Sociobiology

In terms of the concerns of this chapter, the most interesting thing about this move back towards biology is the reaction it provoked. This is perhaps best illustrated by what happened after the publication in 1975 of Edward O. Wilson’s groundbreaking book, ‘Sociobiology: the New Synthesis,’ the major part of this work, reflecting Wilson’s expertise in areas such as population biology and ecology, was devoted to explicating the new-Darwinian under-pinning of animal social behaviour. However, in its last chapter, Wiulson turned his attention to Homo sapiens, and suggested that human social behaviour was analysable in similar terms.

The suggestion provoked a furious reaction: In Wilson’s words, ‘the most tumultous controversy of the 1970s. a group of Boston scientists, researchers and students -- included Richard Lewonstin and Stephen Jay Gould, both colleagues of Wilson at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology -- formed the Sociobiology Study Group, noting in the ‘New York Review’ of Books that theories which attempted to establish a biological foundation of social behaviour were ‘an important basis . . . for eugenic policies which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany’; the American Anthropological Association, in a move which Time magazine linkened the Catholic Church’s denunciation of Galileo, debated a motion to censure sociobiology on the grounds that it was ‘an attempt to justify genetically the sexist, racist and elitist status quo in human society’; and protesters from the international Committee against Racism dumped a pitcher of ice water over Wilson himself at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in early 1978

Wilson’s opponents were motivated by explicitly moral and political commitments. The Sociobiology Study Group was affiliated to an organization called Science for the People, which was founded in the 1960s to challenge the kinds of science it considered politically dangerous. Lewontin and Gould, both of whom supported the organization’s wider aims, considered themselves to be working in the tradition of Marxist theory…… ~ Page 94/95