I read (not extremely closely, but better than skimming) Aaronson's foreword, the guest post, and the article in question; and I still don't know what about Wilson's work was supposedly "problematic". It's apparently something to do with the "nature vs. nurture" question, but I can hardly remember reading so many words with so little substance. For somebody not involved with the field (e.g. me), this omission of substance makes it very difficult to evaluate the merits of either perspective.
It also sets off some alarm bells, since it's difficult for an intellectually honest (edit: and competent) author to write on the order of a thousand words of evasive fluff and deem it suitable for publication.
OP's link aside, I don't think the SA article comes anywhere close to justifying its attack on Wilson ("racist ideas"), and the quoted bit regarding normal distributions is beyond the pale.
This goes into some of the original accusations of racism he received in the 70s and the background behind them.
Quote:
They accused Wilson of sending human nature back to the concentration camps. Wilson isn’t a determinist who believes that life is purely mechanistic, and he isn’t right-wing - he remains a Democrat and fears the environmental worst from the George Bush presidency. Although Wilson argued that homosexuality might have a genetic element, he also argued that it was therefore natural and should be tolerated. But Gould was good-humoured and discursive, taking an apparently compassionate view of human nature, and Lewontin, a population geneticist who could show that racial differences are genetically tiny, added credence to charges of racism, even though Wilson hadn’t brought the subject up.
Did he think that his opponents were themselves guilty of prejudice? “They were, although they never admitted it,” Wilson says slowly, reaching for the words. “I came from the Old South, I was raised as a racist. I mean, we all were. It was only in my teens that I began to change. But here, if you were called racist - well, in the 70s it was like a death sentence.”
Lovely article and perhaps the first one that people new to Wilson's work, like me, should read. Having read it, I can't say that I came away thinking Wilson was racist, at all. If anything, it inspires me to try to be less emotionally charged when dealing with emotionally charged issues.
Twitter, nor apparently SciAm, is suited to dealing with nuanced, multifaceted issues.
Because invariably, people in the business of replying to short snippets with short snippets, will summarize someone's lengthy work in a short snippet.
And on the basis of reading that summarization alone, someone will have an opinion (and possibly even a reasonable opinion, with no other context available), and then you're into the problem of (1) convincing someone to change their public opinion & (2) arguing from different viewpoints (if one has read the entire work & the other has not but won't admit to not having done so).
> But here, if you were called racist - well, in the 70s it was like a death sentence.”
I find this argument really hard to buy because at the same time someone like Richard Lynn had a successful career despite being openly racist (talking about “caucasoids” vs “negroids” (or is it “congoids”? I'm not sure)
I would also be interested in hearing more on that. It doesn’t pass the smell test to me. Unless perhaps the bar for being perceived as racist in the 70s meant you were a literal klansman.
>Old white man raised in the American South makes me think he's likely to have a bunch of racist attitudes, and that those might leak into his science.
Judging people based on their place of birth and skin colour... I feel like there's a word for that...
I read big portions of Sociobiology while taking a lot of evolutionary biology coursework in college. As stated in the guest post, the book primarily focuses on non-human animals so it's bizarre to me that McLemore is trying to make this about racism in humans without any quotes or anything to tie him to that. It's just an astoundingly poorly written article that SA shouldn't have published for that reason alone.
But I suspect they're employing the same strategy that The Washington Post and others use - post intentionally inflammatory guest op-eds and profit from the influx of clicks.
Here is a publication of the SA article's author in which she and her co-author explain their "default human" critique in more detail (linked in the SA article).
I only skimmed the text. The normal distribution isn't mentioned, but if you combine the SA article with this text (which is linked in the SA article as a reference for her normal distribution critique), it gives the impression that the author somehow thinks that the normal distribution is intentionally "engineered" / "used" as a tool of suppression.
I'm not sure what you read, but I don't see any methodological critique of other studies' statistics. The link under discussion still insists on the "myth of the default human" and has some pretty inflammatory and dishonest language. GP is exactly right.
Are nurses known for being scientifically literate? My daughter has a friend who is a nurse that worked at a hospital throughout the pandemic. She is convinced that Covid is a hoax and has thrown anti-mask parties at her house.
> I still don't know what about Wilson's work was supposedly "problematic".
To oversimplify slightly, his detractors have a deep ideological commitment to the blank slate theory of human development, largely because it implies human behaviour is socially determined and not biologically determined. They believe that if we accept that human behviour is influenced by our genes, it follows that that certain negative human behaviours like racism and sexism will be excused as natural and therefore permissible. Most people can agree that those behaviours are undesirable, but instead of arguing that we can overcome our genetic heritage, blank slate adherents argue that biology has no significant impact on human behaviour and anyone who thinks it does is a racist and a step away from being a Nazi-style eugenicist.
Behavioral geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden receives similar criticism for having the temerity to suggest that genes play some statistically significant role in individual behavior. I don't understand why it has to be all or nothing. Surely the reasonable position is that both genes and environment have an intertwining role to play, and we can measure some of that across various psychological studies combined with genetic profiles, on a statistical basis. Paige was on Julia Galef's Rationally Speaking podcast, and her work sounds completely reasonable and hardly controversial.
Unless one is ideologically committed to an all or nothing view on genes.
So, I'll bite. Maybe this is a poor decision given the tenor of the comments here but I'll try to give a contrasting view.
Notwithstanding her personal experiences, the position that Harden adopts is somewhat of a strawman, and a favorite of those in the behavior genetics community as it allows them to sidestep problems in the field and draw attention to their own research. I think there's some overlap between the blind spots this entails and what the SA article is pointing to. I say this as someone who studied behavioral ecology (basically sociobiology) in college, and has done research in this area as well as behavior genetics.
Before you proceed to comment on Harden, or Wilson, or the SA piece, ask yourself this question: what experimental evidence is there that some gene-based approach to a given sociobehavioral problem in humans in general provides a powerful, rigorous solution to that problem?
The answer is pretty obvious.
I'm not raising this question to play some methodological "gotcha" card. I think this is a case where the lack not only of experimental evidence, but of a scientific culture that avoids the pursuit of such evidence, says as much about the evidentiary basis of the claims, but also the motives and general orientation toward the problems being discussed.
That is, not only is there a lack of experimental evidence regarding sociobiological claim X, Y, or Z in humans as a scientific matter, but the field and its explanations have a paradigm that avoids manipulation or changes of these things as an implicit ideal. The problem that critics have with Harden isn't the focus on genes as explanatory mechanisms, it's the lack of experimental evidence for her claims, and a perspective that sees genes as fixed and as something to be "worked around". Typically in such research you have a model that asserts some "general genetic background" in an individual that has longstanding effects, without specifying such effects or doing any research to mitigate such effects biologically.
Take research on educational achievement for example. In Harden's paradigm, the point is to identify individuals based on generic "black box" genetic risk (yes, polymarker risk is black box), and to tailor their educational curriculum and vocational planning around this, to better match their identity. However, if you really truly believed some genetic risk factors were in play, wouldn't you work to mitigate those genetic factors biologically? Via drugs, attempting to outline neurobiological pathways, or whatnot? What about the risk of labeling such individuals incorrectly? Is there any benefit in using "genetics" as an explanatory perspective for an individual, beyond historical status? Research suggests you get the same outcomes if you just use past performance instead, without any assumptions about causality. And there are individuals whose trajectories are anomalous with regard to genetic explanation. Shouldn't we be focused on understanding that?
Where this dovetails with criticisms of Wilson is a similar kind of genetic predestination paradigm. Maybe Wilson wasn't deterministic per se, but that's strongly implied by his theories. Even within the field of behavioral ecology, there was a sort of shift toward more cognitive and general-function models that allowed for greater flexibility in behavior.
By the point Wilson published his Sociobiology text, it should have been apparent to anyone wading into the literature on human behavior that there were certain sandpits to avoid. Not just politically, but theoretically as well. And this is the racism being referred to. It's an insensitivity to sociocognitive-cultural factors that are paramount in understanding human behavior, at a time when this should have been abundantly clear to anyone studying behavior.
It's telling that the responses to claims of racism made in the SA piece are along the lines of "but Wilson was such a kind person" and "such an environmentalist" as if it's not possible to be a strong environmental advocate and racist at the same time. In fact, this is a classic rhetorical device in defenses of racism, regardless of the truth of any claims about Wilson per se.
I have respect for Wilson, and think there's a lot about his career to learn from in our current age (note his Wikipedia page says nothing about grant dollars, only his ideas and writings). I do not want to say that Wilson as a person was racist, as I that's a dangerous game to play. I also don't want to defend the SA piece as some pinnacle of writing. But I also don't think the SA piece is entirely unreasonable, and regardless of how one characterizes Wilson as a person, I think there's a fair argument that sociobiology as a paradigm as applied to humans is racist, if for no other reason that it explicitly ignores the sociocultural context critical to understanding human experience. You can handwave about this and say "well sociobiology isn't meant to explain everything" but aren't cognitive-cultural phenomena the crux of its limitations? Would that have really been nonobvious in 1975?
> what experimental evidence is there that some gene-based approach to a given sociobehavioral problem in humans in general provides a powerful, rigorous solution to that problem?
The same empirical issues come up with cultural causes. If I recall correctly, Harden says that family income has a 15-20% impact on educational achievement, which is about the same range for genes responsible for intelligence. Or something along those lines. Basically, there are both cultural and genetic factors that can be measured has having some percentage likelihood of influence. To the extent we can rely on such studies. Which again is an empirical issue with reliably understanding something as complex and hard to control for as human behavior. So if one says we can't empirically do that for genes, I don't know why the cultural factors would fare much better.
> I think there's a fair argument that sociobiology as a paradigm as applied to humans is racist, if for no other reason that it explicitly ignores the sociocultural context critical to understanding human experience.
What makes humans so special that genes wouldn't have an influence on behavior? I also don't understand why that position is racist. Genes clearly have an influence on other biological traits. Are we treating the brain as a non-biological entity? Is human culture so different from anything other animals do, that it makes genetic factors obsolete?
> You can handwave about this and say "well sociobiology isn't meant to explain everything" but aren't cognitive-cultural phenomena the crux of its limitations?
It should explain what it can and no more. Same with culture influences. The problem is thinking that it can only be one or the other, otherwise <insert bad thing that happened in the past>.
> what experimental evidence is there that some gene-based approach to a given sociobehavioral problem in humans in general provides a powerful, rigorous solution to that problem?
So Down’s Syndrome is socially constructed?
As for it being a straw man, you’re literally writing that in a thread about someone taking a maximalist position like that.
It's partially environmental, and therefore can be socially correlated. We know of many conditions that are caused by changes in pre-natal environment (e.g. folic acid deficiency in the mother causes neural tube defects). Genes you don't get to pick, but everything that happens after fertilization is absolutely impacted by the external environment in many ways.
The ongoing debate is culture versus biology, with genes being the focus on the biological side. The prenatal environment isn't cultural, although some cultural factors can play a role in the mother's health. Biological factors are always mixed in with the environment, but that doesn't mean the environment in terms of human culture is 100% the determining factor for behavior.
Good summary. It seems to me that from a scientific perspective that having a deep ideological commitment to a given position - no matter what that position is - isn't desirable for all the obvious reasons: bias, negative impacts on truth, accuracy, etc. With ideology having now entered the debate, any chance reaching a common consensus will be greatly prolonged.
As discussion and debate over gene expression has been in the high-stakes category both in the scientific community and across much of humanity for decades it would ultimately make sense to get to the scientific truth of the matter. If it eventuates and we learn for certain that human genes are in fact able to express themselves in ways that the vast majority of us humans now find morally repugnant and that such expression manifests in actual behaviour then as a species we'd be forced to deal with the problem head-on rather than sweep it under the carpet (as we now seem to be doing).
I've little doubt that those who 'believe that if we accept that human behviour is influenced by our genes, it follows that that certain negative human behaviours like racism and sexism will be excused' are acting from the highest moral motives but to personally denigrate and malign the character of researchers who genuinely report scientific research that purportedly shows negative or undesirable gene expression is, in my opinion, extremely counterproductive.
For starters, character assassinations of the type we're now seeing are very likely to deter scientists from entering this field of research or that they ignore researching the field altogether—or perhaps worse—researchers out of fear of being vilified then fail to report the actual findings of their research. I've little doubt that such events have happened in recent decades. Moreover, it's very likely that the character assassinations that have occurred in recent years have been deliberately targeted to deter researchers from pursuing such research and also to persuade funding bodies to deny funding of any such research. After all, a researcher would have to have considerable fortitude and resilience to continue in the light of such attacks on his/her character.
Tragically, in the current political climate, it is just not possible to have a sensible nuanced discussion about race, human intelligence, etc. without one's opponents immediately raising the 'racist' moniker and this has been the situation for many decades. Whilst it was very necessary to debunk the dangerous racist propaganda from the 1930s and earlier, stifling discussion on these matters altogether in the sense that it's now politically incorrect to even raise or discuss them will eventually likely lead to dangerous outcomes—outcomes that could come with nasty unintended consequences.
Moreover, the reticence to discuss matters of race openly and honestly, the repression of gene research information and the vilification of researchers who report or discuss findings contrary to acceptable political orthodoxy is not unique to this field of endeavour. We are not only witnessing similar repression of ideas across many endeavours but especially so in other areas of science—for instance 'facts' concerning COVID-19 and climate change no longer need be based on scientific truth but 'adjusted' to suit the prevailing politic.
I have a foreboding feeling that we seem to be returning to a time not dissimilar that of Galileo's when the Inquisition would send one to prison for possessing or espousing view outside the accepted orthodoxy. The fact that one's views were factually correct being both irrelevant and immaterial in the decision to impose sentence.
Unfortunately, I think you are correct. If I had to pick a time when this became obvious to me it was between one and two decades ago when both university establishments and students started ostracizing and even removing lecturers and professors from their positions for their political or unorthodox views.
When I was at university which was quite some decades before that time it was almost the norm for students to have different political and social views to many of the teaching staff - for that was one of the unstated parts of a student's development.
However, these differences never descended into the depths of personal animosity that we're seeing today. Instead, constant tension been youthful student culture and establishment norms resulted in a cross fertilization of ideas and it formed a substantial part of how students developed into mature individuals. Traditionally, one of the most valuable aspects of students' lives was that they were constantly saturated with many differing and challenging ideas that were outside their core curricula. Debates often followed that further forced students to think in rigorous ways if for no other reason than one had to analyze the diversity of ideas to arrive at a sensible or logical conclusion.
(I'd go as far as saying that what I learned outside the curriculum largely formed me into the person I am today, especially so my worldview, for without this constant interaction with others that view would now be much narrower.)
Back then, it would have been almost unthinkable that teaching staff would have been dismissed for having or stating political or unorthodox views, as there was a well accepted and longstanding understanding that a university was a place where ideas had 'universality' - hence the very term university. Universities were places where we not only cultivated both traditional and new ideas but also where we examined them and argued over their importance. Arguing over ideas honed one's cognitive ability and thus was encouraged. These days, if one puts an 'alterative' view or one that's deemed unacceptable to mention - even if mentioned in quotes or just as a hypothetical - then one is suspect or automatically comes under suspicion and is thus subject to criticism and attack even to the extent that one's career can be seriously damaged or put into jeopardy. Again, once not that many decades ago such unacceptable behavior was almost unheard of.
Nevertheless, universities are just a microcosm of the broader culture and the breakdown in their culture and social fabric that we're now seeing is also occurring across society at large. Nowadays we're witnessing not only a loss of tolerance for alternative views and ideas but also that this intolerance often develops into outright hostility towards those who entertain or espouse alternative ideas even if they deviate only marginally from the accepted orthodoxy. It's as if we're entering an age not unlike those nasty times of heightened religious sectarianism where each orthodoxy was utterly immutable and set in stone.
One doesn't have to be a genius to realize that if one doesn't want to be on the receiving end of hostilities then one should keep one's views to oneself. No further extrapolation is needed to see that such pressures lead to an overall narrowing of ideas together with a reduction in their diversity.
What I've learned from this is how quickly things can go bad or change for the worse. That the Enlightenment took over from the Middle Ages and that it led to the betterment of millions of lives over the next few centuries is no guarantee that humankind will continue to improve this way into the future.
Intolerance towards alternative ideas and lack of concern for facts and the truth ought to be a wake-up call to every thinking individual. That said, what I remain most perplexed about is why philosophers and the best thinkers of our time remain so mute about these issues especially so the reasons for why we arrived in this deplorable situation at all. It seems to me they should be shouting loudly about them at every possible opportunity.
No scientist can choose to believe something is true because it favors the left-wing agenda. Or the right wing for that matter. It's the definition of un-scientific thinking.
Now, some topics are extremely charged and one has to be extremely careful on how to present the data not to stir the nest of hornets in either direction.
People do what they have to do to preserve themselves, their minds and world views. This includes allowing themselves to be brainwashed into believing nonsense if it's necessary to survive.
Scientists are no different. If falsifying results or avoiding certain research areas is what is needed to keep your career - and stay alive - then that's what they will do.
It's not a new phenomena, see e.g. Galileo. Arguably the most extreme case of this was in Stalin's Soviet Union, hence the term Lysenkoism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism) for "deliberate distortion of scientific facts or theories for purposes that are deemed politically, religiously or socially desirable."
We are thankfully nowhere near the extremes of Stalin's murderous regime. No one is going to put a bullet in anyones skull if they publish anything saying men are better than women, or anything about "race". But, if they do, regardless of if the research is absolutely perfect, there is still a definite risk to employment. How many institutions or companies would employ someone controversial? How many people would self-censor to avoid the controversial? Water down what they found etc? In general risk what puts bread on their table? For my money, if that doesn't limit the spread of ideas and search for truth what does?
The long answer to your question can be found in Pinker's "Blank Slate". In a nutshell: the nature/nurture discussion went off the rails after WWII. 'Scientific' racism and eugenics had culminated in the Holocaust. One generation later (i.e. 60s and 70s), a strand called "radical science" had emerged (in the US) that was into deconstruction of ideas. They creatively came up with the assertion than any notion of human nature was the bedrock of racism and eugenics.
When Wilson published "Sociobiology" and mainly talked about non-human animals, they lost their shit completely. All of research, science, and academia, they asserted, was more a negotiation of power distributions than an honest attempt to make sense of the universe. The most aggressive tactic in that sphere was research on the nature of humans. Another generation later (90s), some of those "radical scientists" had secured tenure and made it their gig to teach creative deconstruction and cancel culture to students (yes, for real in the 90s). Pinker's book is from 2002, but you know the rest of the story.
All of research, science, and academia, they asserted, was more a negotiation of power distributions than an honest attempt to make sense of the universe.
Precisely. The approach seems more “ends justifies the means”. If your entire political theory depends on outcomes being socially determined, not genetically, then any science counter that must be attacked by whatever means necessary.
Like you, I was confused by this whole thing. In my mind Wilson is slotted next to Attenborough as a kind and knowledgeable naturalist environmentalist. The only controversy I knew associated with him was his claim that skill with math is not necessary to be a great scientist.
What I could piece together:
People didn't like that he supported the idea that genetics has a large influence on personality, behavior or intellect, a genetic leash as he called it (he also argued against free will). I suppose the fact that Evolutionary Psychology (which is susceptible to just-so stories) derives from Sociobiology is also enough for current people to unfairly accuse him of promoting racism.
Something surprising I learned from all this is cancellations, de-platforming and campus protests of certain ideas already existed way back in the 60s and 70s! The only difference with today is increased connectivity and mass.
> In the ’60s and ’70s it became almost dogma — it was a dogma — to believe that the human brain was a tabula rasa, a blank slate. I don’t think scholars in this generation, even those of middle age, can appreciate how stern was the prohibition against believing that human behavior was influenced by genes in any manner whatsoever.
> But I really was upset at being called a racist, promoting racism and sexism. I was accused of trying to reintroduce a retrograde, outmoded, dangerous philosophy. There was nothing in “Sociobiology” to suggest such a thing. The words had to be taken out of context and tweaked.
> On one occasion, I had a little mob in Harvard Square parading and protesting and holding placards demanding that Harvard dismiss me. On another occasion, when I was to give a lecture at the Science Center, a crowd of protesters gathered at the entrance with signs and shouts and chants and so on. I was ushered in through the rear by University police. My class was disrupted at least once.
---
The SciAm article spent only a few words on Wilson. It instead seemed to really want to air disagreements on how health studies are carried out and IMO, was sloppy in its attempt to shoehorn Wilson in. It would probably have worked better as a stand alone piece on how poverty impacts on health outcomes are ignored.
Another article posted here, defending Wilson, states that he himself later agreed his work was sexist.
So we may need to add specific dates to quotes about him being hounded for "nothing" or it'll not make much sense.
> He acknowledges one charge as having validity, the accusation from more thoughtful feminists that he had over-simplified the role of women. “As time has gone on two things have happened,” he says. “One is that we are vastly better informed about gender differences, their genetic and physiological bases, right down to fine- tuning of hormonal regulation of behaviour. Another thing is that scientists like Sarah Hardy have been able to demonstrate a far greater richness of female flexibility in reproductive strategies. It’s far more subtle and sophisticated than we anticipated. The theory in the 70s was that women were more passive, judging between male capacities, but now we know that women are vastly more powerful than that in establishing relationships
So that's a 2001 quote from a positive article interviewing 71 year old Wilson.
Presumably we've not learned anything about the genetics or other aspects of race since the 70s and so all his theories on that are still valid and anyone who disagreed was totally unreasonable, like the less thoughtful feminists.
Oh and your article, is 3 years later, and in which he returns to it all being a big misunderstanding, that he was technically right and invented "evolutionary psychology" but he just needed to add a disclaimer that although he said that women were genetically designed to act the way his society wanted them to, and not like some of them claimed they wanted to behave, that didn't mean his society was right and they were wrong. But he won a Pulitzer, so he was right and they were wrong.
So on the one side, we have an article where a (then still alive) scientists admit that their initial hypotheses were incomplete and possibly influenced by social factors.
On the other, we have an article attacking a (now dead) scientist for endorsing fundamental concepts that not even the article itself dares to call incorrect.
If anything, the first situation displays strength of character that should be taken as proof that he is capable of introspection where needed, which would make him more trustworthy as a scientist.
The latter shows nothing more than the bad attempt of a racist individual to rewrite science to better suit their hateful world-view wherein people of one skin-colour could never see the whole picture due to their inherent cognitive characteristics and fundamental concepts of mathematics are still subjective.
The issue is most people coming to this are lacking in context, on whose details it seems all sides are not willing to be forthcoming.
When I searched I could not find anything that could be pointed at to justify his being labelled racist. The example you point out is an instance of the just-so type stories I mentioned. It would have been more helpful if the SciAm article had gone into detail with examples like that, pointing out relevant and topical flaws and gaps in his reasoning.
The criticism section of the plato page I linked to goes into some detail and ideas of his relying on group selection can be instantly marked as suspect. It's a shame because if the article had been more on-topic, resulting conversation could have been more substantial.
It also sets off some alarm bells, since it's difficult for an intellectually honest (edit: and competent) author to write on the order of a thousand words of evasive fluff and deem it suitable for publication.
OP's link aside, I don't think the SA article comes anywhere close to justifying its attack on Wilson ("racist ideas"), and the quoted bit regarding normal distributions is beyond the pale.