the field of ecology

Pulitzer Prize for ''The Ants'' (with Bert Hölldobler), 1991

International Prize for Biology, 1993

Carl Sagan Award for Public Understanding of Science, 1994

''Time Magazine'''s 25 Most Influential People in America, 1995

American Humanist Association's 1999 Humanist of the Year

Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science, 2000

Nierenberg Prize, 2001

Distinguished Eagle Scout Award 2004

Dauphin Island Sea Lab christened its newest research vessel the ''R/V E.O. Wilson'' in 2005.

Addison Emery Verrill Medal from the Peabody Museum of Natural History, 2007

TED Prize 2007 given yearly to ''honor a maximum of three individuals who have shown that they can, in some way, positively impact life on this planet.''

XIX Premi Internacional Catalunya 2007

Member of the World Knowledge Dialogue Honorary Board, and Scientist in Residence for the 2008 symposium organized in Crans-Montana (Switzerland).

Distinguished Lecturer, University of Iowa, 2008–2009

E.O. Wilson Biophilia Center on Nokuse Plantation in Walton County, Florida 2009 Video

Explorers Club Medal, 2009

BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Ecology and Conservation Biology Category, 2010

Thomas Jefferson Medal in Architecture, 2010

2010 Heartland Prize for fiction for his first novel ''Anthill''

Main works

''The Theory of Island Biogeography'', 1967, Princeton University Press (2001 reprint), ISBN 0-691-08836-5, with Robert H. MacArthur

''The Insect Societies'', 1971, Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-45490-1

'' Sociobiology: The New Synthesis'' 1975, Harvard University Press, (Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition, 2000 ISBN 0-674-00089-7)

''On Human Nature'', 1979, Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-01638-6

'' Genes, Mind and Culture: The coevolutionary process'', 1981, Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-34475-8

'' Promethean fire: reflections on the origin of mind'', 1983, Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-71445-8

, 1984, Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-07441-6

Success and Dominance in Ecosystems: The Case of the Social Insects, 1990, Inter-Research, ISSN 0932-2205

''The Ants'', 1990, Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-04075-9, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, with Bert Hölldobler

''The Diversity of Life'', 1992, Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-21298-3, ''The Diversity of Life: Special Edition, ISBN 0-674-21299-1

''The Biophilia Hypothesis'', 1993, Shearwater Books, ISBN 1-55963-148-1, with Stephen R. Kellert

''Journey to the Ants: A Story of Scientific Exploration'', 1994, Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-48525-4, with Bert Hölldobler

''Naturalist'', 1994, Shearwater Books, ISBN 1-55963-288-7

''In Search of Nature'', 1996, Shearwater Books, ISBN 1-55963-215-1, with Laura Simonds Southworth

''Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge'', 1998, Knopf, ISBN 0-679-45077-7

''The Future of Life'', 2002, Knopf, ISBN 0-679-45078-5

''Pheidole in the New World: A Dominant, Hyperdiverse Ant Genus'', 2003, Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-00293-8

''From So Simple a Beginning: Darwin's Four Great Books''. 2005, W. W. Norton.

''The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth'', September 2006, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. ISBN 978-0-393-06217-5

''Nature Revealed: Selected Writings 1949-2006'', Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. ISBN 0-8018-8329-6

''The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies'', 2009, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. ISBN 978-0-393-06704-0, with Bert Hölldobler

''Anthill: A Novel'', April 2010, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. ISBN 978-0-393-07119-1

''The Leafcutter Ants: Civilization by Instinct'', 2011, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. ISBN 978-0-393-33868-3, with Bert Hölldobler

Edited works

''From So Simple a Beginning: Darwin's Four Great Books'', edited with introductions by Edward O. Wilson (2010 W.W. Norton)

See also

Sociobiology

Biodiversity

Biophilia Hypothesis

Westermarck effect

Green economics

Evolutionary psychology

Human behavioral ecology

Dual inheritance theory

Richard Machalek

Barry Lopez

Bert Hölldobler

Myrmecology

Superorganism

Biomass

Encyclopedia of Life

The 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll

Footnotes

External links

Bio

"E.O. Wilson Profile" - Comprehensive list of Degrees, Awards and Positions

E. O. Wilson's CV

E. O. Wilson biography

Videos

"On the Relation of Science and Humanities" - lecture at Harvard@Home

"From So Simple a Beginning: The Four Great Books of Charles Darwin" - lecture at BookTV

Appearance on MeaningOfLife.tv - interview by Robert Wright

Ubben Lecture at DePauw University

E. O. Wilson ''Charlie Rose'' complete interviews

E.O. Wilson: TED Prize wish: Help build the Encyclopedia of Life TED, March 2007, on the Encyclopedia of Life

Appearance on NOVA's Little Creatures Who Run the World, 1997

Subject of NOVA's Lord of the Ants, 2008 /

Wilson on music, from the documentary Behold The Earth

Interviews

Living in Shimmering Disequilibrium - interview by Fred Branfman (Salon)

Karl Marx was right, it is just that he had the wrong species - interview by Frans Roes

E.O. Wilson - interview by Paul D. Thacker (BioMedNet)

"The Creation: A Meeting of Science and Religion • The Future of Life" City Arts & Lectures 2006-10-10

Esquire, August 5, 2008

Articles

Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died - essay by Tom Wolfe (Forbes, 1996)

Darwin's natural heir: Profile - essay by Ed Douglas (The Guardian, 2001)

The Ant King's Latest Mission: Profile - essay by Robin McKie (GuardianUnlimited, 2006)

Essays

Science and Ideology (1995)

Kin Selection as the Key to Altruism: Its Rise and Fall (2005)

Letter to a Southern Baptist Minister (Excerpt from ''The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth''). (2006)

Trailhead (The New Yorker, 2010)

Books

Success and Dominance in Ecosystems: The Case of the Social Insects (1987), available as free download.

Category:1929 births Category:Living people Category:American ecologists Category:Biogeographers Category:American entomologists Category:American zoologists Category:American naturalists Category:American novelists Category:Human evolution theorists Category:Myrmecologists Category:Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction winners Category:Evolutionary biologists Category:Race and intelligence controversy Category:National Medal of Science laureates Category:Harvard Centennial Medal recipients Category:Harvard University alumni Category:Harvard University faculty Category:Ethologists Category:Deists Category:American humanists Category:American science writers Category:American non-fiction environmental writers Category:American conservationists Category:Sustainability advocates Category:Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Category:Foreign Members of the Royal Society Category:University of Alabama alumni Category:People from Birmingham, Alabama Category:Distinguished Eagle Scouts Category:Writers from Alabama Category:American skeptics

zh-min-nan:Edward Osborne Wilson ca:Edward Osborne Wilson cs:Edward Osborne Wilson da:Edward Osborne Wilson de:Edward Osborne Wilson et:Edward Osborne Wilson es:Edward Osborne Wilson eo:Edward Osborne Wilson fa:ادوارد ویلسون fr:Edward Osborne Wilson gl:Edgar Wilson hr:E. O. Wilson it:Edward Osborne Wilson lv:Edvards Osborns Vilsons nl:Edward Osborne Wilson ja:エドワード・オズボーン・ウィルソン nn:Edward O. Wilson pl:Edward Osborne Wilson pt:Edward O. Wilson ru:Уилсон, Эдвард Осборн sk:Edward Osborne Wilson sl:Edward Osborne Wilson fi:Edward O. Wilson sv:Edward O. Wilson uk:Едвард Осборн Вілсон zh:艾德華·威爾森

Stefan Collini (born 1947) is an English literary critic and academic, Professor of English Literature and Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge. He has contributed essays to such publications as ''The Times Literary Supplement'', ''The Nation'' and ''London Review of Books''.

Works (incomplete)

"Modernism and the little magazines." ''The Times Literary Supplement''. 7 October 2009. (accessed October 8, 2009).

"'No Bullshit' Bullshit." ''London Review of Books''. 23 January 2003. (accessed October 29, 2009).

''That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History'' (1983) with John Burrow and Donald Winch

''English Pasts: Essays in history and culture'' (1999)

''Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850–1930'' (1991)

''Matthew Arnold: A Critical Portrait'' (1994)

''Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain'' (2006)

''The Two Cultures'', by C.P. Snow, introduction by Stefan Collini (1993)

''Common Reading: Critics, Historians, Publics'' (2009)

External links

Stefan Collini, University of Cambridge

Contributor page at the ''London Review of Books''

Contributor page at ''The Nation''

''Journalisted'' page

Category:1947 births Category:English literary critics Category:Living people

name	Colson Whitehead
birth date	1969
occupation	Author
website	http://www.colsonwhitehead.com/ }}

Colson Whitehead is a New York-based novelist. He is best known as the author of the 2001 novel ''John Henry Days''. In 2002, he received a MacArthur Fellowship.

Background and education

Whitehead was born in New York City in 1969, and grew up in Manhattan. He attended the prestigious preparatory school Trinity in Manhattan. Whitehead graduated from Harvard College in 1991.

Career

Early years

For two years after leaving college, Whitehead wrote for ''The Village Voice''. While working at the ''Voice'', he began drafting his first novels.

Novels

Whitehead has since produced five widely acclaimed book-length works—four novels and a meditation on life in Manhattan in the style of E.B. White's famous essay ''Here Is New York''. The books are 1999's ''The Intuitionist'', 2001's ''John Henry Days'', 2003's ''The Colossus of New York'', 2006's ''Apex Hides the Hurt'', and 2009's ''Sag Harbor''. ''Esquire'' Magazine named ''The Intuitionist'' the best first novel of the year, and GQ called it one of the "novels of the millennium." Novelist John Updike, reviewing ''The Intuitionist'' in ''The New Yorker'', called Whitehead "ambitious," "scintillating," and "strikingly original," adding, "The young African-American writer to watch may well be a thirty-one-year-old Harvard graduate with the vivid name of Colson Whitehead."

Whitehead's ''The Intuitionist'' was nominated as the Common Novel at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), a prestigious recognition of Whitehead's literary talents. The Common Novel nomination was part of a long-time tradition at the Institute that included authors like Maya Angelou, Andre Dubus III, William Joseph Kennedy, and Anthony Swofford. Whitehead's visit to Rochester included meeting author/editor, Rebecca Housel, a former professor at RIT.

Journalism

Whitehead's non-fiction, essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including ''The New York Times'', ''Salon'' and ''The Village Voice''.

Honors

Whitehead is a 2002 recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. He received the New York Public Library's 2002 Young Lions Fiction Award as well as a Cullman Fellowship.

Bibliography

''The Intuitionist'' (1999)

''John Henry Days'' (2001)

''The Colossus of New York'' (2003)

''Apex Hides the Hurt'' (2006)

''Sag Harbor'' (2009)

''ZONE ONE: A novel'' (2011)

References

External links

Personal site

On Point - What's in a Name? (interview, 2006-09-04)

Category:1969 births Category:Living people Category:Harvard University alumni Category:MacArthur Fellows Category:American novelists Category:African American novelists Category:African American writers Category:Postmodern writers Category:Trinity School (New York City) alumni

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