Robert H. MacArthur & Edward O. Wilson
Edward Osborne Wilson was born on June 10th 1929 and is an American biologist, researcher, theorist (consilience, biophilia), and naturalist (conservationism). His biological specialty is myrmecology, a branch of entomology. Wilson is known for his career as a scientist, his advocacy for environmentalism, and his secular-humanist 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.
Robert H. MacArthur was born on April 7th 1930 and died on November 1st 1972. He was an American ecologist who made a major impact on many areas of community and population ecology. MacArthur received his Bachelor's degree from Marlboro College, a Master's degree in mathematics from Brown University (1953). A student of G. Evelyn Hutchinson, MacArthur earned his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1958; his thesis was on the division of ecological niches among five warbler species in the conifer forests of New York. He was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, 1958-65, and professor of biology at Princeton University, 1965-72. He played an important role in the development of niche partitioning, and with E.O. Wilson he co-authored The Theory of Island Biogeography, a work which changed the field of biogeography, drove community ecology and led to the development of modern landscape ecology. His emphasis on hypothesis testing helped change ecology from a primarily descriptive field into an experimental field, and drove the development of theoretical ecology.