Why the 25-Year-Old Battle Over Sociobiology Is More Than Just 'an Academic Sideshow'

A scholar's book says the dispute stems from fundamental clashes over research principles

By LILA GUTERMAN

Ullica Segerstrale is not immodest. Yet the sociologist believes she has gotten to the bottom of one of the most contentious scientific disputes of the last quarter-century: the battle over the evolutionary basis of human behavior.

No, she has not proved definitively that nature trumps nurture, or vice versa.

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But after 25 years of listening carefully to the heated arguments, interviewing more than 80 of the players, and reading hundreds of articles and books, she has concluded that despite all the personal attacks, all the charges that the theories are politically and ideologically based, the sociobiology dispute is, first and foremost, about "genuine and deep scientific disagreement." Her account of the debate reveals how different approaches to research can often result in bitter disputes about scientific ideas.

Both sides -- the sociobiologists, led and personified by Harvard University's Edward O. Wilson, and their most vocal critics, Stephen Jay Gould and especially Richard C. Lewontin, also of Harvard -- wanted to see scientific methods prevail, Ms. Segerstrale argues in her new book, Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond (Oxford University Press). And the leaders of each side also felt they were working on science for the good of society -- one by spurring on a new field and the other by chipping away at it.

But the two held fundamentally opposed notions of what good science is. They disagreed not only about what a scientist must do to get at truth but also about how science could (or should) ultimately affect society. Today, although the intellectual climate is more receptive to the notion that genes influence behavior, neither side has backed down.

"The news is that this is a debate about science, very much," says Ms. Segerstrale, a native of Finland who teaches at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

That's news because from the beginning, the scientific disagreements have been clouded by political ones. Mr. Wilson was criticized not only by fellow scientists but by political groups. In his 1975 book, Sociobiology, he defined a new area of study dedicated to the biological basis of animal behavior, including that of humans. Everything from aggression to religious belief, he suggested, has been influenced by our evolution and now lies coded in our genes.

To many left-leaning intellectuals at the time, his ideas stank of genetic determinism and social Darwinism. If human nature had evolved through survival of the fittest, then a relationship between economic status and evolutionary fitness might be seen as an inevitable consequence. Quickly, a group of Boston-area academics wrote a letter to The New York Review of Books tying Mr. Wilson to determinist theories that had supported "the eugenics policies which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany."

Mr. Wilson defended himself by saying that his views had been distorted, but the controversy only grew. In 1978, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, protesters interrupted Mr. Wilson, just as he was about to begin a presentation, with chants of "Racist Wilson, you can't hide, we charge you with genocide!" and poured a pitcher of ice water over his head.

The political controversy "from the very beginning undermined serious scientific discussion about the real merits and shortcomings of sociobiology," writes Ms. Segerstrale. She herself, at the time a graduate student in sociology at Harvard, was inclined to write off sociobiology as "very dangerous." But then she spoke to Mr. Wilson. "I asked him some direct questions, if he believed the things they said he believed. And he said no," she recalls.

Over time, she learned more about how the opposing sides differed in their approach to science, she says. Although Mr. Gould and Mr. Lewontin, both Marxists, signed on to many of the political attacks on Mr. Wilson, they also believed that his scientific methods were fundamentally flawed. Still, they didn't make that argument until after they had raised their political concerns.

The dispute had to do with the use of models in research. Mr. Wilson, like many other evolutionary biologists -- including the University of Oxford's Richard Dawkins and William D. Hamilton, then at the University of Michigan -- used data collected by population biologists to build theoretical models of how evolution might have taken place. The models explained aspects of social behavior. Such modeling inherently requires assumptions and simplifications, such as the premise that evolutionary changes are prompted by organisms' adapting over time and becoming "fitter."

"Wilson thinks the proof is in the pudding," says Ms. Segerstrale. "You have models, you test them; if they pan out, you are onto truth."

But such methods violate Mr. Lewontin's conception of, in his terms, "good science." He has an "almost holy sense of what good science is," Ms. Segerstrale says. He and Mr. Gould see modeling as overly simplistic. They believe that postulating a gene for a type of behavior or oversimplifying an evolutionary process is "bad science." Good science requires studying molecular behavior directly, in the laboratory. Even models that work perfectly may not be accurate representations of reality, they point out.

Ms. Segerstrale calls that view unrealistic, saying, "Most of science depends on plausibility arguments. Science is an ongoing project." Scientists always have incomplete data, so they try to conjure up mechanisms that seem credible, and await further testing to prove or disprove their theories. Mr. Lewontin lacks that "visionary" approach, according to Mr. Wilson, who is quoted in the book as saying of his opponent that "He was always, even in the '60s, sitting in the safe domain, questioning and so on."

Differing conceptions of scientific practice butt up against one another in many controversies, Ms. Segerstrale says, but don't rear their heads otherwise.

For instance, in the early days of the controversy over genetically modified foods, molecular biologists were certain that if they understood a plant in the laboratory, they could predict what would happen in the environment. Ecologists insisted that the biologists should not assume that the plant would behave in the same way once planted in a field.

To take another example, in the cold-fusion debate, many physicists insisted that the reported results were impossible. But other scientists entertained the idea that perhaps B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, of the University of Utah, had discovered a new form of energy, or at least a new phenomenon, and went about trying to replicate their results. The conflict over cold fusion stemmed from "deep beliefs about what is good science and what is possible," Ms. Segerstrale says.

Such debates might be more quickly and rationally resolved if scientists were to "have a nice meta-discussion about what science is" before any specific controversies came up, says Ms. Segerstrale, but she doesn't see that happening anytime soon. "I think that scientists are almost impossible to steer in this direction."

The sociobiology controversy was especially contentious because it touched on sensitive topics about the nature of personhood and because the two sides differed so markedly on the role of science in society. Mr. Wilson and Mr. Lewontin both "had deep scientific ambitions and moral/political ambitions," she says. Underlying all of Mr. Wilson's books and most clearly stated in his 1998 book, Consilience, is a long-term humanistic goal: as Ms. Segerstrale puts it, "The salvation of mankind. And the saving of the earth." He believes that understanding human nature can help us use culture to circumvent problems -- such as violence -- that may be rooted in biological tendencies.

But he intended no immediate social use of his work. In that way, he differed from his critics, who were concerned by the short-term social consequences of scientific statements. When Mr. Wilson said that human behavior had a genetic basis, Mr. Lewontin and Mr. Gould feared that policymakers could take such a statement as a defense of social inequality or support for racist or sexist beliefs.

Mr. Gould, in fact, presented an alternative view of evolution that, were it applied to society, would have more-favorable implications. He said that some changes over time were random rather than adaptive, and that evolution worked by multiple mechanisms. "If you talk about evolution as being very pluralistic, you don't speak about anything that sounds like social Darwinism," says Ms. Segerstrale.

Professional ambition may even have encouraged Mr. Gould and others to promote the sociobiology controversy, she writes. Their political stance could have been "a deliberate maneuver to gain a later hearing for their fundamentally scientific argument."

Although she admits that she thinks Mr. Wilson behaved better than his critics, Ms. Segerstrale says she can't say which scientist was right. "I am not Wilsonian, and I am not Lewontinian," she says, but in her book she tries to present balanced scientific criticism of both sides. As for the moral ambitions of the opponents, she sees them both as "defensible."

Lawrence Busch, a professor of sociology at Michigan State University, praises her evenhanded treatment of the divisive controversy. "Usually, once you talk to one side, you've been branded as a partisan and it's impossible to talk to the other folks," he says.

Even scholars closer to the debate praise Ms. Segerstrale's book. Irven DeVore, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard, says it is "unlikely that there will be another review of this tumultuous period in evolutionary biology that is so thoughtful and comprehensive."

But she has yet to convince many of her readers of some of her interpretations. "My impression of Lewontin is that everything he does is political," says Mr. Dawkins, the Oxford biologist.

Stephen Cole, a sociologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, agrees. "In this area of science, politics and values play more of a role in various scientists' deciding what they think is true than [does] empirical evidence."

In the intervening years, however, the science has moved forward. "The idea of a biological foundation for human behavior has become more acceptable on both scientific and intellectual grounds," Ms. Segerstrale writes.

Sociobiology has spawned several journals and at least two scientific societies, as well as a new field, evolutionary psychology, which deals with universal features of the human mind. The study of animal behavior has become more complex, paying greater attention to nongenetic effects on behavior such as development, perhaps because of the early scientific criticisms of sociobiology. And various genes tied to behavior have been discovered, making Mr. Wilson's original ideas less hypothetical. The decoding of the human genome may reveal even more.

But Mr. Lewontin remains resolute in his criticism of the field. "It's just bad science," he says in an interview. "It remains the same kind of storytelling it always was." He says he has not read Ms. Segerstrale's book and has no immediate intention to do so: "I don't know what it'll tell me that I don't already know." Mr. Gould did not return The Chronicle's telephone calls.

Mr. Wilson has clearly not forgotten the debate either, saying he is "very happy that Ullica has finally brought out her book." He says he thinks that more than a thousand scientists now study sociobiology, but "there are no young people that I'm aware of -- I can't think of a single one -- that is continuing this criticism."

"I have not decided in my own mind whether the famous sociobiology controversy was an important event in intellectual history, or whether it was just an academic sideshow," he says. "I always thought of the criticisms as lightweight."

Ms. Segerstrale is not surprised that the leaders of the warring factions have not changed their minds in decades. Neither has she. "I've figured them out already," she says. "They are just continuing to behave in the same way. The more they behave, the more I am right."

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