In Love With Living Things : NATURALIST, <i> By Edward O. Wilson (Island Press: $24.95; 352 pp.)</i> : JOURNEY TO THE ANTS: A Story of Scientific Exploration, <i> By Bert Holldobler and Edward O. Wilson (Harvard University Press: $24.95; 224 pp.)</i>

“If you’re a storyteller,” the filmmaker Howard Hawks is quoted in “Naturalist,” “find a good story and tell it.”

For more than 40 years, Edward O. Wilson, one of the preeminent evolutionary biologists of our time, has been finding and telling good stories in unlikely places, from fire ants in Alabama, to bulldog ants in Western Australia, to army ants in Costa Rica. (“Most children have a bug period,” he says, “and I never grew out of mine.”) His discoveries have excited other biologists and intrigued a widening circle of readers (most of whom outgrew their bug periods a long time ago). In four decades at Harvard University, he has won the National Medal of Science and two Pulitzer prizes (for “On Human Nature” in 1979, and “The Ants” in 1990). Now, in a wonderful new memoir, “Naturalist,” he tells the story of his own evolution.

“My childhood was blessed,” Wilson writes in the book’s prelude; but not everyone would say so. Wilson was born in Birmingham, Ala., in 1929. His parents divorced when he was 7, and he grew up in a series of homes and Southern boardinghouses, dependent on the kindness of strangers and the whims of his father, an alcoholic government accountant. By the time he graduated from high school, he had attended more than a dozen different public schools and one military academy. Then is father killed himself.

As a boy, he was shy, small, “always the runt of my class.” In town after town he headed for the woods and swamps. There he collected ants, rattlesnakes, butterflies, Spanish moss. “Animals and plants I could count on; human relationships were more difficult.”

“Strong father, weak son,” Wilson writes; “weak father, strong son; either way, pain drives the son up or down in life.” Pain drove Ed Wilson upward. Early on, he discovered an amazing capacity for hard labor. By the age of 13, he had become “a child workaholic,” delivering 420 newspapers every dawn in Mobile. At the same time he began climbing toward Eagle Scout, and expanding the long woods-and-swamps adventures that would make him one of the great explorer-naturalists.

The year of his parents’ divorce, he blinded his right eye in a fishing accident. His left eye happened to be unusually sharp at close range, and that helped push him toward entomology, toward “animals that can be picked up between thumb and forefinger and brought close for inspection.” At 16, he resolved to choose a group of insects on which he could become a world authority. He considered flies: “I liked their clean looks, acrobatics, and insouciant manner.” But to collect flies he needed long black pins that were made only in Czechoslovakia, and that country was not manufacturing any insect pins in 1945. Then Wilson thought of ants. “Of course, ants: my old acquaintances, the source of some of my earliest passions.”

Very few scientists have written so candidly and evocatively about their early lives, and shown us how the career grew out of the childhood. And very few have the skill to make their work as clear and interesting as Wilson does here. In the second half of the book, he leads the reader on adventures in rain forests, deserts, mountains and South Pacific islands--wherever ants are to be found, which is almost everywhere. He gives us telling descriptions of many well-known figures in modern biology, including Richard Lewontin, Stephen Jay Gould and James Watson, the cocky young co-discover of the double helix, who joined Harvard in 1956, the same year as Wilson, and became Wilson’s nemesis.

Watson felt that the future of the life sciences lay at the level of molecules. The study of living animals and plants was history. Ecology was bunk. Thanks partly to Watson’s agitations, the Harvard biology department, like biology departments almost everywhere, soon stopped looking for people like Wilson and began looking for people like Watson. This made life for a world authority on ants very uncomfortable, as Wilson describes in one of his memoir’s liveliest chapters, “The Molecular Wars.” He found Watson “the most unpleasant human being I had ever met.”

Again, pain drove Wilson upward. He amassed an encyclopedic knowledge of the world’s ants, finding and naming new species everywhere. He also made himself a master at finding and naming new theories. He explains these clearly and gracefully in “Naturalist,” and in another new book, “Journey to the Ants,” written with longtime collaborator Bert Holldobler.

There are about ten thousand trillion ants on the planet at this moment. The secret of their world-wide success, as Wilson and Holldobler explain, is their highly social existence: “It would appear that socialism really works under some circumstances. Karl Marx just had the wrong species.” “Journey to the Ants” is a pocket version of the authors’ masterpiece, “The Ants,” and it does its job well. It is short, instantly accessible, and every chapter is packed with stories to make a reader gape. Some of these insects seem to be storytellers themselves; weaver ants “come very close to employing syntax in their chemical language--the use of various combinations of chemical ‘words’ to transmit different ‘phrases.’ ” Together weaver ants manage to do what a single ant could never do: roll up big leaves to make their nests. “Journey to the Ants” describes this feat in fascinating detail, and concludes: “The formula is one of simple repetition: work begets success begets added work begets still more success.” That’s Wilson! That’s also science.

In the early 1960s, “fueled by the amphetamine of ambition,” Wilson began looking for rules that explain why working together pays: why social behavior evolved and how it got locked into the genes of so many species. In 1971, in his monumental book “Insect Societies,” he made the case for the bugs. In 1975, in his even more monumental “Sociobiology: The New Synthesis” he made the case for all social creatures--including us.

“Sociobiology” infuriated many readers. The opposition was led by Lewontin and Gould--again, right in Wilson’s own department. Wilson tells the story of the controversy with the same grace and poise with which he tells the more painful stories of his childhood. “I have been blessed with brilliant enemies,” he writes. Some of them saw sociobiology as a throwback to racism and eugenics, which it is not. Others saw it as an attempt to subsume the humanities and social sciences into branches of biology. It is not really that, either, but Wilson did sometimes write in as threatening a style as Watson, so that at least a few of his new enemies were earned. There were placards, bullhorns, protests in Harvard Square and an ambush with a bucket of ice-water.

Once again pain drove him upward, to champion a cause that everyone of the warring factions could believe in--conservation. No one has worked more passionately and effectively to conserve what has lately come to be called biodiversity. Wilson estimates that we are now losing half a percent of the species in the world’s rain forests each year. “This,” as he has written in a much-quoted essay, “is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.”

“When the century began,” Wilson writes, “people could still easily think of themselves as transcendent beings, dark angels confined to Earth awaiting redemption by either soul or intellect.” Now we see ourselves as part of nature. Again, when this century began, we still saw ourselves as conquerors of nature; now we see ourselves as trying to preserve nature, and ourselves within it. In both these changes in human thought, Wilson has played an important role, and that is what makes the story of his life an important story.

“Naturalist” is a pleasure to read and reread, which is the mark of literature. It is one of the finest scientific memoirs ever written, by one of the finest scientists writing today. And “Journey to the Ants” should turn many readers into fans of its authors’ favorite chunk of biodiversity, a group of living things that are at once weird and familiar. Among the new words that Wilson has coined in his long career is “biophilia”: love of living things. Both these books should foster biophilia.