His self-confidence and style were potent in the academy of the 1960s and 1970s. It was the era when students clamorously asserted their independence and at the same time searched desperately for leaders. Lewontin’s lectures at Harvard and abroad were enthusiastically received. His antiestablishment barbs, delivered with the panache of a stand-up comedian, were marvelously witty, even when you happened to be the target; they drew dependable laughter. Here was a scientist, the students knew, and a thinker, drawing from a deep revolutionary wellspring. He impressed journalists, too, who commonly referred to him as “the brilliant population geneticist.” Lewontin was an intellectual who preached social change from the temple of hard science.
His scientific credentials were beyond challenge. His genetic research was of the highest caliber. In the mid-1960s, while at the University of Chicago, he collaborated with J. L. Hubby to make the first estimates of gene diversity within populations by means of the electrophoretic separation of closely similar proteins. Their technique soon became standard and inaugurated a new era of quantitative studies in evolutionary biology. He was also one of the first to use computers to study the role of chance in microevolution. Striking out from the same base of expertise, he explored the border area between genetics and ecology by linking the evolution of demography to changes in the rate of population growth.
Very early, at the age of thirty-nine, Richard Lewontin was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors in American science. Then the contrarian side of his nature emerged. In 1971, amid verbal fireworks, he resigned in protest over the Academy’s sponsorship of classified research projects for the Department of Defense. He was one of only twelve members out of the thousands elected during the 130-year history of the organization to quit it for any reason. He had placed himself in distinguished company; the others included Benjamin Peirce, William James, and Richard Feynman.
In the early spring of 1972 a Harvard committee, of which I was a member, recommended to the Department of Biology that Richard Lewontin be offered a full professorship. He was at that time considered the best population geneticist of his generation in the world. Under ordinary circumstances the appointment would have received quick approval and been passed on to the dean and president; but circumstances were no longer normal. Dick by that time was more than just a leading scientist. He had also become a political activist targeting other scientists. At the 1970 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science he had been one of a small group who disrupted a session on a politically sensitive topic.
Several of the senior professors, alarmed by what they saw as a trend in his personality, were prepared to vote against Lewontin’s candidacy. Wouldn’t he be disruptive in his own department, they asked, if brought to Harvard? At the critical meeting of the tenured professors Ernst Mayr and I defended him. We argued (rather stuffily it seems in retrospect) that political beliefs should not influence faculty appointments. Some of the members remained unpersuaded: beliefs are one thing, they said, but what about personal attacks and disruption? I badly wanted Lewontin to come to Harvard. I said, let me call a friend in his department at the University of Chicago and ask if Dick has attacked his own colleagues there on ideological grounds. The proposal was accepted, and the decision postponed. In the interim George Kistiakowsky, one of Harvard’s most respected senior professors and wise adviser to the university administration, got wind of the proceedings and telephoned me from the Department of Chemistry. He said in effect, you’re going to be sorry if Lewontin comes. I was committed; I made my own call and was assured that Lewontin had not created problems at the University of Chicago. At the next meeting we voted unanimously to recommend him for a professorship. President Derek Bok approved his appointment on November 8, 1972, and the following year he came to Harvard.
Once he was installed, and increasingly after the sociobiology controversy began, I realized that we were opposites in our views of the proper conduct of science. Lewontin was the philosopher-scientist, tightly self-constrained, critical at every step, a stern guardian of standards who opposed—indeed, would have banned, if given the opportunity—plausibility arguments and speculation. I was the naturalist-scientist, in agreement on the need for strict logic and experimental testing but expansive in spirit and far less prone to be critical of hypotheses in the early stages of investigation. A collector and pragmatist by lifelong experience, I believed that every scrap of information and reasonable hypothesis should be put on record, then kept or discarded as knowledge grows. My notebooks were an indiscriminate hodgepodge. To be restrictive in the early stages, to make a moral issue of plausibility arguments, was in my view antithetical to the spirit of science. I wanted to move evolutionary biology into every potentially congenial subject, roughshod if need be, and as quickly as possible. Lewontin did not.
By adopting a narrow criterion of publishable research, Lewontin freed himself to pursue a political agenda unencumbered by science. He adopted the relativist view that accepted truth, unless based upon ineluctable fact, is no more than a reflection of dominant ideology and political power. After his turn to activism he worked to promote his own accepted truth: the Marxian view of holism, a mental universe within which social systems ebb and flow in response to the forces of economics and class struggle. He disputed the idea of reductionism in evolutionary biology, even though it was and is the virtually unchallenged linchpin of the natural sciences. And most particularly, he rejected it for human social behavior. “By reductionism,” he wrote in 1991, “we mean the belief that the world is broken up into tiny bits and pieces, each of which has its own properties and which combine together to make larger things. The individual makes society, for example, and society is nothing but the manifestation of the properties of individual human beings. Individual properties are the causes and the properties of the social whole are the effects of those causes.”*
This reductionism, as Lewontin expressed and rejected it, is precisely my view of how the world works. It forms the basis of human sociobiology as I construed it. But it is not science, Lewontin insisted. And according to his own political beliefs, expressed over many years, it could not possibly be true. “This individualistic view of the biological world is simply a reflection of the ideologies of the bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century that placed the individual at the center of everything.”† Lewontin sought instead laws that were transcendent, beyond the reach of natural science. “There is nothing in Marx, Lenin, or Mao,” he wrote in collaboration with Richard Levins, “that is or can be in contradiction with the particular physical facts and processes of a particular set of phenomena in the objective world.”‡ Only antireductionist, nonbourgeois science would help humanity attain the ultimate, highest goal, a socialist world.
That a distinguished scientist could advocate an approach to science guided by a radically sociocultural version of Marxism in the service of world socialism may seem odd today, and perhaps most of all in the former republics of the Soviet Union. But it helps to explain the distinctive flavor of the controversy at Harvard in the 1970s. In the standard leftward frameshift of academia prevailing then, Lewontin and members of Science for the People were classified as progressives, admittedly a bit extreme in their methods, while I—Roosevelt liberal turned pragmatic centrist—was cast well to the right.
After the Sociobiology Study Group exposed me as a counterrevolutionary adventurist, and as a result of it, other radical activists in the Boston area conducted a campaign of leaflets and teach-ins to oppose human sociobiology. As this activity intensified through the winter and spring of 1975–76, I grew fearful that it might reach a level embarrassing to my family and the university. I briefly considered offers of professorships from three universities—in case, their representatives said, I wished to leave the physical center of the controversy. But it all came to very little. For a few days a protester in Harvard Square used a bullhorn to call for my dismissal. Two students from the University of Mich
igan invaded my class on evolutionary biology one day to shout slogans and deliver antisociobiology monologues. When it became apparent that they had not read Sociobiology and were more interested in using it as a stick to beat the Harvard ruling class, they were heckled by my own students. I received almost no hate mail, and never a death threat.
The most dramatic episode was the water dousing in Washington in 1978. On February 15 I arrived at the Sheraton Park Hotel to speak at a symposium on sociobiology planned as part of the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The largest organization of scientists in the world, the AAAS was and remains especially concerned with the relation of science to education and public policy. A large crowd was expected at the symposium, which featured a half-dozen of the principal researchers on human sociobiology, as well as one of its most articulate critics, Stephen Jay Gould.
The moderator was to be Margaret Mead, and I looked forward to meeting her for the second time. A year before, at a conference on human behavior in Virginia, she had invited me to have dinner with her to discuss sociobiology. I was nervous then, expecting America’s mother figure to scold me about the dangers of genetic determinism. I had nothing to fear. She wanted to stress that she, too, had published ideas on the biological basis of social behavior. One was that each society contains an array of people genetically predisposed toward different tasks, say artist or soldier, and this differentiation creates a more efficient division of labor. Over roast beef and red wine (I was too mesmerized by her presence to taste either) she recommended several of her own writings that she thought I might want to read.
Sadly, I was not to see her again. Shortly before the AAAS meeting, she was stricken with the cancer that would soon take her life.
As the time approached for the symposium to begin, the atmosphere in and around the meeting hall grew tense. I was told that some kind of demonstration was planned by the International Committee Against Racism (INCAR), a group known for violent action. Its leaders, on learning that a session on human sociobiology was scheduled and that I would be present, had alerted members throughout the country. On hearing this news I walked by the INCAR booth to collect the literature they were distributing and to pick up a lapel button. As the crowd of several hundred began to settle in the nearby lecture hall, two INCAR members moved about distributing copies of a protest leaflet. I reached for one, but the young woman offering it recognized me and snatched it away.
Nothing happened as the substitute moderator, Alexander Alland, Jr., an anthropologist from Columbia University, opened the session and several other speakers presented their papers. When my turn came I chose to stay in my seat rather than stand at the lectern; my right leg was in a cast from an ankle fracture incurred while jogging over black ice two weeks previously. As soon as I was introduced, about eight men and women—I never managed an exact count—sprang from their seats in the audience, rushed onto the stage, and lined up behind the row of speakers. Several held up antisociobiology placards, on at least one of which was painted a swastika. A young man walked to the lectern to take the microphone away from Alland. AAAS officials had earlier issued instructions to session chairs to surrender their microphones if demonstrators demanded them, to avoid physical scuffling, and then to inform the protestors that if the microphones were not returned within two minutes, hotel security would be called. Alland announced that he was following the AAAS official procedure and turned over the microphone. Meanwhile, some of the members of the audience, fearing a riot, began to move out of their seats and away from the stage. They made little progress, however, because all the seats were filled and the aisles were crowded. Napoleon Chagnon, seated in a middle row, struggled to move the other way, determined to reach the stage and eject the protestors, but his way was also blocked. With several other audience members he shouted back at Alland and the protestors: the surrender of the microphone was wrong; no group should be allowed to take over a session by force. But this was the era of parity and equivalence, and every form of expression was considered free speech. The crowd began to settle down.
Then, as the INCAR leader harangued the audience, a young woman behind me picked up a pitcher of water and dumped the contents on my head. The demonstrators chanted, “Wilson, you’re all wet!” In a little over two minutes they left the stage and took their seats. No one asked them to leave the premises, no police were called, and no action was taken against them later. After the symposium, several stayed behind to chat with members of the audience.
As I dried myself off with my handkerchief and a paper towel someone handed me, Alland, in possession of the microphone again, expressed his regret to me for the incident. The audience then gave me a prolonged standing ovation. Of course they did, I thought. What else could they do? They might be next. Before I could proceed with my brief lecture, other members of the panel rose to condemn the INCAR action. Steve Gould seemed to be speaking to the demonstrators when he quoted Lenin on the inappropriateness of violence for mere radical posturing, as opposed to the attainment of worthy political goals. Gould referred to the AAAS incident, using Lenin’s words, as an “infantile disorder” of socialism. In that he was correct. It was the grown-up intellectuals I knew I had to worry about.
How did I feel during the incident? Calm—dare I say icy cold, as I let the protestors’ anger wash over me? That evening I joined Napoleon Chagnon for dinner and then debated Marvin Harris on human sociobiology at the Smithsonian Institution, with another large audience in attendance—no takeover by radicals this time. Afterward I taxied to Union Station to catch the Night Owl sleeper to Boston. There I ran into the physicist Freeman Dyson, who was on his way home to Princeton. Well, I said, I’ve had quite a day. I had water dumped on me by protestors at the AAAS sociobiology symposium. Well, he said, I’ve also had quite a day. I was just in a train wreck. The engine had derailed a few miles north of Washington and the passengers had been ferried back to the station to await a later northbound train.
By this time it was obvious to me that human sociobiology would remain in trouble, both intellectually and politically, until it incorporated culture into its analyses. Otherwise the critics could always cogently argue that since semantically based mind and culture are the defining traits of the human species, explanations of human social behavior without them are useless. This shortcoming was on my mind when Charles Lumsden, a young theoretical physicist from the University of Toronto, arrived in early 1979 to work with me as a postdoctoral research fellow. His interests had lately turned to biology, and he saw great opportunity in the analysis of social behavior. We talked at first about a collaboration on social insects, but soon our conversation gravitated to the subject of heredity and culture. I said, the possible payoff justifies the high risk of failure; let’s give it a try. So two or three times a week for eighteen months we sat together and framed the subject piece by piece.
We reasoned as follows. Everyone knows that human social behavior is transmitted by culture, but culture is a product of the brain. The brain in turn is a highly structured organ and a product of genetic evolution. It possesses a host of biases programmed through sensory reception and the propensity to learn certain things and not others. These biases guide culture to a still unknown degree. In the reverse direction, the genetic evolution of the most distinctive properties of the brain occurred in an environment dominated by culture. Changes in culture therefore must have affected those properties. So the problem can be more clearly cast in these terms: how have genetic evolution and cultural evolution interacted to create the development of the human mind?
No doubt we went out of our depth in embarking upon this subject. But so was everyone else, and no one can be sure of anything until the attempt is made. Undaunted then, we sifted through a small mountain of literature in cognitive psychology, ethnography, and brain science. We built models in population genetics that incorporated culture as units of learned information. We studied the properties of semantic thought to make our premises
as consistent as possible with current linguistic theory.
We were looking for the basic process that directed the evolution of the human mind. We concluded that it is a particular form of interaction between genes and culture. This “gene-culture coevolution,” as we called it, is an eternal circle of change in heredity and culture. Over the course of a lifetime, the mind of the individual person creates itself by picking among countless fragments of information, value judgments, and available courses of action within the context of a particular culture. More concretely, the individual comes to select certain marital customs, creation myths, ethical precepts, modes of analysis, and so forth, from among those available. We called these competing behaviors and mental abstractions “culturgens.” They are close to what our fellow reductionist Richard Dawkins conceived as “memes.”
Each time an individual modifies his memories or makes decisions, he entrains intricate sequences of physiological events that run first from the perception of visual images, sounds, and other stimuli, then to the storage and recall of information from long-term memory, and finally to the emotional assessment of perceived objects and ideas. Not all culturgens are treated equally; cognition has not evolved as a wholly neutral filter. The mind incorporates and uses some far more readily than others. Examples of heredity-bound culture that Lumsden and I found from the research literature include the peculiarities of color vision, phoneme formation, odor perception, preferred visual designs, and facial expressions used to denote emotions. All are diagnostic of the human species, all part of what must reasonably be called human nature.
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