Naturalist (Edward O. Wilson)

CATEGORY: BOOK REVIEWS

written by Michael S. Scheeringa
Read time: 3.9 minutes
 
Why would suggesting that human behavior is shaped by nature, not nurture, be so threatening? The liberal hegemony in academia which finds this threatening is the result of a long period of gaining control of academia in what has often been called “the long march through the institutions.” This book includes a look back at the early period of the march.
 
Book Summary
Society accords resources to and value for scientists, and  in return scientists produce truths about the natural world for the rest of us. Naturalist (1994) is an autobiography of a scientist who stuck to that deal, no matter where the data took him. Beginning with his boyhood in Alabama and following his rise to become one of our great biologists, it is an appealing “inside story” of a science profession in America.
For the purposes of Trauma Dispatch, I deal with only a small episode in Wilson’s story when he broke a taboo and then his neo-Marxist colleagues tried to destroy him. Everything about this historical episode is relevant to the modern troubles with trauma science.
 
In 1975, Wilson published Sociobiology in which he used evolutionary principles to explain the behavior of social insects and other animals. Wilson argued that all animal behavior is the product of heredity governed by laws of evolution through natural selection. This theory was groundbreaking, influential, and established sociobiology as a new scientific field.
Only the twenty-seventh and final chapter was about humans, in which Wilson suggested that the mechanisms he described for insects and animals likewise applied to humans. This would provide a biological basis for our tendency to inherit much of our human nature—traits such as bonding between parents and children, heightened altruism toward close kin, incest avoidance, tribalism, and territorial aggression.
Fifteen individuals in the Boston area formed the Sociobiology Study Group, which was dominated by Marxists scholars from Harvard. Two of the most prominent were Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, close colleagues of Wilson who worked in his department. They met in secret in Lewontin’s office, one floor below Wilson’s office. After three months of “study,” they sent a letter to the New York Review of Books, trying to impugn Wilson. By claiming a hereditary nature for human behavior, Wilson had crossed a red line. They claimed sociobiology was unsupported by evidence and politically dangerous because it seemed to vindicate ruling despots, restrictive immigration, and eugenics of Nazi Germany. The letter made no attempt to correct Wilson’s facts. It was an ethical diatribe, meant to destroy his credibility.
A wave of opposition soon rose among social scientists who published commentaries trying to exempt human behavior from biology. In November 1976, the American Anthropological Association voted on a motion (and failed) to censure sociobiology and ban two symposia from the meeting. On February 15, 1978, Wilson attended the American Association for the Advancement of Science to speak. When his turn to present came, he remained in his chair because of a cast on his right ankle. About eight men and women sprang from their seats and lined up behind the speakers. Several held up anti-sociobiology placards, one included a swastika. As one protester spoke into the hijacked microphone, a woman dumped a pitcher of water over Wilson’s head, and they chanted, “Wilson, you’re all wet.” 

​Who Wrote This?
Edward Osborne Wilson (1929–2021) made enormous contributions to biology and ecology through research and over thirty books, and was a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. At age seven, while fishing, the spine of a fish pierced his right eye. This developed into a cataract which left him partially blinded. Due to his reduced sight, Wilson resolved to study ants. This misfortune was turned into fortune as it forced Wilson to study one of the few species of animals with the highest level of social organization behavior.

Analysis
Lewontin—the main agitator against Wilson—believed in a “Marxist approach to evolutionary biology.” Lewontin yearned for a socialist world, and claimed only antireductionist, nonbourgeois science would attain it. This was not atypical in the academia culture of the 1970s. A reductionism view of evolutionary biology in which behaviors were heritable instincts was not simply a disliked hypothesis, it was a threat to his belief system.
Wilson sees in retrospect that he was desperately naive to be surprised by the attack. At the time, he knew little about Marxism, and paid little attention to the active Left. In the 1970s, most social theorists believed that human nature was built wholly from experience, i.e., nurture. These social theorists favored nurture because it allowed different cultures to have “moral equivalency,” not judged unsatisfactory by Western schemes. The cultures of oppressed peoples were uniquely valued as victims which needed championing.
Wilson learned the hard way that the sociobiology controversy ran deeper than ordinary scholarly discourse. His enemies “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.”

Due to the continuing liberal hegemony in academia and media, the story of the attempt to cancel Wilson is exactly the story of much trauma research.

Posttraumatic stress disorder is one of the few psychiatric disorders which require a certain type of life experience in the diagnostic criteria. This makes trauma research a perfect incubator for every Leftist theory of how oppression causes nearly all societal problems. This is what gave us the fantastical theory that the “body keeps the score.”

This also made possible the fake complex PTSD disorder which redefines personality disorders as trauma reactions, and the scientifically-bankrupt Adverse Childhood Experiences movement which claims everyday stressors cause some of the most lethal physical diseases.
This is likely a permanent state of these sciences. The trauma field is full of people like Richard Lewontin who view science professions as platforms to defend a worldview. Even the more  sober researchers and clinicians who do not believe in complex PTSD and ACEs still seem to think the ideological context is a trivial matter better not mentioned. They complain, for example, that when I insert motivations of ideology into science debates, it diminishes my scientific argument. I contend they might heed the story of Wilson and Sociobiology because while sober scientists are generally uninterested in ideology, they are outnumbered by neo-Marxists who certainly are.  As I wrote in The Body Does Not Keep the Score, “I suggest that refusing to place the debunking of science claims within the context of ideologies would be like bringing a knife to a gun fight. We are all in an ideology war now, whether you know it or not. You either get out in front of it or get steamrolled.”