Edward Wilson. Portrait of Edward Osborne Wilson (born 1929), American biologist. Wilson studied island populations in the 1960s. He found that the number of species which colonised an island after it was fumigated was the same as before the sterilization. He also studied social insects and introduced the term 'character displacement' to describe the process where the characteristics of similar species begin to diverge when brought into competition with each other. In 1975 he published Sociobiology in which he showed that social animal behaviour was governed by genetic factors. He also controversially claimed that the same factors controlled human behaviour and emotions.