In the New York Times, Carl Zimmer has a good obituary of the great biologist E. O. Wilson. Predictably, there’s also a new hit piece on him (courtesy of Scientific American) claiming Wilson was racist. Jerry Coyne does a fine job tearing it apart. Which wasn’t hard since it’s so bad. For example “the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against.” Yes. The writer is so bad at math she believes a Gaussian distribution has something to do with who is declared a normal (default?) human.
On Dec 30, Razib Khan hosted a clubhouse to discuss Wilson’s life and career. Which was good. But what I took away from it, and reactions to the SciAm article, was we should take more nuanced view of E. O. Wilson’s career than we have. So I’ll take a stab at it.
The incident which most resonates today was Wilson getting water dumped on his head at a 1978 conference, because his book Sociobiology claimed human behavior was affected by genes. This was part of a larger effort at Harvard by Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould to discredit Wilson and get him fired. In modern terms, to cancel him.
One way to slot Wilson into our current debates is to label him early anti-woke/alt-right. Depending on your politics, Wilson was an anti-woke fighter for scientific truth over cancel culture. Someone with courage today’s academics lack. Or Wilson was an alt-right racist who provided intellectual cover to racists. I think this is slightly off, but we’ll get to that.
First some historical context. In the early 1900s the progressive movement believed in scientific racism (cf Woodrow Wilson). Hitler came to power in the 1930s in that intellectual milieu. After World War 2, scientists were rightfully horrified by what had been wrought in their name. In reaction to Hitler, the scientific consensus flipped to declaring human nature a pure blank slate. Genes didn’t matter for human behavior in any way. Only environment. Hitler was solved. Game over. Anyone who disagreed with the new scientific taboo was a Nazi.
After 75 years, many people forget the origin of calling scientists who disagree with the blank slate a racist Nazi. Well. Now you know. It started after WW2 because of, well, actual Nazis.
I’d say peak scientific blank slate was mid-1970s. Exactly when E.O. Wilson published his 1975 book Sociobiology, with its final chapter declaring human genes mattered for behavior after all. Recall that in 1975 Hitler had been dead for 30 years. For perspective, 30 years ago from today was 1992. The year Bill Clinton was elected. A while back, but in living memory.
Time to put my cards on the table. The blank slate taboo is and has always been unscientific. Even if it was created as an understandable historical reaction to Hitler. Steven Pinker’s excellent 2002 book The Blank Slate debunks it. Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould’s attempts to cancel Wilson were contemptible and unscientific. In fact, when I read Sociobiology I expected the final chapter to leap out with claims of human genetic determinism. But no. It’s sooo tepid. It reads today as obvious and boring. But obvious is just another word for conventional wisdom. Which means Wilson won the scientific debate. Lewontin and Gould lost. Genes matter. See Kevin Drum’s post for a bit more on this, as he has a nice 2x2 on it.
And to be clear that debate isn’t over. It’s just moved from whether genes matter at all (they do) to how much do genes matter. Something now fiercely debated. For full details of the 1970s Sociobiology wars I’d recommend the same book as Kevin Drum and Razib Khan, Defenders of the Truth by Ullica Segerstråle.
To round out Wilson’s career, he wrote arguably the most influential book on ecology The Theory of Island Biogeography. With co-author Robert MacArthur doing the math. Wilson was of course the world’s leading expert on ants. And was involved (not very successfully) in debates around altruism and group selection. See my post on altruism and group selection for details. For those who didn’t hate him, he remained congenial. He encouraged and promoted new ideas as long as he lived. And later became an advocate for environmentalism and biodiversity. A full life.
For what it’s worth, I see Wilson’s true genius in his strong intuitions about which topics were ripe for overturning. His intuitions on where to strike were inspired. Even if his own theories were flawed and later reworked by others into better form. Sociobiology begat evolutionary psychology. His work on altruism is better understood today as a combination of gene-culture evolution and multilevel selection.
To summarize:
Portraying Wilson as an anti-woke or alt-right activist is somewhat anachronistic. Though the lineage is clear and there’s some merit to it. But he was scientist more than activist. And in Wilson’s day, actual Nazis who had actually supported Hitler actually still walked the earth. Calling someone a Nazi today is better understood in the context of internet memes and culture war.
He worked hard to retain the support of those colleagues he could. He wasn’t a jerk.
The underlying reason that Scientific American article is so badly written is because it is a copy of a copy of an out of date argument. One created in the aftermath of WW2, a time when saying genes affected human behavior in any way was racist taboo. Wilson helped nudge the overton window, and today his chapter in Sociobiology is just plain boring. Copy/pasting 1970s attacks on Sociobiology into an article now, long after the war was lost, is silly.
Wilson’s genius lie in his intuitions on which scientific direction to strike. He knew why scientists made the blank slate sacred. He knew what might happen if he pushed against it. And yes, he could be intellectually reckless. But when he chose to fight, he knew what he was getting into. In Hirschman’s terminology Wilson used voice, not exit.
Would Wilson get fired today? Perhaps. Certainly academia is far more prone to cancel people than in Wilson’s day. And fewer now speak up for free speech.
But also recall we are now living through a major political and cultural realignment (see my realignment post). Once our current realignment settles, which may already be happening, appeasing the new gods and avoiding blasphemies will be easier. And if we choose to fight, we can select our battles carefully.
For me, the greatest lesson of Wilson’s life is not him as modern antiwoke outsider, heckling from beyond the exit at Quillette or Substack. It is Wilson as a recognized Harvard elite insider, choosing his battles, and having the courage to voice for change from within. That’s why he (sometimes) won. And that’s why he matters to us still.
Excellent. I crossed Scientific American off my list long ago as a high school term paper level of originality. Enough with the snarkiness. In 1975 as a high school senior I was tasked with reading "on the origin of species". Needless to say that read combined with subsequent reading of Sociobiology, The Sociology of Religion, and lived experience of patriarchy, academic egoism, and religiosity leave me at this point in time to conclude that Wilson has done the finest job possible of putting authentic thought on the table in the sincerest way possible. People should go back and read On Human Nature 2x over to find the core of his thinking about the brain's wiring for mythology and focusing it on the infinite mysteries that will always be there, even as we explain previously unexplainable phenomenon.