A Digression: E.O. Wilson and Stephen Jay Gould
A Discursion into the History of Science and Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology
Today’s post is a pretty big digression from what I’ve been writing about over the last week - it doesn’t really touch on the history of religion and is mostly about the history of science - in particular the history of a controversial branch of biology known as “sociobiology” or “evolutionary psychology”.
The occasion for todays post is the death of E.O. Wilson, the founder of sociobiology, at the age of 92. You can read a very nice obituary for him here at the New York Times (the paywall should be down on this link). Wilson is famous for his research into the behavior of ants and how it could have evolved. He was one of the first scientist to embrace what is known as “inclusive fitness”, the idea that it can be evolutionarily advantageous to do things that help people that aren’t your children if those people share genetic material with you (because they are your cousins, for instance, or your nieces and nephews, or because all of the ants in a given colony are related to each other). You probably have heard of this idea associated with Richard Dawkins and his concept of the gene as the unit of selection in evolution. (In other words, “survival of the fittest” refers to the survival of the fittest genes, not necessarily the fittest organisms, though the two are often connected.)
The part of Wilson’s legacy that I want to write about his creation of the field of sociobiology. Sociobiology grew out of his study of ant behavior and evolution. Wilson tried to find evolutionary explanations for the way that ant colonies behave, and then he expanded his ideas to include the study of other animals and, most controversially, humans. In his book Sociobiology (1975) included a brief section on humans, but his Pulitzer Prize winning On Human Nature (1978) jumped feet first into what was called at the time the “nature-nurture” debate about human culture and behavior.
In brief, sociobiologists like Wilson were on the “nature” side of the debate, arguing that genetics plays a pre-eminent role in shaping human culture and behavior. In the 1970s, this sparked a major backlash from left-wing and Marxist scholars, who associated sociobiology with eugenics and Nazi-style ideas about racial superiority. On one level, this was probably a bit unfair. Wilson himself certainly never appeared to promote any sort of far-right thought, and seems to have personally been a political liberal. And when the “International Committee Against Racism” dumped a pitcher of water on Wilson’s head in 1978 at an academic conference, they probably weren’t doing much to advance their cause.
The argument against sociobiology was both scientific and political. The person who exemplified both of these strains of attack was Stephen Jay Gould, Wilson’s colleague at Harvard and one of the great popularizers of science in the 20th century. Gould was both an expert on evolution and a political progressive and an activist. Gould wrote a lot of criticism of sociobiology and it’s descendent, evolutionary psychology. One piece in particular, I think, captures Gould’s critiques.
In “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm”, Gould (and his collaborator, Richard Lewontin) presents two different attacks on what is called “adaptionism”, a branch of evolutionary thought of which sociobiology is an example. For adaptionists, physical and psychological traits of a creature are examples of evolved adaptations - they must have evolved because they provided some evolutionary benefit to the creature (or it’s relatives, if you accept inclusive fitness). Gould’s two critiques focus on:
Spandrels: This is an architectural term used to describe the triangular space between the top of an arch and a rectangular frame. These spaces were generally not intended by the architects, but were filled with decorations because they inevitably occurred when a curved figure is inscribed in a rectangular frame. For Gould, spandrels also occurred in nature - physical or psychological traits that are the byproduct of the evolution of some other characteristic, and are not adaptive themselves.
Panglossian Paradigm: Pangloss is a character in Voltaire’s story Candide. Famously, he believes that we live in “the best of all possible worlds”. For Gould, adaptionists were Panglossian - they assumed that the physical and psychological features we observe in nature are the best of all possible adaptations, a position which favors the political and social and economic status quo, and which also is likely scientifically incorrect. Interestingly, Pangloss in Candide sounds a lot like some evolutionary biologists of this stripe - “Everything is made for the best purpose. Our noses were made to carry spectacles, so we have spectacles. Legs were clearly intended for breeches, and we wear them”.
Discussions of Gould inevitably come around to the question of the measurability and heritability of human intelligence. Wilson and Gould disagreed considerably here, as elsewhere. Basically, some scientists believe that there is a measurable quality called “intelligence” (basically, IQ scores), and that this quality is at least partially genetically determined and thus able to be passed on between parents and children. Other scholars deny one or both of these ideas - either holding that there is no way to quantify “intelligence” as a single factor or that this factor isn’t primarily genetically determined, or both.
Gould is a fierce opponent of the idea that “intelligence” is measurable or heritable. He wrote the classic book on the subject, The Mismeasure of Man (1982), which famously discredited the idea of biological determinism in general, and with regard to human intelligence in particular. Gould examined 19th and 20th century attempts to measure intelligence, starting with craniometry, where Samuel George Morton measured the volume of human skulls to “scientifically” prove the superiority and intelligence of whites over Asians and Blacks, and continuing through to the history of intelligence testing and IQ, which was likewise used to “prove” the racially-determined low intelligence of African-Americans and immigrants. Gould dissects the data and procedures from these studies and show multiple ways in which they were deeply flawed.1
Wilson took a more nuanced view. As a proponent of “biological determinism” in the sense that Gould would use the term, Wilson was open to the idea of the heritability of intelligence, and thus inherit racial differences in intelligence. In 1977, an author in the New York Review of Books wrote about a group of leading geneticists who attacked the idea of the heritability of intelligence because “at a time of deeply troubled race relations, when the whole possibility of peaceful coexistence and mutual respect in multiracial communities is in question in many parts of the world, these geneticists feel an imperatively urgent desire to put the scientific record straight”. Wilson shot back with a letter to the magazine, attacking the idea that concerns about race relations should color one’s views on the heritability of intelligence. Criticism shouldn’t be directed at scholars who believe in genetically-determined low intelligence among Blacks and other minority groups, but instead at those “who politicize scientific research, who argue the merits of analysis according to its social implications rather than its truth”.2
Interest in the racial basis of intelligence continues down to the present, especially among those, like Wilson, who see biology as determinative of human behavior and culture. Public intellectual, evolutionary psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker famously wrote an essay in The New Republic in 2005 supporting the idea that Ashkenazi Jews are innately particularly intelligent. Other, more fringe, intellectuals like Charles Murray (author of The Bell Curve) and Jordan Peterson, of so-called “Intellectual Dark Web” fame and great popularity among young, male, conservative college students, have all embraced the theory of innate Jewish intelligence as part of a larger paradigm of the racially-based inheritance of intelligence. For a good review of the rise of this new “race-science”, here is a great article from The Guardian.
As you can see if you read the New York Times obituary of Wilson linked above, Wilson and sociobiology and evolutionary psychology are still widely accepted in polite society. Steven Pinker very much represents the latest iteration of this sort of biologically deterministic view of human behavior and culture, and he is one of the most prominent public intellectuals in the world today. I think it’s definitely worth remembering the critiques that scholars like Stephen Jay Gould put forth against these ideas in the 1970s and 1980s.
Lately, there have been a number of attempts to “debunk” Gould’s book by those who believe in innate racial differences in intelligence. You can read a good debunking of the debunkers here.
“Politics and IQ”, New York Review of Books, 31 March 1977 (https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1977/03/31/politics-iq-1/)