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E.O. Wilson died on Sunday, but sociobiology lives on

E.O. Wilson died yesterday. He was a expert on ants, beloved by . . .

Yeah, yeah. It so happens that Wilson was an expert on ants, but his real fame comes from the final chapter of his 1975 book, Sociobiology, titled "Man." The book is generally about the way evolution and natural selection affect the genetic underpinnings of animal behavior, and for 26 chapters everything was fine. Vertebrates? Sure. Birds? No problem. Carnivores? Such big teeth. Nonhuman primates? They're so fascinating. Man?

Hold on there. Roughly speaking, everyone agreed at the time that genes affect physical development in all living creatures. And everyone agreed that genes affect behavior in all living creatures—except. h. sapiens. Here's what this looks like:

Wilson filled in that top left square with a big Yes—i.e., genes do affect human behavior and human cognitive traits—and liberals went ballistic. Why? Because this was only a few years after Arthur Jensen had published his (in)famous article suggesting that the measured IQ difference between Black and white people was due mostly to genetic factors. This, needless to say, set the liberal community on fire and made it hypersensitive toward any research that might be construed as aiding and abetting racists. Sociobiology fit squarely in that category.

So in the same way that Darwin's opponents in the 19th century insisted for religious reasons that mankind couldn't be a product of evolution, liberals in the 20th century insisted for idealistic reasons that the behavior of mankind couldn't be a product of evolution. This was not liberalism's finest moment, and it's Exhibit 1 for anyone who wants to demonstrate that liberals don't always follow the science when it's inconvenient for them.

The resulting fight lasted decades and, yes, it included an incident in which some protesters dumped a pitcher of water on Wilson's head. If you're interested, the definitive work on the sociobiology wars is Defenders of the Truth, by Ullica Segerstråle, a historian of science and professor of sociology at the Illinois Institute of Technology. In fact, it's so definitive that I'm tempted to say that if you haven't read it you shouldn't even pretend to know much about how this all went down.

In the end, of course, Wilson was vindicated. Natural selection affects the evolution of the human body. The brain is part of the human body. And the brain is the source of behavioral and cognitive behavior. Therefore, natural selection affects cognitive behavior in humans. Even Darwin knew this—though it took another century before we understood the genetic mechanism underlying it all.

This is just the simplified version, but don't worry. The more complicated version vindicates Wilson too. Nobody today seriously denies that both genes and environment affect both human behavior and human cognitive traits. It's only a matter of how much each matters.

If you want to avoid the stigma of sociobiology, you can call it evolutionary psychology. Unfortunately, that's developed something of a stigma of its own, so calling it behavioral ecology is probably your best bet. And don't worry: whatever you call it, there's nothing in the field that claims Black people are genetically less intelligent than white people. It's perfectly safe to believe the science without accepting racist views of intelligence.

20 thoughts on “E.O. Wilson died on Sunday, but sociobiology lives on

  1. BlueGreenMango

    I don't doubt that sociobiology, or evolutionary psychology, or behavioral ecology are legitimate scientific pursuits.

    Unfortunately, it's equally true that the discipline attracts a large number of self-promoting racists, or at least mansplainers, who prefer to take their message directly to the public rather than bothering with inconveniences like peer review.

    1. ScentOfViolets

      "You scream and you leap." Okaaaaay. It wasn't 'liberals' that did for sociobiology, any more than it was 'liberals' who are resposnible for the decline of coal.

    2. GrueBleen

      Looking at human 'behaviours' I can see that we eat, drink, excrete and urinate, and sometimes we sweat and we fart. And I can see that eating and drinking are basically behaviors carried by genes and the others are just unthinking bodily actions. So far, so good for "evolutionary psychology" . And of course language and speech are clearly carried by the genes - that's why we never have to be taught how to speak and every linguistic group has different genes for their own language.

      Evolutionary psychology is really looking good.

      But then we get to the behaviour known as formulating and demonstrating the Einstein-Hilbert general relativity theory. Can anybody tell me what genes carry that behaviour and why so very few people seem to have inherited them ?

  2. DTI

    While there’s no doubt that behaviors have genetic components. You can see similar behaviors expressed across all manner of primates including humans.

    So that part isn’t controversial. What *is* controversial would be Wilson’s early speculation that using wheels was genetic and that wheel use only became universal when those without a wheel-use gene died out because they couldn’t compete.

    Don’t get me wrong, I’m liberal as can be and was even more so back when gleeful morons were using the concept to justify every conservative status-quo behavior in the book.

    I loved University of Washington sociobiologist David Barash who opined that since male blind microscopic worms plugged other male reproductive systems with sperm packets that “homosexual rape” might seem terrible but it’s really genetically determined.

    Consequently I can’t imagine why you think only liberals objected to the initial hyper-deterministic version.

    For the record, while I agree that Wilson was generally right, although he became a whole lot more right after a ton of that push back, it’s also the case that his idea was controversial only when t came to humans. In particular, sort of like you did in your original post, etymologists would say “well, Ed might be right about fish and ungulates, but that’s not exactly how bugs work. Folks who studied fish said something similar, just substitute “fish” for “bugs.” Same for those who studied horses and antelopes, etc.

    My neuroscience and cognitive science friends and family members, including those with PhDs can tell you, sometimes with excruciating specificity, what genes are expressed during certain behaviors and what proteins, nerve impulses, and hormones are produced as a result. Yet somehow very, very few of them have much patience for practicing sociobiologists or “evolutionary” psychologists.

    It’s ok, don’t get me wrong. All new fields have to go through their “let’s put radium in baby formula to keep it fresh longer” phase. In the long run I’m sure we’ll get real benefits from Wilson’s legacy. But at least for now we still seem to be getting more useful results from seriously adjacent fields like behavioral economics.

    1. ScentOfViolets

      I'm guessing that

      Yet somehow very, very few of them have much patience for practicing sociobiologists or “evolutionary” psychologists.

      is because these folks are in the business of telling 'just so' stories. Does anyone really believe that's how the elephant got his trunk?

  3. Spadesofgrey

    Eh, you would think after the last 20 years of exploding Eurasian DNA bombshells, liberals would understand base racism under Semitic capitalism and the fact science was driven heavily by R1B-L51 folks is a ponzi scheme. The ability to create is not seen in IQ. This is a long genetic trait since PIE and the linguistic/culture that is indoeuropean. When the Aryan branch of IE's with its R1A offshoot went into the decaying Indus Valley civilisation, it through cultural exchange and "race" mixing with black Dravidian peoples, ignited a new culture. It was the racism of black Dravidian peoples who fled south and eventually got themselves caste'd by the mongrels of the north.

    Selfrightious db's need to follow history better.

  4. Michael Friedman

    __And don't worry: whatever you call it, there's nothing in the field that claims Black people are genetically less intelligent than white people.__

    Oh boy... it's a heck of a lot more complicated than that!

    There is plenty of evidence that blacks in environments as close to that of whites as we can make them have lower measures of intelligence than matched whites.

    For example, if you take middle class whites and middle class blacks you will find significant differences in measured intelligence. This applies to kids growing up in nice progressive environments where racist environmental insults to intelligence would seem to be limited. It is also in decided contrast to, for example, Jewish refugees from the Nazis who do not seem to have had their intelligence reduced by a quite horrendous environment.

    There is also strong evidence that measured intelligence is strongly correlated with actual intelligence across races - all the outcomes that would seem to be determined by intelligence are strongly correlated with measured intelligence.

    There are also arguments to the contrary. For example, if you take the measured IQs in many African countries as being accurate it is hard to understand how they are able to maintain a modern society at all. Something seems off.

    Another point is that the SAT scores (strongly correlated with intelligence) of members of heavily black Division I basketball teams are significantly lower than those of members of much whiter Division I football teams. Sounds like evidence for racial intelligence differences. But then look at football vs. basketball and ask yourself which game places the most demand on intelligence? I think that football (except for quarterbacks) obviously requires far less intelligence than basketball.

    Really, the most you can say at this point is that evidence is mixed and that there is probably more specific evidence for racial intelligence differences but at the macro level there are good reasons to question those results.

    1. ddoubleday

      Kevin: "there's nothing in the field that claims Black people are genetically less intelligent than white people"

      Michael: "hold on now"

      THIS is why a fight always breaks out.

  5. rational thought

    At the risk of triggering some, if intelligence is influenced by genes, it is inheritable. If it is inheritance, any gene affecting intelligence will be favored to the extent it increases the chance of that individual surviving and reproducing, in the particular environment in which they live.

    And, if any group of humans are differentiated with regard to the environment in which they have lived for generations, then the inheritable genes which they would evolve should be expected to be different to the extent their environments differ in what types of mental traits that are advantageous.

    But also

    1) any truly " superior" genetic intelligence traits ( i.e. that are advantageous in all environments) should not differ hardly at all in two populations as long as they have enough contact to spread that gene. Which is true for all of the old world populations. Including Africa as, even though somewhat isolated, not entirely. Maybe that could have happened for Australia or New world populations ( either direction ) but even there, there was sporadic contact and any really advantageous trait would have spread.

    2) likely having one sort of mental ability means that likely will be deficient in another. The brain cannot be good at everything simultaneously. And a trait will only be advantageous relative to others in the population. Everybody will not have the same traits as society will value minority skills if they are rare enough.
    So likely any population ( or "race") will differ on the relative proportions of traits, not absolutely. So unlikely can say that " all of x race " are y with anything so ambiguous for advantageous as mental traits.

    3) which traits are advantageous depends on the society and can change as society changes. If we ever have direct human brain to computer connections , some types of " intelligence " such as being able to do math in your head might be fairly useless.

    4) so the racists who say that x race is just overall less intelligent do not understand how relative that concept to circumstances is and how variable such traits can be. Best you can say is that one group likely does " differ" in different mental traits which can be called " intelligence ", re the proportions of different traits in the population, to the extent that their original homelands might differ in what is advantageous .

    5) but also just unscientific to insist that, by some magic ( or maybe god) that different races have absolutely no differences re mental traits .

  6. 4runner

    Amen as to "likely having one sort of mental ability means that likely will be deficient in another."

    Seriously folks: Think of how reductionist it is to classify something like "beauty" or "physical attractiveness" on a linear scale. As if some sort of "Racial-Facemash" could rank the entirety of what we call "races" on an attractiveness scale of 1 to 10.

    And yet we seem hell bent on ranking "intelligence" on a comparably banal scale.

  7. Justin

    When I read books by Wilson and others back in the 1990s, I learned about human evolution and human nature. At the time I wasn’t aware of the controversy. It all made sense.

  8. Salamander

    Clearly, at least in my opinion, a big reason why we Libz have resisted the intelligence/heredity == RACE thing is because it interferes with the constitutional principal underlying our government, that "all men are created equal." In practice, this means everyone has equal rights, not that they're precisely equal, like clones raised under identical environments or something. Anything that throws a wrench into this "equality" thing is dangerous to our society.

    On the "intelligence" front, seriously?? Superior intelligence a "good thing"?? A couple of later posts invite us readers to discuss our high school experiences, in which, it is clear, "intelligence" means ostracizing, sometimes physical violence, and constant ridicule, not to mention a near-zero chance of Finding A Mate (the point of evolution). High intelligence is not good.

    And if you look at our world as it stands now, it's clear that it's being run and ruled by, shall we say, the "C students"? The biz majors, class presidents, and the like. That's why we can't stop making money to deal with that wonky, nerdish "global warming" nonsense*. It's why one political party wants to go back to the 1800s, and better yet, even earlier, before those durned "scientists" and other librulz "took over" (that is, had some small influence).

  9. dm00

    Has evolutionary psychology really outgrown its "just-so stories" phase derided by Stephen Jay Gould?

    For the longest time the field suffered from ignorance about everyday life in tribal societies. "Primitive life was like X. Therefore we were selected for X. Therefore there's a genetic basis for current X-favored behavior." When the first step is based on ignorance, the validity of all the subsequent steps, no matter how logical, suffers.

    It doesn't help that the ignorance about everyday life in tribal societies was at least partially attributable to motivated reasoning (which, in turn, is at least partially the result of ideology and prejudice). Unfortunately, the corrections to the old fallacies are themselves tangled in ideology, so I continue to find the whole endeavor pretty dubious.

  10. ProbStat

    Ultimately I think eschewing racism has to be a normative rather than a positive decision: you don't judge people by their race because it's morally wrong and its ugly, and not because the evidence doesn't show that race is a factor in intelligence or behavior.

    Of course this tends to mean that you don't go out of your way to look for racial differences in intelligence or behavior either.

    The real question that Jensen's studies raise is not, "Gosh, what should we do if Blacks are just racially less intelligent than whites?" but rather, "What is wrong with this idiot that he would study such a thing?"

    If there's a diagnostic matter, one might look to genetics in the same way one might eventually look to genetics to explain chronic fatigue, joint pain, and low blood oxygen (symptoms of sickle cell anemia, by the way).

    But in matters of intelligence or behavior, ya kinda should wonder if having to devote a significant part of their attention to worrying about how white people are going to react to anything they do (or don't do) might be the first thing to try to address before looking at anything else.

  11. lawnorder

    There are a number of issues with trying to correlate genetic intelligence potential with race. First, there is no widely accepted operationally specific definition of "intelligence". Second, even when a researcher formulates a precise operational definition of intelligence for the purposes of their research, it's still difficult to impossible to measure accurately. Finally, even if those difficulties can be overcome, the conclusion will, at most, be that there is a slight difference in mean intelligence between groups, possibly combined with a slight difference in standard deviations.

    This tells us nothing useful about individuals.

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