It was the commonality of human nature and not cultural differences on which I focused in Sociobiology. At this level what I said could by no stretch be considered original; many others had advanced a similar thesis for decades. Darwin, who seems to have anticipated almost every other important idea in evolutionary biology, cautiously advanced theories of genetic change in aggression and intelligence. But no scientist before me had employed the reasoning of population biology so consistently to account for the evolution of human behavior by natural selection. The human genome is there in the first place, I argued, because it enhanced survival and reproduction during human evolution. The brain, sensory organs, and endocrine systems are prescribed in a way that predisposes individuals to acquire the favored general traits of social behavior.
In order to use models of population genetics as a more effective mode of elementary analysis, I conjectured that there might be single, still unidentified genes affecting aggression, altruism, and other behaviors. I was well aware that such traits are usually controlled by multiple genes, often scattered across many chromosomes, and that environment plays a major role in creating variation among individuals and societies. Yet whatever the exact nature of the genetic controls, I contended, the important point is that heredity interacts with environment to create a gravitational pull toward a fixed mean. It gathers people in all societies into the narrow statistical circle that we define as human nature.
Mine was an exceptionally strong hereditarian position for the 1970s. It helped to revive the long-standing nature-nurture debate at a time when nurture had seemingly won. The social sciences were being built upon that victory. But I hoped that even if sociobiology was dismissed by some of the more established scholars, evolutionary biology, including models of population genetics, would prove attractive to a younger generation of researchers in the social sciences, who might then connect their field to the natural sciences.
That expectation was desperately naive. The sociocultural view favored by most social theorists, that human nature is built wholly from experience, was not just another hypothesis up for testing. In the 1970s it was a deeply rooted philosophy. American scholars in particular were attracted to the idea that human behavior is determined by environment and therefore almost infinitely flexible.
If in fact genes did surrender their control sometime back during human evolution, and if the brain simply resembles an all-purpose computer, biology can play no contributory role in the social sciences. The appropriate domain of sociology would then be variation within cultures, interpreted as the product of environment. And cultural anthropology should concentrate on the internal detailed study of alien societies accepted on their own terms, with minimal reference to extraneous Westernized schemes, including those from biology. There were also important political implications. If human nature is mostly acquired, and no significant part of it is inherited, then it is easier to conclude, as relativists do with passion, that different cultures must be accorded moral equivalency. Differences among them in ethical precepts and ideology deserve respect, for what is thought good and true has been determined more by power than by intrinsic validity. The cultures of oppressed peoples are to be specially valued, because the histories of cultural conflict were written by the victors.
The hypothesis that human nature has a genetic foundation called all these assumptions into question. Many critics saw this challenge from the natural sciences as not just intellectually flawed but morally wrong. If human nature is rooted in heredity, they suggested, then some forms of social behavior are probably intractable or at least can be declared intractable by ruling elites. Tribalism and gender differences might then be judged unavoidable, and class differences and war in some manner “natural.” And that would be just the beginning. Because people unquestionably vary in hereditary physical traits, they might also differ irreversibly in personal ability and emotional attributes. Some people could have inborn mathematical genius, others a bent toward criminal behavior.
In the 1970s a great many ordinary people believed these hereditarian propositions to be more or less true. But anyone who advanced such ideas in colleges and universities risked the scalding charges of racism and sexism. In contrast, those who attacked the hereditarian position were praised as defenders of truth and virtue. The psychobiologist Jerre Levy parodied the politically correct formula as follows: “Even without supporting evidence, the sociocultural hypothesis is assumed to be true unless proved false beyond any possible doubt. In contrast, the biological hypothesis is assumed to be false unless evidence is completely unassailable in its support.”*
Understandably, then, American scholars, in a society grown hypersensitive to its internal divisions, shrank from the word “sociobiology.” When American researchers formed a professional association on human sociobiology in 1989, they named it the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, and they used the word “sociobiology” only sparingly thereafter at their annual meetings.
The Europeans were less chary. One circle of researchers formed the European Sociobiological Society, headquartered in Amsterdam. Another established the Sociobiology Group at King’s College, Cambridge University. A third began the Laboratory of Ethology and Sociobiology at the University of Paris-Nord. The word “sociobiology” and the ideas behind it were freely used in China, the Soviet Union, and other socialist countries, with articles written both for and against it in a scattering of journals.
What made Sociobiology notorious then was its hybrid nature. Had the two parts of the book been published separately, the biological core would have been well received by specialists in animal behavior and ecology, while the writings on human behavior might easily have been dismissed or ignored. Placed between the same two covers, however, the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. The human chapters were rendered creditable by the massive animal documentation, while the biology gained added significance from the human implications. The conjunction created a syllogism that proved unpalatable to many: Sociobiology is part of biology; biology is reliable; therefore, human sociobiology is reliable.
Some of the critics, assuming that I must have a political motive, suggested that the main purpose of the animal chapters was to lend credence to the human chapter. The exact opposite was true. I had no interest in ideology. My purpose was to celebrate diversity and to demonstrate the intellectual power of evolutionary biology. Being an inveterate encyclopedist, I felt an additional obligation to include the human species. As I proceeded, I recognized an opportunity: the animal chapters would gain intellectual weight from their relevance to human behavior. At some point I turned the relationship around: I came to believe that evolutionary biology should serve as the foundation of the social sciences.
Hence my conception of human sociobiology did not spring from any grand Comtean scheme of the relation between the natural and social sciences. I simply expanded the range of the subjects that interested me, starting with ants and proceeding to social insects, then to animals and finally to man. Believing the time ripe for the melding of biology and the social sciences, I used strong, provocative language to start the process. The last chapter of Sociobiology was meant to be a catalyst dropped among reagents already present and ready to combine.
Then everything spun out of control. In my calculations I had not counted on the ferocity of the response at my own university. During the McCarthy era, Harvard had been a celebrated—if imperfect—sanctuary for academics accused of being members of the Communist Party. It was supposed to be a forum in which people could exchange ideas with civility, protected from defamation by political ideologues. Yet the fact that it was well populated by leftist ideologues put that genteel goal at risk. Shortly after the publication of Sociobiology, fifteen scientists, teachers, and students in the Boston area came together to form the Sociobiology Study Group. Soon afterward the new committee affiliated itself with Science for the People, a nationwide organization of radical activists begun in the 1960s to expose the misdeeds of scientists
and technologists, including politically dangerous thinking. The Sociobiology Study Group was dominated by Marxist and New Left scholars from Harvard. Two of the most prominent, Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, were my close colleagues and fellow residents of the Museum of Comparative Zoology. Three others, Jonathan Beckwith, Ruth Hubbard, and Richard Levins, held faculty posts in other parts of the university.
Although the unofficial headquarters of the Sociobiology Study Group was Lewontin’s office, located directly below my own, I was completely unaware of its deliberations. After meeting for three months, the group arrived at its foreordained verdict. In a letter published in the New York Review of Books on November 13, 1975, the members declared that human sociobiology was not only unsupported by evidence but also politically dangerous. All hypotheses attempting to establish a biological basis of social behavior “tend to provide a genetic justification of the status quo and of existing privileges for certain groups according to class, race, or sex. Historically, powerful countries or ruling groups within them have drawn support for the maintenance or extension of their power from these products of the scientific community … [Such] theories provided an important basis for the enactment of sterilization laws and restrictive immigration laws by the United States between 1910 and 1930 and also for the eugenics policies which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany.”
I learned of the letter when it reached the newsstands on November 3. An editor at Harvard University Press called me to say that word about it was spreading fast and might prove a sensation. For a group of scientists to declare so publicly that a colleague has made a technical error is serious enough. To link him with racist eugenics and Nazi policies was, in the overheated academic atmosphere of the 1970s, far worse. But the self-proclaimed position of the Sociobiology Study Group was ethical, and therefore implicitly beyond challenge. And the purpose of the letter was not so much to correct alleged technical errors as to destroy credibility.
In the liberal dovecotes of Harvard University, a reactionary professor is like an atheist in a monastery. As the weeks passed and winter snows began to fall, I received little support from the Harvard faculty. Several friends spoke up in interviews and public radio forums to oppose Science for the People. They included Ernst Mayr, Bernard Davis, Ralph Mitchell, and my close friend and collaborator Bert Hölldobler. But mostly what I got was silence, even when the internal Harvard dispute became national news. I know now after many private conversations that the majority of my fellow natural scientists on the Harvard faculty were sympathetic to my biological approach to human behavior but confused by the motives and political aims of the Science for the People study group. They may also have thought that where there is smoke, there is fire. So they stuck to their work and kept a safe distance.
I had been blindsided by the attack. Having expected some frontal fire from social scientists on primarily evidential grounds, I had received instead a political enfilade from the flank. A few observers were surprised that I was surprised. John Maynard Smith, a senior British evolutionary biologist and former Marxist, said that he disliked the last chapter of Sociobiology himself and “it was also absolutely obvious to me—I cannot believe Wilson didn’t know—that this was going to provoke great hostility from American Marxists, and Marxists everywhere.”* But it was true. I was unprepared perhaps because (as Maynard Smith further observed) I am an American rather than a European. In 1975 I was a political naïf: I knew almost nothing about Marxism as either a political belief or a mode of analysis, I had paid little attention to the dynamism of the activist left, and I had never heard of Science for the People. I was not even an intellectual in the European or New York—Cambridge sense.
Because of my respect for the members of the Sociobiology Study Group I knew personally, I was at first struck by self-doubt. Had I taken a fatal intellectual misstep by crossing the line into human behavior? The indignant response of the Sociobiology Study Group stood in shocking contrast to the near silence of the other biologists in my department, who failed to offer even casual encouragement during corridor talk. My morale was not helped by the fact that Dick Lewontin, the most outspoken of the critics, was also chairman of the department. I faced the risk, I thought, of becoming a pariah—viewed as a poor scientist and a social blunderer to boot.
Then I rethought my own evidence and logic. What I had said was defensible as science. The attack on it was political, not evidential. The Sociobiology Study Group had no interest in the subject beyond discrediting it. They appeared to understand very little of its real substance.
As my mind settled on the details, anger replaced anxiety. I penned an indignant rebuttal to the New York Review of Books. In a few more weeks anger in turn subsided and my old confidence returned, then a fresh surge of ambition. There was an enemy in the field. An important enemy. And a new subject—which, for me, meant opportunity.
I set out to learn the elements of Marxism. I was encouraged in my amateur’s effort by Daniel Bell, the distinguished sociologist, and Eugene Genovese, a leading Marxist philosopher. Neither of them cared very much for sociobiology, but they disliked even more the aggressive tactics of Science for the People. I expanded my reading into the social sciences and humanities. I acquired a taste for the history and philosophy of science. Two years after the Sociobiology
Study Group published their letter, I wrote On Human Nature, which won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction (granted, a literary award and not scientific validation). The following year I began an all-out attempt to build a stronger theory to explain the interaction between genetic and cultural evolution.
The sociobiology controversy, I came to realize, ran deeper than ordinary scholarly discourse. The signatories of the Science for the People letter had come to the subject with a different agenda from my own. They viewed science not as separate objective knowledge but as part of culture, a social process compounded with political history and class struggle.
The spirit of their exertions was most clearly embodied, I believe, in the person of Richard C. Lewontin. He was later overshadowed by the scientific and literary celebrity of Stephen Jay Gould, but in 1975 the two men were equally well known and of mostly common political opinion. Gould shared Lewontin’s Marxist approach to evolutionary biology, and he afterward maintained a drumfire of criticism in his monthly Natural History column and essays published elsewhere. But it was Lewontin who explored more deeply and thoroughly than anyone else every level of the implications of human sociobiology. He was the principal author of the letter in the New York Review of Books. Afterward he gave the greatest number of lectures opposing sociobiology, drawing on his extensive knowledge of genetics and the philosophy of science. He devoted the greatest amount of time to rallying opposition among potential converts, and his vigilance never slipped. If there is a truly fatal flaw in the sociobiology argument, he will have explicated it somewhere.
Without Lewontin the controversy would not have been so intense or attracted such widespread attention. He was the kind of adversary most to be cherished, in retrospect, after time has drained away emotion to leave the hard inner matrix of intellect. Brilliant, passionate, and complex, he was stage-cast for the role of contrarian. He possessed a deep ambivalence that kept both friend and foe off balance: intimate in outward manner, private inside; aggressive and demanding constant attention, but keenly sensitive, anxious to humble and to please listeners at the same time; intimidating yet easily set back on his heels by a strong response, revealing a fleeting angry confusion that made one—almost—wish to console him. Robert MacArthur told me, when we three were young men, that Lewontin was the only person who could make him sweat.
Unafflicted by shyness, at committee meetings he almost always seated himself near the head or center of the conference table, speaking up more frequently than others present, questioning and annotating every subject raised. He was the boy prodigy you surely encountered at least once in school, the first to raise his hand, the firs
t reaching the blackboard to crack the algebra problem. His youthful demeanor was preserved into middle age by a round face, easy grin, and knowing stare, a shock of unruly dark hair, and a tieless shirt, always blue, said by amused friends to advertise his solidarity with the working class. Journalists referred to his countenance as owlish, but that was true only in freezeframe. Lewontin was too nervous and active in real life for the strigid image to fit.
He would pivot from one role to another, first the thoughtful and cautious dean, now the lecturer expanding a philosophical idea, then the hearty joking companion, and abruptly, on occasion, the angry radical. To accentuate a point, he would raise his hands above his head with fingers opened, and as his voice evened out and the argument unfolded, slide them back to the table top palms down, at first placed side by side and then eased apart, the mood having turned reflective, then quickly up again to chest level and windmilled one around the other, the subject grown more complex and the listener thereby commanded to pay close attention. He spoke in complete sentences and paragraphs. The stream of words was punctuated at intervals by a slowing delivery, sometimes almost a slurring, to reinforce a key phrase and, finally, the approach of the concluding argument. While he spoke he turned about to make eye contact with each listener within range, flashing the grin, signaling a confidence in his choice of words, revealing an attention to technique as well as to substance.
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