Without a trace of irony I can say I have been blessed with brilliant enemies. I owe them a great debt, because they redoubled my energies and drove me in new directions.

Wilson frames intellectual opposition as a formative gift rather than a grievance. By stressing “without a trace of irony,” he signals sincerity: adversaries—especially capable ones—can sharpen arguments, expose weak assumptions, and force methodological or conceptual innovation. The “debt” he claims suggests that scientific progress is often dialectical, propelled by critique and rivalry as much as by collaboration. In Wilson’s career, marked by high-profile controversies (notably around sociobiology and later debates in evolutionary theory), the remark also reads as a personal credo: resilience and curiosity can convert conflict into creative momentum, redirecting a thinker toward new problems and more robust syntheses.