Morality, Selfishness, Altruism, and Kinship

Sociobiology’s first chapter, “The Morality of the Gene,” begins by taking issue with Albert Camus’s statement that suicide is the only important philosophical question. It is the biologist, Wilson claims,

Then by a leap that has not worked for anyone, Wilson implies that understanding the material structure of the brain and the evolutionary process by which it came into being creates direct understanding of the content of human thought. We can adjudicate, he implies, between particular thoughts (in this case life versus suicide) by reference to biological structures and their evolution. This theme persists in his other works as well.

While the necessary material structure of the human brain does in an ultimate sense constrain what can be thought, these constraints relate so remotely to our ability to predict the content and structure of systems of ideas that Wilson’s formulation cannot be taken seriously. Almost no one who accepts evolutionary theory will dispute the point that the hypothalmic and limbic systems evolved by natural selection or that we must learn why altruism is evolutionarily possible. But this knowledge will not automatically lead us to moral clarity.

Wilson’s prose suggests that selfishness and altruism exist in a pitched battle, though nothing in the theory of inclusive fitness suggests that they must. He evokes an image of humanity torn between ambivalent impulses programmed into our brains and argues that understanding the conditions that led to this impasse will permit us to control our behavior. This is an optimistic view of the human condition with strong Freudian overtones. Nothing in it is entailed in the theory of inclusive fitness.

These very first paragraphs show something about Wilson’s use of words that will compound confusion later on. “Morality,” “selfishness,” “altruism,” and “kinship” are all words that directly imply a cultural capacity for abstract thought, for deliberative behavior. Wilson’s use of terms taken from the cultural world humanizes the nonhuman world by imputing morality, selfishness, altruism, and kinship to cultureless creatures. Then by reverse extrapolation he applies these terms to humans. It then appears that we are just like all the other animals. This is just linguistic sleight-of-hand, a point Marshall Sahlins (1976) has made eloquently. That we are animals no one can doubt. That we are just like any other animal is less clear. We are biocultural animals—not nobler or better, but different.

From Nature Through Mind to Culture

These early pages set the baseline for Wilson’s whole argument about the relationship between genes, mind, and culture. His reductive program for eliminating the distance between culture and biology operates by rhetorical means that have little or nothing to do with sociobiological theory proper. Even Wilson does not follow his reductionism: he holds “rationality” to be above the realm of direct biological causation, while making it crucial to our species’ biological salvation.

The mind is simply a complex apparatus that overlies the genes and must necessarily act in the interest of perpetuating the genes of that organism. The mind is a fitness-informing device. In this way Wilson drives a wedge between the genes as an ultimate level of reality and the conscious mind as an environmental tracking device that calculates fitness outcomes of various courses of action.

Chapter 2 begins in a striking way with the following lines: “Genes, like Leibnitz’s monads, have no windows; the higher properties of life are emergent” (p. 7). Here is an interesting conundrum. Much of the book argues that genetic causality is the only form of “real” biological causality. Yet here a combined argument for holism and emergent levels of organization is made the centerpiece. Wilson wants to use two incompatible views of the organization of the world as they suit his convenience.

Sociobiology is the study of the biological foundations of all social behavior. As genes underlie the mind, so sociobiology supposedly underlies sociology and the humanities. “It may not be too much to say that sociology and the other social sciences, as well as the humanities, are the last branches of biology waiting to be included in the Modern Synthesis” (p. 4). This remark threatens many territories and has been widely cited. Wilson claims to recognize no general causes of behavior that are not biological, and so the incorporation of the social sciences and humanities in the sociobiological synthesis will be accomplished according to the ground rules of biology. While this idea in itself is not bad, since nothing in the social sciences and humanities could in any ultimate sense conflict with the biological capacities of human beings, Wilson’s terms of incorporation destroy rather than explain the social sciences and the humanities.

Wilson defines society as “a group of individuals belonging to the same species and organized in a cooperative manner” (p. 7). This vague and analytically useless definition of society is purposely broad, Wilson says, so that it can apply to almost any aggregation of a species in which some small degree of interaction occurs. In fact, this vagueness does not seem costly at the outset, but it becomes so when the similarities and differences in the social forms of different species and ultimately in human and other animal societies are examined.

Wilson provides an elaborate discussion of various mechanisms and effects related to the rate of the evolution of social behavior. He endeavors to develop a concept of “social drift,” made up of a genetic element and a “tradition” element, in analogy to genetic drift. As an example of “tradition drift,” defined as behaviors learned solely as a result of social experience, he speaks of the acceptance of a new idea in a human group. His model, which is a very old one, claims that ideas compete for acceptance, and the best variant survives.¹

We can see here the weakness of Wilson’s approach to cultural analysis. The mechanistic treatment of ideas apart from their content and contexts is inexcusable. Further, the modality for communicating ideas between parent and child and among cohorts is linguistic communication, a system of transmission dependent on distinctive cultural mechanisms. The acceptance or rejection of an idea is as significantly conditioned by its fit within a larger system of ideas and by the modes in which it is communicated as by any inherent strength or weakness in the idea itself.

Though the concept of tradition drift has something to recommend it, especially as applied to nonhuman animals (whose social learning has been underemphasized by scholars until recently), the application to humans reveals important weaknesses in Wilson’s thinking. He abstracts out a prime characteristic of culture, but in the process he impoverishes the concept of culture beyond recognition. It is abundantly clear that he does not use the concept “symbol,” “symbolic system,” “context,” or “meaning” in acceptable ways. These weaknesses ultimately ruin his discussion of humans.

Speaking of group size in an evolutionary context, Wilson uses the example of the Mennonites in the rural United States as proof that mechanisms found in other animal societies work for humans. This choice is quite revealing. Not only are the demographic data adduced very weak, but he forgets that the boundaries of Mennonite communities are religiously defined. Yet the fluctuation he finds in Mennonite group size is said to represent the operation of universal mechanisms. How many macaque communities are bounded religiously and are ethnically oppressed? More important, Wilson’s inclusion of the Mennonites does not enhance our understanding of them at all because it is already known that communal agricultural societies have an optimum size that varies according to changes in land base, technology, and communication. How does the use of evolutionary language improve our understanding of either the Mennonites or the macaques? If this is what Wilson means when he says that human behavior is “consistent” with sociobiological theory, then I see no difference between “weak” inferences and useless ones.

Wilson also misses opportunities to apply his models to humans well. When he discusses adjustable group size and describes societies that adjust their size to available resources, he does not mention humans. This is one subject on which there is somewhat better human evidence (Lee and De Vore, eds., 1968). It appears that cultural systems are great facilitators of the expansion and contraction of group sizes and that kinship networks (in the correct anthropological sense of the term “kinship”) serve to enhance the ability of groups to fuse and divide. Here, where a human example would be worth thinking about, Wilson overlooks the opportunity.

Later, after arguing that the correct definition of higher organisms is the degree of refinement in their ability to adjust to the environment (p. 151), he takes up tradition once again. “The highest form of tradition … is of course human culture. But culture aside from its involvement with language, which is truly unique, differs from animal tradition only in degree” (p. 168; emphasis mine). This statement is quite remarkable. Wilson uses a radical distinction here between humans and animals, yet presumably a major point of the book is to moderate just such a distinction.

The phrase “culture aside from its involvement with language” is incomprehensible. Ordinarily we define culture as a congeries of symbolically mediated behaviors that have some systematic internal organization. In the social sciences and the humanities we have often considered language a major paradigm for what culture in general is like. There is also wide agreement that the development of language is the key to the development of culture; that without one the other cannot exist. And finally, the absolute uniqueness of human language itself is being questioned by the very ethologists from whom Wilson otherwise draws so much sustenance. What, then, can Wilson mean? Unfortunately, the only interpretation that can be placed on this crucial passage is that Wilson does not know what he means by either “culture” or “language.”

The chapters on communication support this contention. Though Wilson tries to use language as paradigmatic for communication systems (p. 177), he rejects the universal design features of language, is confused about phonemes, and entirely forgets that language is not analyzable without reference to meaning. And then, having used language as a paradigm for communication system in general, he reverses the field and argues that human language is unique (pp. 201–2) and that the application of human language concepts to other animal communication systems is risky.

In part, Wilson’s problem is simply one of expertise. The material on aggression, spacing, and dominance is better handled. He retains a lively sense of multiple causes and multiple effects and he balances predictive statements with reasonable caution. Here he is clearly on familiar ground. Except for one careless aside on “obvious parallels” with humans in his discussion of the will to power (p. 287), this set of chapters, in which all sorts of bits and pieces of human evidence are fitted in, is not marred by the kind of outlandish comparisons that came earlier. Knowing this material better, Wilson is more diffident about extrapolation.

After a discussion of what he terms “role” and “caste” among nonhuman animals, Wilson turns to human roles.

This statement could have been made by Galton, Malthus, or Milton Friedman. It reveals a naive free-competition model of society without any awareness of problems of social stratification and power or of the long history of debate on this subject.

Species Immortality

Since modification of the environment is a particularly marked human characteristic, Wilson’s comments on this subject have considerable importance.

This statement needs to be remembered, for it contains the core of Wilson’s peculiar utopianism. If we humans could manipulate the environment rather than letting it affect us, we could become our own ultimate causes in the world. And were we so inclined—as Wilson seems to be—we could try to bring evolution as we know it to a halt. This goal is nothing less than the achievement of species immortality in the material world. It is Wilson’s alternative to the immortality of the individual soul.

Scholarly emphasis on human manipulation of the physical environment has led many authors to argue that culture has taken over from biology among humans. Wilson does not agree. He calls such manipulation an “adaptation,” thus insisting that culture be treated as one more biological adaptation. While this position is generally reasonable, Wilson finds it necessary to ignore the symbolic and systemic aspects of culture.

Why does Wilson consistently ignore these aspects? I believe it is because he sees culture (in contrast with science) as obscuring our view of truth. Only when we purge culture of its irrational elements will culture give a true picture of the environment. Then we can reach the ultimate adaptation. Wilson thus wishes to reduce culture to its scientific-rational components. The rest of culture must be consigned to the dustbin.

“Man: From Sociobiology to Sociology”

Wilson has been repeatedly drubbed for his final chapter. Indeed, he published On Human Nature to remedy just this problem. But the errors in this chapter merit comment because they help to reveal the major cultural presuppositions that underlie Wilson’s failure to apply evolutionary analysis to humans. All the difficulties discussed earlier now combine and interact.

The chapter begins with an invocation of an extraterrestrial zoologist, presumably because from an extraterrestrial perspective we humans could not deny that we are animals. Noting that we are ecologically “peculiar” because we are so wide ranging and locally dense in some areas, Wilson also stresses our anatomical uniqueness.

There is much to consider here. “Hypertrophy” suggests an almost unnatural overgrowth of an organ. By what standards do we judge this condition? Do birds have hypertrophied digits? What is the difference between hypertrophy and a complex morphological adaptation? This is really an issue in classification. Wilson uses the term to suggest that humans may have gone too far in one direction and that we are much in need of perspective and self-control. As a biological concept in regard to humans, mental hypertrophy is vacuous.

At the same time that Wilson evokes human variability in ethnicity and in social roles, he darkly invokes a biogram that must necessarily set limits around the protean character of humanity. Biology teaches us, he suggests, what these limits are so we can know how to behave.

Surely this make no sense in view of his general theory. If, as he has insisted throughout the book, he is a biological determinist, then humans cannot behave in any way that is not biologically feasible. If this is the case, what is there to worry about? But Wilson is obviously worried. The true meaning of mental hypertrophy becomes clearer now. He thinks that overdevelopment of the brain can lead us to think and behave in ways that are not consistent with our survival. If we want to survive as a species, we must come back to reality and analyze the true evolutionary constraints that affect us.

Clearly this is a peculiar problem for an evolutionist to worry about. No other species concerns itself with species immortality. Species adapt or not; they continue or become extinct. For all his emphasis on evolution, Wilson finds such a fate intolerable for humanity. We should try to develop the perfect adaptation and become immortal as a species. While the appeal of this view is understandable, it has no conceivable connection to sociobiology and is only tenuously related to evolutionary biology. It is also a view that such thinkers as Malthus, Galton, Lorenz, and Desmond Morris have held without reference to sociobiological theory at all.

After this strange beginning, Wilson deals with human flexibility in more detail. He speaks of “ecological release” through lack of competition with other species (p. 550), and he christens the human capacity for flexible behavior genetic “underprescription” (p. 559). This amounts to a double renaming of what most anthropologists would simply call cultural behavior.

Rudimentary discussions of language, the nuclear family, and other issues show how far out of his own area of expertise Wilson has strayed. These divagations should not be taken too seriously because the real point comes when Wilson tries to sharpen his analysis of culture.

“Culture, including the more resplendent manifestations of ritual and religion, can be interpreted as a hierarchical system of environmental tracking devices” (p. 560). Culture change and environmental change thus occur at similar rates. Religion, however, apparently interferes with such tracking:

This situation is apparently connected to hypertrophy. Definable evolutionary conditions have led us to mental hypertrophy, which has increased our capacity for flexible behavior. But this flexibility is now hedged round by the irrationalism of religion, which has monopolized the means of indoctrinating people with regard to altruistic behavior. The “demonstrably false” religions are taking our hypertrophy and turning it into a danger for our species. This danger must be met, and the answer is sociobiology:

“To maintain the species indefinitely … total knowledge.” This is Wilson’s true agenda. Our species should strive to maintain itself indefinitely by learning scientifically how evolution applies to us. Thus we must push aside religion and the other “cultural mystifications” that hide what we really are.

This is really an old call to the imposition of rational science over irrational religion on the promise of a utopian future. In this utopia the antithesis between nature and culture will have been abolished by science. The argument assumes that all that is truly human and worthwhile is rational, and that science is thus the quintessence of humanism (as against the false humanism of the so-called humanities). Surely this is the antithesis of the scientific method.

Scientific Method and Loose Thinking

One way of dealing with some of the most patent inconsistencies in Sociobiology is to claim that Wilson is simply a bad scientist, or at least a very naive one. Such a convenient view does not account for the data and is much too easy a way out of a complex problem. Wilson is a famous and widely respected scientist who clearly understands the canons of scientific method. His abstract discussion of the theoretical structure and requirements of sociobiology demonstrates this understanding. He emphasizes a distinction between ultimate and proximate causality, one that is now much bandied about. By “proximate causation” he means essentially such immediately functional causes as anatomy, physiology, and behavior. By “ultimate causation” he means the necessities created by the environment (p. 23). Clearly some such distinction is important in most dynamic analyses and in analyses where differences in scale are important. Yet these distinctions, unless they are carefully handled, are a perfect escape clause that can protect a theory from empirical challenge. If inconvenient evidence is found at one level, then causality at the other level can be invoked, and Wilson does invoke it repeatedly in his human examples.

In the section “Reasoning in Sociobiology” Wilson gives a fair characterization of the deductive basis of science. He discusses the use of “strong inference” and criticizes the “advocacy” method of proof. Arguing in favor of multicausal theories in sociobiology that move the various levels of analysis together in a sensible way, he concludes, “The goal of investigation should not be to advocate the simplest explanation, but rather to enumerate all of the possible explanations, improbable as well as likely, and then to devise tests to eliminate some of them” (p. 30). One can only agree. This is a textbook scientific method. That Wilson is aware of these rules is important because, as we shall see, the requirement to develop a variety of hypotheses, devise tests, and apply them is dropped when his subject is humans.

By Chapter 5 he has moved far from these elegant statements about scientific method. Such comments as the following are found:

The method of strong inference is gone, and with it the elaboration of multiple hypotheses and the use of tests to eliminate some. Proofs regarding human behavior in particular hang on the words “consistent with,” a slippery phrase that says “caused by” without really defending or testing the proposition.

Wilson concludes Part I with the following statement:

Wilson promises that sociobiology can convert religion and morality into science by reducing them to evolutionary theory. This moralized science promises to save humanity by purging culture of its irrational elements and bringing us into concert with the environment through reason. The scientific method and strong inference have been supplanted by the advocacy method. That a “single… thread” runs from termites to man could be true in any typological system (e.g., we both locomote by means of limbs of some sort). The strength of his thread is supplied by the logic of the system he has created, not by any tests he devised or applied. The thread is strong only if we already believe Wilson.

“Man’s Ultimate Nature,” Natural Reason, and Truth

Chapter 1 opens with this question: “What is man’s ultimate nature?” The question itself betrays the fundamental orientation of the work. What can the “ultimate nature” of a species mean if a species is a congeries of ranges of variation that are continuously shifting? Can we talk about the “ultimate nature” of a species in evolutionary biology? Certainly not. This concept only fits the chain-of-being model of creation. Thus the book begins on a nonevolutionary note.

This question is immediately followed by a statement that distracts our attention from the issues just raised and focuses on the specter of materialism: “If the brain is a machine of ten billion nerve cells and the mind can somehow be explained as the summed activity of a finite number of chemical and electrical reactions, boundaries limit the human prospect—we are biological and our souls cannot fly free” (Wilson 1978:1). This statement introduces a theme that runs throughout the work. Biology is a constraint on culture. To be realistic we must adjust our culture to this fact. Such a view of the relationship between biology and culture is inappropriate to modern biology, but it is common in the works of Hippocrates, Jean Bodin, and other pre-Darwinian writers.

Wilson has a strong tendency to link such concepts as soul with religion and culture, and to link such concepts as science and rationality with transcendence of the limits of culture. Wilson naturalizes reason: “The human mind is a device for survival and reproduction, and reason is just one of its various techniques”; “Human nature can be laid open as an object of fully empirical research, biology can be put to the service of liberal education, and our self-conception can be enormously and truthfully enriched” (p. 2). Reason is natural; natural science is about what is natural; what is natural is real and true. Thus natural science can tell us the truth about ourselves and move our reasoning onto a mature plane, far from the fantasy world of religion and the humanities.

Biological Constraints and Moral Choice

According to Sociobiology, we are programmed for both selfishness and altruism. The only moral choice Wilson can understand is between these alternatives. In On Human Nature he eliminates this moral choice by arguing that it is rational to be altruistic. Further, he wants to use biology to prove that after we have measured the tightness of the material constraints, we still have the freedom to choose.

This is an odd position for an author who begins a book with an epigraph from Hume, who compellingly portrays the distance separating “is” from “ought.”

Wilson really only plays with the idea of constraint. He pretends to measure constraint to prove that we have the freedom to choose, that rationality has a role to play. Yet by annihilating the understanding of cultural systems in both of his books, he deprives that appeal to rationality of any context or meaning.

The question of constraint comes up again in a variety of forms: “The question is no longer whether human social behavior is genetically determined; it is to what extent” (p. 19). It is a serious error to attempt to analyze the relationship between biology and culture as a single continuum ranging from fully biological to fully cultural and then to place traits along the continuum. As Lewontin ([1974] 1976) has argued more powerfully than anyone else, this is bad biology.

All culture is biological, for without biological beings there is no culture. But if we agree that all culture is 100 percent biological in this sense, we have said nothing useful about constraints, freedom, culture, or behavior. Wilson has simply restated the old dichotomies—environment/culture, nature/nurture, genes/culture, constraint/freedom. These polarities do not belong in evolutionary biology.

Wilson confuses the issue further: “Either possibility—complete cultural determination versus shared cultural and genetic determination of variability within the species—is compatible with the more general sociobiological view of human nature” (pp. 42–43). Having started from the position that everything humans do is biological and material, he here argues that some things may be cultural without being biological. This confusion is nothing more than an expression of the old dualistic model of human nature.

Wilson’s quest for the ultimate nature of humans also leads him into trouble with biological diversity. He turns the problem over and over and finally tries the following formulation: “Hope and pride and not despair are the ultimate legacy of genetic diversity, because we are a single species, not two or more.… Mankind viewed over many generations shares a single human nature.…” (p. 50). Whatever this statement means, and I challenge others to make sense of it, it only highlights the problem of trying to assert a species essence in the humoral/environmental sense and biological diversity in an evolutionary biological sense. The positions are irreconcilable.

At the end of the work, Wilson returns to the question of moral choice. Given our ambivalent “essence,” we are biologically programmed to be free to choose between selfishness and altruism. But in his view, science tells us that only altruism is rational. As he puts it, “circularity of the human predicament is not so tight that it cannot be broken through an exercise of will.” Sociobiology “will fashion a biology of ethics, which will make possible the selection of a more deeply understood and enduring code of moral values” (p. 196). Then he provides this biology of ethics:

This remarkable passage sums up Wilson’s true agenda. The mental hypertrophy that characterizes humans should allow us to see past selfishness as shortsighted and to realize that altruism, though in the short term possibly disadvantageous, in the long term will ensure our survival. Evolution is blind but it has produced a creature capable of vision. Our will and our reason can permit us to outsmart the environment and approach the ideal of bringing evolution to a halt. We must look to empirical biological research for our ethical systems; we must derive “ought” directly from “is.” The price for failure is ongoing evolution, which may leave us as extinct as the dinosaurs.

Evolutionary “Truth”

In Wilson’s view, what most encumbers our vision is the “falsity” of our cultural systems. Our religious ideas are especially at fault because they supposedly deny the materiality of human life and celebrate the irrational. To address this problem Wilson suggests that we drop the “biblical epic” and put the “evolutionary epic” in its place.

The problem is that our cultural knowledge thus far in human history has been “false.” Now we can make it “true.”

What is the truth? It appears that the truth is that a judicious combination of selfishness and altruism is the only evolutionary strategy that will work. This is universally true no matter what the circumstances or time period. Under these conditions, the only moral thing to do is to follow the dictates of scientific reasoning, which has uncovered the universal and eternally best strategy for survival. Thus Wilson ends by spiritualizing biological science, trying to convert its results into direct guidelines for behavior based on the analysis of the diversity of species now existing and their evolutionary histories.

Wilson as an Evolutionist

It is clear that when Wilson deals with humans, he uses neither sociobiology nor evolutionism. Rather he is a naturalistic thinker in the tradition of those whose ideas rest on a dichotomous static vision of nature and culture. Except for the occasional loose connection made between kin selection, reciprocal altruism, and cooperative behavior, Wilson is content to use biological information to make the case that we humans are in grave danger of extinguishing ourselves because of the contradictions in our “nature.”

Most of the major rules of evolutionary biology are overturned. Despite some remarks here and there about diversity in human populations, Wilson speaks of humans as having a “nature,” indeed as having an “ultimate nature” that is potentially permanent. Nothing in evolutionism permits such assertions. A species is an interbreeding congeries of varying traits, continually in motion, with fuzzy boundaries in fact, if not by definition.

Wilson’s goal is to preserve our species from extinction by perfecting our ecological release via proper balancing of our selfish and altruistic natures. While the goal of preservation of our species may be laudable, nothing in evolutionary biology justifies such actions. Evolutionary biology is not about preserving species indefinitely; it is about the mechanisms and trajectories of evolutionary change.

In the most bald fashion, Wilson repeatedly moves from what he considers to be the facts of evolutionary biology to the moral imperatives he thinks we must follow. He leaps across the boundary from “is” to “ought” without regard for most thinkers’ belief that such a leap is rationally unjustifiable and ideologically compromised. He thinks that a philosophy of empiricism will simply and directly solve our moral dilemmas.

This belief finds no support in evolutionary biology. Evolution is a theory, not a description of neutral facts. Evolutionary theory produces no clear moral imperatives. We may weigh the evolutionary consequences that can arise from various courses of action, but the choice of a course of action and the imposition of that choice on others in our society cannot be justified on simple evolutionary grounds.

Wilson’s pattern of thought is not explicable in terms of evolutionary theory but it does fit the old Western view of the human epic. Humans began in a state of nature in which natural laws virtually controlled all. As we became increasingly successful and proliferated, our cultural ideas became more and more complex, obscuring the “real” (natural) requirements of human existence. We began to act in ways not in our collective interest. But this dangerous cultural world also gave rise to the scientific method, and its advance ushered in the possiblity of a final age of human evolution in which scientific purging of untrue cultural ideas will permit us self-consciously (rationally) to regulate our relationships with nature, using reason to abolish the contradiction between nature and culture. This is an elite-managed rational utopia.

While a knowledge of evolutionary biology does not help us understand what Wilson thinks, an understanding of medieval theories about the relationship between purity of blood and social order does. The genealogical principle dominates in those theories, and blood “holds culture on a leash”; the social order is a reflection of the biological characteristics of the population. Environmental and historical effects, such as invasions and migrations, have confused the relations between blood and social position. As a result, a scientific analytical effort is necessary for effective political management and responsible moral judgment.

Social order depends on obedience to these basic “natural” principles. “Science” served this medieval enterprise in the form of elaborate genealogical investigations to determine the “natural” constraints involved. Politics and ethics were felt to be the direct expressions of rational inquiry. History was viewed as the playing out of these natural principles. Once the principles were understood, history became an intelligible, manageable process.

The claim that Wilson’s construal of the relationship between nature and culture has much in common with arguments about purity of blood is not made with the intention of ridiculing Wilson. He is a sincere and serious scholar and deserves to be treated as such. Rather it emphasizes the fundamental similarity between his views and those pre-evolutionary views in reifying the distinction between nature and culture as a way of harnessing science to political and moral judgment.

What then is sociobiological or evolutionary about Wilson’s view of humans? Nothing. Wilson’s human sociobiology has been fully domesticated by an ancient Western cultural vision. That his own view of human nature cannot explain analytically the power and permanence of the very cultural visions of which he is captive is the strongest reason to reject what he says.

Lest it be thought that Wilson is singled out for particular abuse, I must point out that Wilson’s opponents often argue in ways that differ little from his. As is commonplace in attacks on biological determinist views such as Wilson’s, some opponents take such extreme counterpositions that they end up arguing from supposed “facts of nature” to their own particular political and ethical preferences.

One of many egregious examples in the antisociobiological literature is the Sociobiology Study Group’s “Sociobiology: A New Biological Determinism” (1977). After offering theoretical and empirical criticisms of Wilson’s views—all perfectly legitimate and powerful—they argue that there can be no evidence for sociobiology because “the truth is that the individual’s social activity is to be understood only by first understanding social institutions … we know of no relevent [sic] constraints placed on social processes by human biology” (p. 148; emphasis mine). This mode of argument mirrors Wilson’s advocacy view. The Sociobiology Study Group’s “scientific facts” about humans are turned into direct support for their own political and ethical scheme. This logic is as unacceptable in the Sociobiology Study Group as it is in Wilson. Both sides are guilty of attempting to create the illusion that science supports their politics and ethics.

Does this mean that human sociobiology is an enterprise devoid of merit? The very criticisms I have made force rejection of this claim. Since Wilson’s approach to humans is nonevolutionary, a rejection of Wilson does not entitle us to reject human sociobiology. Whatever the possibilities of human sociobiology are, Wilson does not explore them in an evolutionary way. Thus my argument is not about the truth or falsity of human sociobiology; it is an explanation of the cultural forces at work that have led a major evolutionary biologist to reject much of the evolutionary paradigm when he deals with humans, that have made many of his critics equally antievolutionary, and that have led both to resemble medieval thinkers theorizing about the relationship between blood and social order. The genealogical principle, the environmental principle, and the static categories of species in the world, albeit in modified form, are still powerfully present, along with their political and moral accompaniments.