Lest darkness fall: E. O. Wilson in 2009 with Alice Dreger

In 2015 Alice Dreger published Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and One Scholar’s Search for Justice, and writing now in almost-2022 I feel there’s a Cassandra-like character to what she was saying. Academic culture is far more radical, political, and a lot of people with courage or openness to heterodoxy are just exiting, leaving the field to the most authoritarian personalities. It’s really strange to me that she published right before “the Great Awokening.” She has timing, that’s for sure.

It’s hard to remember, but when a journalist wrote a libelous book about Napoleon Chagnon in 2000, most scientists criticized the author and the work. I don’t think that would be the case today, as the presumption of guilt would be on Chagnon and James Neel. I read about this controversy in Salon, a very left-wing magazine, and the piece was broadly sympathetic to Chagnon and Neel. 2000 was different. It gets worst, sometimes.

Today Dreger published her conversation with E. O. Wilson from 2009 in Quillette. It’s an interesting read because Wilson clearly had no idea that in 2009 he was speaking during the last gasp of an intellectual interglacial. The beginning of the piece makes his naivete clear:

Alice Dreger: I know you’ve spoken about it many times before, but I would like to begin by asking you about the session at the 1978 AAAS [American Association for the Advancement of Science] conference during which you were rushed on the stage and a protester emptied a pitcher of water onto your head. By all accounts, the talk you then gave was very measured. How on Earth were you able to remain so calm after being physically assaulted?

Edward O. Wilson: I think I may have been the only scientist in modern times to be physically attacked for an idea. The idea of a biological human nature was abhorrent to the demonstrators and was, in fact, too radical at the time for a lot of people—probably most social scientists and certainly many on the far-Left. They just accepted as dogma the blank-slate view of the human mind—that everything we do and think is due to contingency, rather than based upon instinct like bodily functions and the urge to keep reproducing. These people believe that everything we do is the result of historical accidents, the events of history, the development of personality through experience.

That was firmly believed in 1978 by a wide part of the population, but particularly by the political Left. And it was thought at the time that raising the specter of a biological basis for human behavior was not only wrong, but a justification for war, sexism, and racism. Biological gender differences could justify sexism, and any imputation that we evolved a human nature, or that human qualities might differ from one race to another, was dangerously racist.

…I knew things were going to work out—there was so much evidence accumulated already for a somewhat programmed human brain. By then, it was already coming from many directions, including genetics and neuroscience. There was no doubt about where things would go. There may be hold-outs but the inevitable conclusion from neuroscience and anthropology and genetics is for this way of thinking. [American anthropologist] Nap[oleon] Chagnon was present and he was certainly a leader in thinking about human nature and how valuable it is, and what its motivations are, by studying groups like the Yanomamö.

I knew history was on my side. I was young enough that I thought I would live through a good part of it. I was annoyed! But I wasn’t under stress in an extreme way. Before going home, I went to the next session, at which an anthropologist made the mistake of stating that I believe every cultural difference has a genetic basis, so that I am a racist. Of course, I rebutted that, but that was the kind of thing being exchanged at that meeting.

I wish I’d gotten a chance to talk to Wilson. I was actually assaulted at the 2013 ASHG on account of my ideology (the grad student made his reasoning plain during an earlier hour of drunken harassment), and something similar almost happened the next year in 2014 (but I had taken precautions after 2013 so people wouldn’t hassle me). So I had that in common with him. I’m sure there are plenty of others out there.

History is clearly on his side in the long term. But in the long-term we’re all dead. History is not Whiggish in the short term. The openness of 2009 was gone by 2019, and definitely by 2021.

Read the whole thing. There’s a lot of juicy stuff about how Dick Lewontin and S. J.Gould operated. Gould’s sliminess wasn’t really political, as much as it was personal. He wanted to be the glamorous celebrity scientist, which he did become. The particular point that Lewontin sent activists to harass other professors at Harvard in the 1970’s is interesting because there are a thousand Lewontins operating in academia now. The future belongs to him, and not the likes of Wilson. I’m heartened to see so many people praising Wilson online this week. But to be honest most of those people would avert their eyes, just like Wilson’s colleagues did in the 1970’s, if the Dick Lewontins of the day came after the Wilsons of 2021 (who are frankly all mostly closeted anyway).

It is pretty well known that Wilson was instrumental in getting Lewontin hired at Harvard. But the interview in Quillette is painful to read when he outlines how it all played out, and Wilson’s innocence is pretty clear:

I’ll tell you a story about all of this. Around 1970, we were searching for someone in population genetics. He looked very good then. And he had this brilliant personality in conversation, this brilliant presentation, a real theatrical power. The search committee decided he was the best person, but this was after he had just adopted his political and public persona and he was known to be joining protests. I remember watching a news report one day about the takeover of a stage at the University of Chicago, where some government functionary had come to speak at the height of the anti-war protests. And to my astonishment, I saw Dick Lewontin rush up and take the microphone!

We had a meeting to take the final vote on Lewontin at Harvard, and a group of the older professors said they were worried about reports of his behavior at Chicago—that he might be disruptive or might have gotten away from genetics, and so would not be the right sort of person to be at Harvard. I made the speech I will regret for the rest of my life: I said we should never accept or reject someone because of their political views. I felt so good about myself making that political speech! “I know several key people at Chicago on the faculty,” I said. “Let me ask them about the key question: Is Lewontin’s new political activism affecting his performance at the University of Chicago, or affecting anything connected with his duties?” And they said, okay, ask and let us know.

So, I called several people who I knew personally. We were all young guys then and they all said, “No, it’s not causing any problems here. He’s doing fine.” That turned out not to be the case. I reported that, and Lewontin came, and then our troubles with him began. I could tell you stories about him and the department that would make for a hilarious evening. But I won’t, except to say that the whole anti-sociobiology thing broke out about three years after he arrived. It was Gould and Lewontin and Ruth Hubbard, mostly oriented by Lewontin, looking to attack sociobiology and to discredit me.

I held up. In response to those attacks, I wrote On Human Nature, which came out in ‘78, and it won a Pulitzer Prize, which helped strengthen my position considerably. I was increasingly confident in my own reputation and my security at Harvard. I wrote [entomologist] John Law, who was then a close friend who had done work with me on pheromones. I said, “John, we’ve had Dick Lewontin here three years”—so this would have been about ‘76—“so now it’s your turn to take him back for three years.” John sent back a message on a scrap of paper written by the President of the University of Chicago, who was also named Wilson coincidentally. The note said: “From one Wilson to another, no way!” Apparently, they had already been having real problems with him.

There are plenty of Lewontin characters today. The main difference now is a lot of people, including some people who are friends, say “that’s good actually.” Unlike Wilson’s day there’s no need to worry about political considerations, everyone knows that only certain types of political ideologies are acceptable. It’s open now in a way that one doesn’t even need to say it. What is agreed by all needs to be spoken of by no one.

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.