[Steven Pinker] describes him as a researcher from the endangered field of "birdsy-woodsy" biology. Indeed, Edward O. Wilson has gone through experiences that most other scientists have not gone through, perhaps giving him a position to synthesize knowledge. He grew up in the deeply religious Southeast and read the Bible two times. He merely matriculated at the [University of Alabama], upon where the professor intrduced him to a book by [Ernst Mayr], which sparked his interest in evolution and led his path to religious doubt (although he continues to respect religion). And this is what he does in his landmark book, named "Sociobiology - the new Synthesis". Throughout his life, he becomes an advocate of synthesis. This idea is carried on later on in his book [Consilience]. One might find it interesting that ants were his original field of research => and that with such a categorical research field, there had to be a synthesizer somewhere.
Interestingly enough, everything2.com is centered on one of E.O Wilson's ideas, directly or not. In his book [Consilience], E.O Wilson identifies the need for a unit of culture for the reduction of the social sciences to the hard sciences. He calls this unit of culture the "node", and distinguishes the word from the Dawkinian neologism [meme]. The "node" is the smallest unit of culture, upon which higher orders of connections between nodes exist.
He happens to be one of the founders of one of the competing sects of neo-Darwinism. One of the sects consisted of the neo-Marxists [Stephen Jay Gould] and [Richard Lewontin], the other of him, [Richard Dawkins], and [Daniel Dennett]. While he is careful to distance himself from [genetic determinism], he became a victim of highly charged attacks from neo-Marxist liberals.