To future generations, the Sociobiology Wars may come as something of a puzzle.
The shared beliefs of the disputants were so much more impressive than their
disagreements that historians may wonder what the fuss was about. Perhaps the
controversy will come to resemble the Wars of the Roses, all of whose contestants
believed in the divine right of kings. Their differing opinions as to succession
seem rather trivial by comparison. In the case of sociobiology, all the principal
actors accept the premise of materialism, sometimes called naturalism. They
believe, or at least for the purposes of doing science they believe, that matter
in motion is all that exists, and that mind and consciousness are merely special
configurations of that matter.

Anyone who believes this must, as a matter of logical necessity, also believe
in evolution. No digging for fossils, no test tubes or microscopes, no further
experiments are needed. For birds, bats, and bees do exist. They came into existence
somehow. Your consistent materialist has no choice but to allow that, yes, molecules
in motion succeeded, over the eons, in whirling themselves into ever more complex
conglomerations, some of them called bats, some birds, some bees. He “knows”
that is true, not because he sees it in the genes, or in the lab, or in the
fossils, but because it is embedded in his philosophy.

Sociobiology extended Darwinian insights about bodies to behavior, and may
be thought of as having revived the old controversy about nature and nurture.
Its participants were, mostly, Harvard professors, and included some of the
best science writers of our day. Its two main antagonists, Edward O. Wilson
and Richard C. Lewontin, both born in 1929, occupied offices one floor apart
in Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. For a while, they didn’t speak in
the elevator. Oddly enough, Wilson, the naturalist, was on the side of the genes,
while Lewontin, the geneticist, was on the side of the environment (to oversimplify).
A frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, Lewontin has
recently published under that imprint a collection of his essays, It Ain’t
Necessarily So: The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions. His best–known
supporter, Stephen Jay Gould, is the author of many books on evolution and natural
history. Richard Dawkins of Oxford is only one of the many biologists who have
sided with Wilson.

The conflict, therefore, should be thought of as a dispute between like–minded
professors whose understanding of life on earth differed in detail, but agreed
on a key premise: any reference to a creator or designer must be excluded from
biology from the outset, as a matter of principle. Just as creationists have
their favorite biblical texts, so do materialists have theirs. It is from the
Book of Dawkins (The Blind Watchmaker): “Biology is the study of complicated
things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” No matter
how much they disagreed with one another, they could all agree on that.

The controversy erupted in 1975, when Harvard University Press published Wilson’s
book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. (A twenty–fifth anniversary
commemorative edition was recently published, with a new introduction by the
author.) The Pellegrino University Research Professor at Harvard, and an expert
on ants, Wilson has defined sociobiology as “the systematic study of the biological
basis of all social behavior.” The zoological chapters of his book, dealing
with the social insects, fish schools, birds, elephants, and carnivores, were
well received. But the final chapter, on human behavior, “ignited the most tumultuous
academic controversy of the 1970s,” as Wilson himself writes in the new edition.

Even before the trouble started, Boyce Rensberger, the science correspondent
of the New York Times, wrote a front page article for the newspaper,
“Updating Darwin on Behavior,” outlining sociobiology’s principal claim. In
the older view, Rensberger wrote, the insect societies of bees and ants and
the hierarchies of monkeys were seen as “evidence for the remarkable variety
of nature.” Now, however, researchers were coming to a “more profound conclusion.”
Beneath the variety there lay “common behavioral patterns governed by the genes
and shaped by Darwinian evolution.”

So that was it, then. Genes and evolution had shaped not just our bodies, but
our behavior as well. Human behavior and human nature were not exempt. When
Tom Wolfe referred to Wilson last year as Darwin II, he was being playful, but
he also had a point. For Darwin’s theory of evolution was being adapted to explain
almost everything under the sun. That prospect should give good Darwinians pause,
however, for a theory so protean that it can account for all observations about
life may be little more than a veiled truism.

As late as 1963, the Columbia University geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky had
stated the older view of human behavior. “Culture is not inherited through genes,
it is acquired by learning from other human beings,” he wrote. “In a sense,
human genes have surrendered their primacy in human evolution to an entirely
new, nonbiological or superorganic agent, culture.” The tendency of Wilsonian
sociobiology was to put the genes back in charge. Wilson’s life–long “dream
of a unifying theory” materialized between hard covers in his 1998 bestseller
Consilience. Ever–widening fields of knowledge were united in single
“Ionian Enchantment.” Everything is material, everything can be reduced to the
laws of physics, everything that is alive ipso facto evolved. Mind is matter.
Things exist because they were selected for in life’s struggle. If they hadn’t
been selected for, they wouldn’t exist. Everything is explained because everything
is connected. In the “unification metaphysics” of Wilson’s late period, one
may say, the insights of Himalayan gurus received the imprimatur of cutting–edge
science.

For earlier researchers the word “instinct” seemed a satisfactory explanation
of much animal behavior. Then it fell out of favor—it glossed over complex mechanisms
that were not remotely understood. The history of science has repeatedly shown
this tendency. A new word or concept creates the illusion of explanation—for
a while. Then it wears thin, and philosophers must come up with something new.
The current mania is for genes, thought of as the material cause of a vast range
of human behavior, character, and malady. “Genomania,” as Lewontin has called
it, began at about the same time as the sociobiology controversy. The almost
magical powers imputed to genes reached what may have been a crescendo with
the recently announced “decoding” of the human genome.

Fortified with the new terminology, the study of instinct was revived in the
1960s. Somehow, animals just did whatever was required: find food, avoid predators,
make nests, reproduce. They didn’t have to learn—“only obey,” as Wilson put
it. His own ants were “hard wired”; once born, they marched off and did their
thing without trial or error. When Konrad Lorenz allowed that all these marvels
must have developed through material evolution, by natural selection, the youthful
Wilson was well pleased. “He secured my allegiance.”

A key contribution to sociobiology was made by an Englishman, William Hamilton.
He would repair from his depressing graduate–student digs to the relative comforts
of Waterloo railway station, and there was rewarded with a monumental insight.
Darwin’s theory of evolution had implied that natural selection would generate
a selfish world. It was “the fittest” that survived, after all, and that presumably
meant looking out for No. 1. Yet, undeniably, there was a lot of altruistic
behavior out there. Darwin himself had viewed with alarm the elaborate cooperation
of the social insects. Hamilton’s explanation, published in 1964, took time
to sink in, but once it did, the evolutionists sang his praises and have continued
to do so without end. Kin selection—of course!

A gene exists not just in one organism, Hamilton argued, but also in others,
closely related. Siblings share half their genes, first cousins share one–eighth
of theirs, and so on. (These ratios were arrived at not by comparing the actual
DNA of individuals, but as a deduction from the postulates of Mendelian genetics.)
Consequently, Hamilton argued, an action that endangers the individual but promotes
the survival of more than two siblings, or more than eight first cousins, would
nonetheless be advantageous: it would promote the spread of the gene that triggered
the behavior which otherwise seemed so ill–advised.

Hamilton’s argument became the backbone of Richard Dawkins’ book The Selfish
Gene, and it was a lifesaver for Wilson. The Darwinian scheme had been preserved
intact. It had given away nothing by taking a more “inclusive” view of fitness.
Then Robert Trivers expanded the analysis to more distantly related animals,
positing genes for “reciprocal altruism.” That was judged to be less successful,
but with the costs and benefits appropriately assigned, it could be invested
with an air of plausibility.

The kin selection theory, published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology,
was expressed in obscure mathematics, but that was one of its triumphs. It all
seemed so precise, so up to date, and yet so mystifying to the hoi polloi. Nature
had rejected it! Hamilton was rapidly promoted from his waiting–room outpost.
And when he died of malaria in the course of a research expedition to Africa
last year, his funeral oration in the chapel of New College, Oxford, was not
just delivered by the atheist Richard Dawkins, but reprinted by the Times
Literary Supplement. Tom Wolfe didn’t quite get it right, apparently. Not
E. O. Wilson, but William D. Hamilton was truly Darwin II. “Those of us who
wish we had met Charles Darwin can console ourselves,” Dawkins began his eulogy.
“We met W. D. Hamilton.”

It’s a sign of our times that when Wilson tried to show that an elaborated
version of Darwinism could as easily explain human behavior and nature as it
could the behavior of wasps and ants, the cry of indignation arose not from
dismayed Christians but from a handful of leftist scientists, mostly secular
Jews, based in Cambridge, Mass. The battle over sociobiology was sometimes construed
as left versus right. But Ullica Segerstråle, the sociologist from the Illinois
Institute of Technology whose book Defenders of the Truth: the Battle for
Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond was recently published by
Oxford, writes that “the actual dividing line went, rather, between a particular
type of New Left activist on the one hand and traditional liberals and democrats
on the other.” There is much to disagree with in her tome, but that judgment
seems to be correct. The political spectrum went from left (Lewontin) to center
(Wilson). The right was nowhere represented. (And don’t even think about the
“religious right,” which had by then been banned in Boston.)

You might think that the left would welcome the inclusion of altruism and cooperation
in the Darwinian scheme. But sociobiologists had framed the argument in terms
of genes, which seemed too deterministic. How could a New Society be built if
our tiny masters, lurking inside every cell, hold us (as Wilson said) “on a
leash”? Such a vision could only discourage the advocates of revolutionary change.
So there was a counterattack, led by the Sociobiology Study Group of “Science
for the People.” Their various statements were signed by up to thirty–five names,
often preceded by initials only (to discourage sexist thoughts). In addition
to Lewontin and Gould, three or four other Harvard professors from time to time
signed the statements.

Today, the left’s critique seems a curious mixture, ranging from the irresponsible
to the astute. Brilliant observations are submerged beneath wild political judgments.
Their vehemence stands in marked contrast to Wilson’s moderate and carefully
hedged views. The low point came in 1978. At a meeting in Washington of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science, a protester dumped a jug
of water over Wilson’s head while others denounced his putative encouragement
of genocide, racism, and sexism. Even as the ice cubes were sliding down his
back, Wilson had the presence of mind to note that a biologist in the audience,
a member of the International Committee Against Racism named Garland Allen,
had taken the floor to say why the attack had been justified.

“He said it was all of a piece,” Wilson recalled. “Since the nineteenth century
there had been a strong bias toward genetic determinism, the claim being that
human beings are fixed in their destiny by their genes, therefore there was
nothing we could do about it. Therefore the existing order is the best possible
order, thereby validating the ruling class in their position. It was all a part
of the continuing conspiracy by scientists in the ruling class.” Gould, who
was present, criticized the attack as illustrating what Lenin had called socialism’s
“infantile disorder.”

On paper, the critics were sometimes just as extreme. Fifteen cosigners of
a statement in the New York Review of Books dismissed Wilson’s book as
the latest attempt to reinvigorate theories which in the past “provided an important
basis for the enactment of sterilization laws and . . . the eugenics policies
which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany.” By the time
Wilson deplored “this ugly, irresponsible, and totally false accusation,” he
surely had the vast majority of scientists on his side. He was accused of being
a “determinist,” but nowhere had he said that human behavior was determined
by the genes. “In rough terms,” he explained, “I see maybe 10 percent of human
behavior as genetic and 90 percent as environmental.”

Here he ran into real difficulties, however. Such hedged statements have little
value if the effective cause (whether genetic or environmental) cannot be effectively
established. If one thing happens, the genes are said to dominate; if another,
it’s the environment. No outcome can falsify the theory. Meanwhile, the genes
that are said to cause the behavior (or cause it a little bit, or cause it 10
percent of the time) have not been identified in a single instance. Lewontin
and his allies did make such criticisms along with their political charges.
But suggesting that sociobiology could lead to the gas chambers and saying that
it violated the protocols of science was a poor strategy indeed. The scientific
criticism, often excellent, was buried beneath political comments so ill–advised
that the New York Times, normally sympathetic to left–wing opinion, didn’t
hesitate to take Wilson’s side.

On this score, Segerstråle’s treatise, over which she labored for at least
twenty years—testament, if any is needed, to the padded state of the American
academy today—includes a comment so inappropriate that it puts her entire judgment
under suspicion. She charges, prominently, at the outset of a nearly five–hundred–page
book, and without basis, that Lewontin and Gould “need[ed]” a scandal, “wanted
to be heard [and] wanted to make a mark scientifically. Solution: create a [stir]
around sociobiology, present it as both morally dubious and scientifically wrong—and
in this way create a climate where people will want to hear what you have to
say.”

There is much about the left–wing worldview to disagree with, but the idea
that its proponents’ views are insincerely held for reasons of personal advantage
is about as wrong as you can get. Leftists have had so much impact on modern
thought above all because they really do believe what they say they believe,
and with rather more passion than most conservatives. As for the idea that they
“wanted to be heard,” both were already on the Harvard faculty, Gould had his
column at Natural History, and Lewontin had made a mark with The Genetic
Basis of Evolutionary Change. My guess is that neither “needed” the controversy.
In the case of the less cautious Lewontin, whose views about science have been
strongly colored by his political worldview, it probably worked to his disadvantage.

Meanwhile, Hamilton, Wilson, and Dawkins had pulled off a coup of sorts—one
that would prove to be of immense value to all of evolutionary biology. If you
wanted to explain anything at all, whether physical or behavioral, you could
henceforth assert that there were genes “for” that thing or behavior. Then you
could bring in Darwin: natural selection had “acted on” those genes, causing
them to spread. That took just three words: the genes in question “were selected
for.” After all the rancor and hostility and theatrics, this seemed to be genuinely
scientific. In due course genes were supplemented by other units of selection:
“memes,” invented by Dawkins, and “modules,” a creation of Steven Pinker of
MIT. A good materialist himself, Pinker thinks “modules” have a physical existence.
“Probably,” he writes, in a characteristic passage of How the Mind Works,
“they look like roadkill, sprawling messily over the bulges and crevasses of
the brain.”

After Watson and Crick’s discovery of the double helix of DNA, genes were no
longer Mendelian abstractions. Now they were physical entities—specific segments
along the DNA chain. It was but a small step from that to the indulgent agreement
in the Halls of Biology that genes for anything could be postulated. If they
had not yet been discovered, one day they surely would be. Yet as far back as
1976, Lewontin was causing trouble, telling visitors to his Harvard lab that
“we don’t have genes for noses”—meaning that the DNA segments called genes code
for proteins, not for external features of the body. Just how the cells of the
nose (or any other body part) know that they are in fact part of the nose, nobody
knows . . .  to this day. In one of his recent essays Lewontin says that we
still haven’t found the genes for skin color (but it is assumed they must exist
because the trait is hereditary).

You didn’t (and still don’t) have to know anything about the environment in
which the fortunate gene/meme/module was selected for. You could make up your
own story. Lewontin and Gould dismissed these scenarios as Just–So stories:
How did the leopard get its spots? Well, one leopard accidentally had a “spots”
mutation (call it a gene from now on) and it survived better, because the camouflage
helped. So spotted leopards survived better than plain vanilla ones, and eventually
displaced them. So that was how the leopard got its spots. (Next question?)
The same argument could be applied to any trait that the sociobiologist desired
to explain, whether animal or human. “The method consists essentially of contemplating
the trait and then making an imaginative reconstruction of human history that
would have made the trait adaptive,” wrote Lewontin (and coauthors Steven Rose
and Leon J. Kamin) in Not in Our Genes (1984).

Sociobiology purported to explain diverse aspects of human nature, thought
to be universal in human society. A partial list includes: dancing, cooking,
religion, territoriality, entrepreneurship, indoctrinability, blind faith, xenophobia,
aggression, and warfare. In The Origin of Virtue: Human Instincts and the
Evolution of Cooperation, Matt Ridley adds generosity, sympathy, kindness,
and selflessness, qualities “unambiguously concerned with the welfare of others.”
Some behaviors do seem very ill–suited to the theory—masturbation, adoption,
homosexuality, contraception, celibacy of the clergy. Don’t they reduce the
chance of propagating one’s genes? “It’s a stretch,” Pinker allows, to say that
the celibate “will have more time to care for nephews and nieces and so propagate
their genes that way.” Especially when they retreat to monasteries and shut
out the world.

But that’s okay. The theory serenely rides out this (or any other) storm. Evolution
happened eons ago, you see, so “we are adapted to the Stone Age,” not the computer
age. Genes/memes/modules evolved in one environment, and we live in another.
If the observed behavior corresponds to the adaptation story, the theory is
confirmed. If not, it’s because the environment is different now and culture
is in charge. (Heads I win. Tails you lose.) It fails Karl Popper’s well–known
test: theories must in principle be falsifiable if they are to be judged scientific.
When Robert Wright says in The Moral Animal that Darwinian selection
“inspires a kind of faith,” and that “one” reaches a point where “one no longer
entertains the possibility of encountering some fact that would call the whole
theory into question,” he speaks more wisely than he knows. For there is indeed
no possibility of such a fatal encounter with a fact. Wright fails to realize,
however, that a field that smoothly “explains” whatever exists, with no experimental
outcome that would call it into question, is no longer a part of science.

A peculiar omission from the sociobiologists’ subdivisions of human nature
is the faculty of reason itself. Stephen Jay Gould indirectly drew attention
to this in his criticism of a claim that Eskimo behavior sometimes validates
altruist genes. When food is scarce and an Eskimo family must move, grandparents
sometimes stay behind to die rather than slow down the entire family. Here,
genes are redundant, Gould points out. Old Eskimos can simply figure it out
for themselves, and may be given an incentive to stay behind in families where
“sacrifice is celebrated in song and story; aged grandparents who stay behind
become the greatest heroes of the clan.” Once reason is admitted as a characteristic
of human nature—and in truth it is the characteristic, along with freedom
of the will—it can be shown to do the work imputed to phantom genes in almost
any example that sociobiologists want to bring up.

Nonetheless, in the biology departments and in the academy more generally,
Wilson and his supporters resoundingly won the debate. The claim by Wilson and
Trivers that sociobiology would soon take over the field of sociology has not
been borne out, but it has had considerable success in academic psychology,
where it has advanced under the rubric of evolutionary psychology. Here, the
seminal work was The Adapted Mind (1992), edited by Jerome H. Barkow
and the husband–and–wife team from U.C. Santa Barbara, Leda Cosmides and John
Tooby. A prominent recent addition to the genre has been A Natural History
of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion, by Randy Thornhill and Craig
Palmer, published by MIT Press last year.

In 1975, it’s safe to say, Cambridge collectives would have been on the march
at the mere suggestion of a book about rape–specific “adaptations.” The authors
have wisely skirted the gene word, but that is because the field is so lax that
authors can invent and multiply their own entities at will. “Adaptations” are
vaguely said to be “in” bodies, but Thornhill and Palmer don’t say where. (How
would one go about finding them?) In a foreword, Margo Wilson assures us that
the authors “passionately embrace the scientific method,” but she doesn’t see
(any more than Robert Wright does) that theories that “explain” everything explain
nothing. Ev–psych is currently fashionable, but the vogue will end, as it did
with “instinct,” once its all–embracing character is recognized.

Explaining something by saying that “genes for it existed, and were selected
for,” is little more than a reassertion of the facts whose explanation we are
looking for. Analogously, if the stock market drops, investors, seeking an explanation
in the newspapers, may find a headline like this: “Selling Pressure Causes Stock
Drop.” That doesn’t help—it merely redescribes the phenomenon. We want a reason
why it dropped—adverse political news, or perhaps an Alan Greenspan speech.
“Genes arose and were selected for” has the same defect. It merely asserts that
the phenomenon appeared, then became more common. It arose, one might say, because
it arose, and then copies of it were made. That’s all there is to it. In a devastating
review of the rape book in the New Republic, Jerry Coyne of the University
of Chicago pointed out that the authors’ evidence is so adverse to their thesis
that it is consistent with a simpler and more obvious hypothesis: that rape
is not “adaptive” at all. “As with most sociobiological arguments,” Coyne added,
“only some level of concordance with prediction need be found to brand an act
as an adaptation.”

The left–wing animus against sociobiology becomes understandable once we look
at its major defect in a political light. Sociobiology “explains” (in a very
weak sense of that word) whatever exists. But as Marx said, the left wants to
change the world, not explain it. The world that exists, filled as it is with
injustice, must be replaced by something better; a world without inequality,
for example. Existing qualities of human nature—the dissimilar attitudes of
men and women toward sexual intercourse, for example—can be explained by the
usual, unvarying, and unfalsifiable formula. The trait arose by accident, then
was selected for. But the raison d’être of the left is to champion states, conditions,
and attitudes that do not exist—gender egalitarianism, say. The sociobiologists’
retort that these things don’t exist either because the requisite genes never
did exist, or (fatal flaw) were not selected for, puts the left on the
defensive. So the whole field of sociobiology suffers from a bias against the
potential and in favor of the actual, and in that sense it’s true that it does
have a “conservative” bias.

We can see the same thing in the assignment of costs and benefits in kin selection.
In a plain–language section of his famous article, William Hamilton wrote as
follows: “The alarm call of a bird probably involves a small extra risk to the
individual making it by rendering it more noticeable to the approaching predator,
but the consequent reduction of risk to a nearby bird previously unaware of
danger must be much greater. We need not discuss here just how risks are to
be reckoned in terms of fitness: for the present illustration it is reasonable
to guess that . . . [mathematical symbols follow].”

The point to notice here is not just that the relevant costs and benefits have
not been measured, but that there is no way of measuring them other than
by observing the behavior that they are said to determine. The fact that
the bird emits the alarm call itself demonstrates that the benefits (to the
bird’s genes) exceed the costs to those genes. QED. The theory is “proved,”
but it never really gets off the page and out into the measurable world. Not
for nothing was it published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology.

The critics of sociobiology were using arguments that threatened to undermine
the whole of Darwinian evolution, since the physical, the mental, and the behavioral
are (in the materialist’s world) parts of one material whole. Phillip E. Johnson,
the U.C. Berkeley law professor whose most recent book on the problems of evolution
is The Wedge of Truth: Splitting the Foundations of Naturalism (InterVarsity
Press; reviewed in this issue), thinks that the critics may have “burned down
the Darwinist house in order to roast the sociobiological pig.” They were certainly
playing with fire. The same critical scrutiny “might have far–reaching consequences
if it were ever applied to the generally accepted Darwinian theory that complex
adaptive organs came into existence through the accumulation of micro–mutations
by natural selection,” Johnson writes. “Here, too, the prevailing practice is
to assume that stories of adaptive evolution require no confirmation from genetics,
or paleontology, or anything else except the adaptationist community’s prevailing
sense of plausibility.”

But the critics of sociobiology also accepted the premise of materialism, and
that put them in a weak position. How else did minds appear, if not by evolution?
Lewontin gave points to the opposition when he conceded the “undoubted truth”
that “behavior must, like morphology and physiology, be subject to the forces
of natural selection.” (More recently, he has written: “No biologist now doubts
that organisms are chemico–electrico–mechanical systems.”) Gould makes a similar
concession: “How can an evolutionary biologist deny that Darwinian processes
can work on behavior as well as form?” Game and set to Wilson!

The critics of adaptive rape were similarly weakened. Thornhill and Palmer
had written: “When one considers any feature of living things, whether
evolution applies is never a question. The only legitimate question is how to
apply evolutionary principles. This is the case for all human behaviors—even
for such by–products as cosmetic surgery, the content of movies, legal systems,
and fashion trends.” The critics were disarmed by their shared worldview. “If
Thornhill and Palmer want to lump rape together with tummy tucks and Titanic
as evolutionary phenomena, God (or Darwin) bless them,” Jerry Coyne wrote, his
frustration showing. But he was not about to quit the Church of Materialism
either, so what alternative could he offer?

After a while, Stephen Jay Gould seemed to pull back. He surely saw the danger—that
an attack on sociobiology could damage Darwinism itself. This was far from what
he wanted. The overriding impression created by Gould’s work is that Darwin
is his hero because his theory of evolution has provided intellectuals with
a wonderful battering ram in the war against religion. Gould has himself been
very much a leader in America’s culture war. Here, his antagonist in the sociobiology
skirmish, the aggressively atheistic Richard Dawkins, is his natural ally. By
1994, when Wilson’s book Naturalist was published, Gould was cited in
the acknowledgments, along with Hamilton, Trivers, and others, for “reading
portions of the manuscript and generously providing help and advice.”

Lewontin was not in that number, however. Unlike Gould, he has at times given
the impression that he wouldn’t mind if the Darwinian house did burn down—provided
the materialist order could be preserved intact. As a committed leftist, Lewontin
was ambivalent. On the one hand he could see that “evolution by natural selection
bears an uncanny resemblance to the political economy theory of early capitalism.
. . . What Darwin did was take early nineteenth century political economy and
expand it to include all of natural economy.” Darwin had admitted as much when
he acknowledged the influence of Thomas Malthus. In Bertrand Russell’s caustic
phrase, Darwinism was “laissez–faire economics applied to the animal and vegetable
kingdoms.” On the other hand, Lewontin could also see that Darwinism had done
the job—it had completed “the unfinished Cartesian revolution that demanded
a mechanical model for all living processes.”

To those outside the materialist citadel, Lewontin is interesting not just
because he is willing to treat Darwinism with a disdain that is rarely found
in the Halls of Biology. He seems primarily committed to a remade political
order—to a new society based on egalitarian ideals (a recipe for disappointment,
surely). He sees a thoroughgoing materialism as indispensable to science, and
in an oft–quoted passage (the New York Review article in which it appeared
has not been reprinted, alas) he wrote that that materialism must be absolute,
“for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.” Nature, as he sees it, “is
at constant risk before an all–powerful God who at any moment can rupture natural
relations. For sufficient reason, He may just decide to stop the sun, even if
He hasn’t done so yet. Science cannot coexist with such a God. If, on the other
hand, God cannot intervene, he is not God; he is an irrelevancy.” Few
biologists in our day have spoken so forthrightly.

Lewontin’s 1992 essay “The Dream of the Human Genome” is one of the best critical
treatments of the genome project yet to appear, and my guess is that its strictures
will eventually seem understated. Wilson won the sociobiology war, at least
in the academic departments and in the press, but in another sense it is not
over yet. For there is a book that cries out to be written—a debunking of the
whole “genomania” upon which sociobiology was largely based. Perhaps we should
think of it as the astrology of the modern academy, with the fashionable microcosm
now replacing the heavenly spheres. Just as mysterious emanations from celestial
objects were once thought to shape character (with a role reserved for free
will), so today mysterious emanations from molecular objects are thought to
do the same (with a role reserved for the environment). What we need is a book
that tells us what exactly we do know about genes, what we do not, and whether
(as I am beginning to suspect) the whole concept of the gene is so overburdened
that it may have to be re–thought entirely. Lewontin, the rare geneticist who
is not inclined to make exaggerated claims about his own field, is ideally qualified
to write such a study.

As for Edward O. Wilson, he grew up as a believing Baptist in Alabama, read
the Bible through twice, began to study science, and then lost his faith. But
unlike many others in that position, he has “no desire to purge religious feelings.”
Materialism itself replaced them. Earnestly, he has tried to make something
grandiose out of that bleak philosophy by piecing its parts into a consilient
whole. “Preferring a search for objective reality over revelation is another
way of satisfying religious hunger,” he candidly writes. I doubt it will satisfy
him, or others.

One afternoon, years ago at Harvard, he showed me the ant armies penned in
his office, patrolling about behind clear glass without paying us any heed.
He talked most interestingly about them for an hour or more. Like other visitors
before and since, I went away wanting to know more. God is in those details,
after all. And when Wilson is studying his ants, discovering their pheromones,
writing papers about olfactory communication among animals, he is also doing
excellent science. He is being what he calls himself—a naturalist. In his consilient
mode, on the other hand, not only will God elude him, but synthesizing the –isms
and –ologies of the modern academy is bad science into the bargain. In trying
to explain everything, one might say that he is not really doing science at
all. Wilson’s career reminds us that not only do science and religion not conflict,
but that they actually work together rather well.

Tom Bethell is Senior Editor of the American Spectator and a  Hoover
Institution media fellow.