E. O. Wilson, 1929-2021

Hopi Hoekstra has announced that E. O. Wilson has died. Not on Wikipedia yet as of this writing, but she would know. The obituaries will come flowing in. Wilson was an important figure, a contentious figure.

Right now, I want to highlight Ulica Segerstrale’s Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond, which documents what happened when Wilson attempted to introduce a biological framework into understanding human society in the late 1970s. Basically, he was attacked, and his character was assassinated, and he was also physically assaulted by left-wing students at a conference. Most of the principals in this cultural-scientific debate are gone. W. D. Hamilton, long gone. John Maynard Smith and Stephen Jay Gould died in the 2000’s, while George Williams in 2010. Richard Lewontin died recently, while Leon Kamin died in 2017. A lot of the “bit players” are around, like Richard Dawkins, Noam Chomsky and Steve Rose. But Wilson was at the center of the action, and he was still alive and kicking. He gave an interview to Vox earlier this month. I suppose Bob Trivers is still around…but well, Bob Trivers is going to do his own thing and he’s barely in academia anymore.

Wilson wrote many books after his brush with infamy in the 1970s, and he rehabilitated himself as a big environment guy, so he was somewhat in the good graces of the liberal intelligentsia after the sociobiology wars faded. But ultimately he never really changed his deep views on the importance of biology in human nature. I know from people who asked him at Harvard and knew him personally and felt comfortable probing deeper. If you want the real deal, Wilson and Charles Lumsden co-authored Genes, Mind, and Culture – The Coevolutionary Process. It’s a radical book, more ambitious than even what L. L. Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus Feldman, and later what Pete Richerson and Robert Boyd, attempted. It was probably too ambitious (have you ever heard of a “culturegen“?), but Wilson was an audacious guy willing to push the envelope and offend people.

This is important because I am starting to worry the next generation of scientists won’t do that. Wilson was politically naive and became savvier. But I fear that modern scientists are too politically savvy, as I read some population geneticists explaining they don’t study polygenic selection because of its political implications. That’s fine, but pretty soon it’s clear that people will shy away from human population genetics in general (some are). Science subordinate to politics is a thing that’s been around for a long time, but it’s not something to celebrate. In the last few years, I’m getting lots of inquiries of the form “you seem very interested in human population genetic history…are you into skulls too? Why are you interested in humans so much?” It’s basically anti-intellectual, but espoused by intellectuals. You know the type.

Here’s a piece from the Harvard Crimson in 1977 from a Wilson critic:

The Sociobiology Study Group has also pointed out Wilson’s explicit sexism. Wilson traces male dominance in modern human societies to the alleged universal division of labor between male and female humans in hunter-gatherer societies. He treats males as the active agents of evolutionary progress and females as “only DNA’s way of making more DNA.” Consequently, Wilson argues:

My own guess is that the genetic bias is intense enough to cause a substantial division of labor even in the most free and egalitarian of future societies. Thus, even with identical education and equal access to all professions, men are likely to play a disproportionate role in political life, business and science. (New York Times, 10/12/75)

CAR agrees with the Sociobiology Study Group that “Wilson joins the long parade of biological determinists whose work has served to buttress the institutions of their society by exonerating them from responsibility for social problems.” CAR has further declared, however, that Sociobiology is dangerously racist. Although Wilson has nothing explicitly to say about race in his book, consider for a moment what a sociobiological analysis would be like…

Granting that Wilson was pretty sloppy and to my mind honestly outran the evidence for his speculations, the reaction was pretty hysterical. But it’s familiar. Wilson spent 40 years on his reputation. I can’t imagine someone being as bold as he was in the near future.