Sociobiology: A Positive View

It is unfortunate that the criticism recently addressed to E.O. Wilson's Sociobiology by many individuals in the Harvard and Boston communities, particularly by members of Science for the People, has been simplistic and largely unconstructive. As anyone knows who has even sketchily followed the development of evolutionary biology, Wilson's book is primarily a synthesis of work, published in the last decade, that has not previously been considered very controversial except in a scientific sense, and Wilson notes this ongoing scientific debate constantly. Given the importance of sociobiological studies it is not surprising that controversies have arisen; what is exciting is the possibility that many of these disagreements can be resolved on empirical grounds.

Unfortunately I see little sign that Wilson's critics have understood his work. In fact, some criticisms seem to reflect a deliberate misreading of the book. A recent article on the editorial page of The Crimson compared Wilson to Herbert Spencer and attempted to find him guilty by association. This is purely a sophomoric game, just as it would be to compare a modern geneticist of Richard Lewontin's calibre to Lamarck, or to B.F. Skinner. Even during the late sixties, when the emotional energy behind university politics was far greater, it would have been rare for the Crimson to give so much space to such an ill-informed piece. But in those days the tarring and feathering of academics--some of them indeed culpable elitists--was merely a sideshow. Today it is in the center ring.

Marxists and sociobiologists of ideas are certainly correct in pointing out the dialectical connection of ideas with material conditions, yet all of science is not called into question thereby. There remains a difference between science and ideology, though the development of science may be guided by ideological needs and ends. The truth-value of many aspects of sociobiological theory can now be tested, as Robert Trivers has done in a recent issue of Science. Recent work by Harvard professors Lewontin, Gould, and Levins has scrutinized some important and inadequately worked-out areas of natural selection theory; i,e. the methodology underlying efforts to ascribe phenotypic characters to effects of "heredity" and "environment"; the degree of determinism in evolution; the degree to which optimum genotypes can be favored by selection under conditions of polygenetic determination of characters and complex selection pressures. These writers' arguments do not, however, reduce the significance of work by Hamilton, G.C. Williams, Orians, Selander, Trivers, and Wilson on the evolution of social behavior. I believe that most biologists familiar with both lines of work look forward to a continuing exchange between the differing perspectives.

Meanwhile, Wilson has received inexcusable treatment from some colleagues who should know better, as well as from poorly informed commentators. I would like to show by a single, grotesque example how this is true. This example is taken from a letter signed by members of Science for the People including several Harvard faculty. The letter has been widely circulated at talks given by Wilson and contains the following statement:

"Many of Wilson's claims about human nature do not arise from objective observation (either of universals in human behavior or of generalities throughout animal societies), but from a speculative reconstruction of human prehistory. This reconstruction includes the familiar themes of territoriality, big-game hunting with females at home minding the kids and gathering vegetables...and a particular emphasis on warfare and the salutary advantages of genocide. But these arguments have arisen before and have been strongly rebutted both on the basis of historical and anthropological studies. (See for instance A. Alland, The Human Imperative or M.F.A. Montagu, Man and Agression)"

This statement attempts to tie Wilson's argument to that of Robert Ardrey, who is extensively and appropriately criticized in the two cited works. (Montagu is actually the editor, not the writer, of Man and Aggression.) In fact the only thing Wilson and Ardrey have in common is that both authors have commented on the evidence for human evolution published by biological and physical anthropologists, paleontologists and archeologists. Let's examine the critics' claims point by point.

Hunting and the female role: Contrary to the claims of Wilson's critics, anthropologists are in overwhelming agreement that hunting has been an important human subsistance strategy for at least two million years. There is also no doubt that child care has been primarily a female activity. Among all known contemporary hunter-gatherers hunting is largely or exclusively done by males, while females do the majority of wild-plant gathering. Thus Wilson is being very cautious when he says "There is no compelling reason to conclude that men did the hunting while women stayed at home" (during early human evolution) for "Comparisons with other primate species offer no clue as to when the trait appeared." 1

Territoriality: Territoriality, in Wilson's usage, implies only that people will defend, at least some of the time, if they can and if they are threatened, the resources crucial to their survival. All evidence from anthropological studies supports this proposition.

Warfare: Forms of "warfare" and homicide resulting from conflicts over females, over scarce resources, and over ideologies, have been reported from essentially all human groups that are not either 1) spatially and technologically isolated from neighboring groups, or 2) already defeated in the contest for a larger share of an area's resources (i.e. "refuge" and "client" groups.) Referring to hunter-gatherers, Wilson is again cautious when he states: "Systematic overt aggression has been reported in a minority of hunter-gatherer peoples." 2 My own recent research suggests that armed conflict between individuals or small groups was a tactical possibility among a large majority of such peoples and that it occurred before colonial contact. It is not surprising that contests were usually of small scale, for the ecology of modern hunter-gatherers has rarely permitted high-density populations.

Genocide: Although Wilson is not wrong in suggesting that genocide could be of selective advantage, I feel that he has misread the anthropological evidence on this point. Most of his examples of genocide come from relatively complex societies with social stratification. Unequal struggles between prestate societies seem rather rarely to have been followed by extinction of an entire breeding population or local group. Dispersal, adoption or marriage into the victorious group, or slavery seem more often to have been the fate of those defeated. In pre-state societies genocide appears likely to have been a costly strategy. Recent works by Parker (1975) and Popp and DeVore (in press), based on the same body of theory as is Sociobiology, suggest why this should be so: individuals threatened with death and the death of their kinsmen can adaptively expend far more energy in self-defense than can individuals threatened only with the loss of a valuable resource.

"Reconstruction": Any description of human life in the past must be a reconstruction. Any attempt to describe the nature of selection pressures in populations that could not be observed directly must be based on inference. Yet archeology and paleontology have made progress nevertheless. Overall, Wilson's account is more cautious than that contained in the full body of literature which he has abstracted.

Alland's Rebuttal: Perhaps the authors of the N.Y. Review letter have not read Alexander Alland's book, The Human Imperative, any more closely than they have Wilson's. Although more speculative than Sociobiology, it tends to support the same view of man. For example, Alland states, "Thus there is the possibility that warfare among early hunting peoples could have had an effect on the evolution of modern man." 3 Alland speculates that man has either a potential or a need (he is not clear) for identification with "Socially defined objects, either humans, ideals, territory, or any combination of these." 4

Here identification is "the social bonding of an organism to another or a group of organisms, usually of the same species. While the ability to identify may be genetically determined..." the form of identification is not. 5 According to Alland, another human universal is the "Tendency to avoid ambiguity" which is "in part also biological." 6 Although I do not feel comfortable with so many non-operational terms, Alland has described here essentially the same characteristics of indoctrinability (Campbell 1972) and xenophobia (in Alland's terms, a distinction between a group-identified-with and others, sharpened by the "tendency to avoid ambiguity") which Wilson presents in Sociobiology. While the same characteristics are being talked about, there is no doubt that the respective world-views or the two authors have influenced their choice of terminology. I doubt, however, that the future hangs on such issues. Wars are not won by calling them "struggles for national liberation" or "struggles for national liberation" or "struggles against communist insurgency." In the long run, the logic of material conditions tends to win out. Thus far, natural selection theory represents our most systematic understanding of this logic. The theory's development depends upon our continuing efforts to test current models against factual data. Wilson's critics have set a poor example of how this can be done.

Previous work has confirmed the following major points.

1) Natural selection has been established as a major cause of changing gene frequencies in populations of organisms, and, together with allometric adjustments, of changes in phenotypes.

2) Selection experiments carried out with a number of species, inadvertently or intentionally, have shown that it is possible to select for behavioral traits (see for example Scott and Fuller 1965, Scott 1966, Lagerspetz 1964, Dobzhansky and Spassky, 1967.)

3) Comparative studies have shown that some human capabilities, (speech, bipedal walking, patterns of smiling, etc.) are species-specific traits and as such have a genetic basis. While we cannot specify the particular genes underlying these or other complex behaviors, there can be no doubt that such genes exist. Because we cannot, and should not, conduct breeding or selection experiments on humans, it may be some time before we are able to map the complex interactions between genes, and between genes and environments, that underly the development of such behaviors. In this respect behavioral traits are not different from metrical traits such as height. Indeed, the distinction often made between behavioral traits and physiological or morphological traits is essentially spurious. We can show that genetic (as well as environmental) factors regulate hormone production, and that hormones in turn influence mating and dominance. But our effort to distinguish a behavioral and a non-behavioral part of this chain does not reflect a real ontological distinction. As Spuhler (1968) correctly observes, "In some sense, most, if not all, of the many thousands of loci in the human genome are concerned with behavior." 7 Rather, the distinction between behavioral and non-behavioral traits reflects a naive, dichotomous perception of mind and body. Thus the contention of Wilson's critics that it is "an unproven assumption that genes for behavior exist" is not only incorrect by conventional standards of scientific demonstration, but also reflects an uncritical assumption that mind and body, structure and process, can be clearly distinguished.

Growing out of this naive perception is another false notion. The critics appear to believe that a theory which talks about substances (genes-bits of DNA) must be more deterministic than one which talks about processes (climatic or nutritional influences, etc.). Clearly there can be no such thing as a purely genetic theory of life or behavior. Moreover, a theory which invokes gene-environment interactions in the causation of behavior, as advanced by Wilson and many others, is not necessarily more deterministic than is a purely "environmental" theory (which is also an impossibility). The critics' misunderstanding is basic: a casual model is deterministic only to the extent that it narrowly specifies possible outcomes from an interacting system of variables. For example, a model which interprets differential infant mortality rates as due to differences in parental economic status alone, might be more deterministic or less deterministic than a model which interprets such rates as resulting from effects both of genetic background and environmental context.

A priori, sociobiological models do not necessarily imply a greater constriction of the possibilities for constructive social change than do "environmental" models proposed by cultural materialist writers such as Marvin Harris.

It is surprising that individuals concerned with social change have summoned such a battery of misleading arguments against Wilson's presentation of a body of scientific theory which may, either in confirmation or falsification, help us better understand how to effect these changes.

Sociobiology's most prominent critics earned my respect during the late sixties for their rejection of an ideology that saw Vietnam as a moral war and Harvard as an Ivory Tower. Harvard is no more an Ivory Tower today, but in attacking E.O. Wilson, the critics now seem to be fabricating a reactionary, not fighting a real one.

Martin Etter is a student at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, studying social anthropology.

Footnotes

1. Sociobiology, 1975, p. 567.

2. ibid, p. 565.

3. Alland, The Human Imperative, 1972, p. 143.

4. ibid, p. 165.

5. ibid, p. 161.

6. ibid, p. 165.

7. Spuhler, "Sociocultural and Biological Inheritance in Genetics: Biology and Behavior Series, Rockefeller University Press. New York.