Richard, I sincerely recommend you to read this. It is a good intro to socio-biology.
Mine
One of the founders of socio-biology decipline in the US, Edward Wilson, says the following in introduction to _What is Sociobiology_:"Sociobiology is defined as the systematic study of the biological basis of all forms of social behavior, including sexual and parental behavior, in all kinds of organisms including humans. As such, it is a discipline inevitable discipline, since there must be a systematic study of social behavior. Sociobiology consists mostly of zoology. About 90 percent of its current material concerns animals, even though over 90 percent of the attention given to sociobiology by nonscientists, and especially journalists, is due to its possible applications to the study of human social behavior. There is nothing unusual about deriving principles and methods, and even terminology, from intensive examinations of lower organisms and applying them to the study of human beings. Most of the fundamental principles of genetics and biochemistry applied to human biology are based on colon bacteria, fruit flies, and white rats. To say that the same science can be applied to human beings is not to reduce humanity to the status of these simpler creatures". (http://www.runet.edu/~lridener/courses/SOCBIO.HTML)
(From Edward O. Wilson, "Introduction: What is Sociobiology?" In Michael S. Gregory, Anita Silvers, and Diane Such (Eds.). 1978. Sociobiology and Human Nature: An Interdisciplinary Critique and Defense. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, pp.
1 - 12.)After the publication of Wilson' s famous socio-biology, three projects were conducted along the lines of same sociobiological arguments. The Human Genemo project, Minnesota Twin Studies, and studies on brain imaginings and sex differences. These scientists continued, and still continue, to receive fundings from government institutions, universities, and non-governmental institutions like Pioneer and Heritage Foundation. The recent researches conducted along the lines of sociobiology are Richard Dawkins' selfish gene studies. Val Dusek, a scientist writing on the debate over sociobiology, says the following about the political nature of 3 socio-biology projects: (http://www.ferris.edu/isar/archives/dusek.htm).
I continue:THE HUMAN GENOME PROJECT
"The Human Genome Project and the biotechnology industry splattered the press with announcements of amazing scientific discoveries, both real and imagined. Weekly there were headlines of the discovery of a "gene for" this and that trait. Often these genes for behavioral traits of general interest are merely one link in an immense network of biochemical pathways that produced the trait. Absence of the gene led to absence of the trait, but the gene alone was not sufficient for the trait, with numerous other genes and environmental factors were involved. A number of "breakthroughs" in the discovery of genes for psychological maladies such as manic depression, schizophrenia, and alcoholism turned out to false alarms, but the public was often unaware of the quiet back page retractions of claims that had earlier been trumpeted on the front pages. Nevertheless the weekly assault of newspaper articles claiming the discover of genes for almost everything (including television watching) made the public believe that numerous genes for behaviors and mental conditions had been discovered. Daniel Kosman, editor of Science magazine, could claim authoritatively that the nature-nurture controversy was over and that nature won (Kosman, 1984)".
THE NEW TWIN STUDIES
During the eighties was the extraordinarily wide media publicity for the Minnesota Twin Studies. Shortly after the publication of Wilson's Sociobiology, hereditarians suffered the embarrassment of the exposure of the later twin studies of Sir Cyril Burt as likely frauds. Since Burt's work had been used by Jensen and others to base theories of hereditary racial IQ differences, this left a gap. Thomas Bouchard and colleagues at the University of Minnesota (conveniently in one of the "Twin Cities," home of the Minnesota Twins baseball team.) gained extraordinary publicity in all major US newspapers and magazines for his "eerie" anecdotes about coincidental similarities among twins. Bouchard was unable for almost a decade to receive grants from National Institutes of Health or National Science Foundation, but was supported by the Pioneer Fund which had been founded explicitly to foster the spread of genes of the original white inhabitants of the US (a few years ago the word "white" was deleted from its mission statement, but the fund has a long history of association with segregationist, anti immigrant and white supremacist figures). Bouchard was also unable for years to get published in a peer reviewed journal for seven years, but during this period was able to publish accounts of his research in all major news magazines and papers in the US.(Dusek, 1987) He
also introduced a segment on telepathy among twins for the TV show Unsolved Mysteries. Reviewers for Science magazine rejected his research articles, but the political news section of Science published glowing accounts of that same research. Bouchard was claimed by one reporter to have misrepresented his results as published (Bazell, 1987). Many scientists outside of the field assume Bouchard's work is solid, and fellow hereditarians in psychology praise his work even though critics were unable to look at his data. The crucial part of the research is the documentation of the genuine separateness of rearing of the twins, an area where past studies had failed. Leon Kamin has raised doubts about the separateness of Bouchard's most famous pair of twins, the Jewish/Nazi pair whose foible of double toilet flushing entered art in the Scharzenegger/De Vito movie Twins. Bouchard's group promised a book length study a decade ago, but it never appeared. The Human Genome Issue of Science published a review article by Bouchard covering research that Science's peer reviewers had earlier rejected. What did this matter if itbolstered the importance of genetic engineering by showing IQ and personality traits were 50% to 80% heritable? Steve Pinker and other scientists follow Bouchard's lead in citing "spooky" and "eerie" coincidences supplied by Bouchard. These include such amazing coincidences as two twins from the wild west who both wear cowboy hats and drink the same brand of beer, twins who live on streets with the same name, or have dogs with the same name. Some of the coincidences (such as twins who both wore seven rings), if not staged for the researchers, are genuinely amazing, but they are hardly amenable to the scientific method. One of Bouchard's colleagues, Lykken, fantasizes about an "emergenesis" statistics that will draw conclusions from single cases, but sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists such as Pinker (who contrast themselves with humanists by touting their own devotion to lawful regularities and replicable findings) appeal to Bouchard's unique coincidence anecdotes to make their case. (Pinker. 1994, pp.327-328, 1997. pp. 21-22).BRAIN IMAGING AND SEX DIFFERENCES
"Claims have been made since the 1970s concerning differences of male and female brains. One study, which used fewer than a dozen brains of either sex and compared brains of aged women who died of natural causes with those of young men who died mainly in motor accidents apparently measured numerous features of the brain until it found one in which sex differences appeared (the splenium).(Lacoste-Utamsing and R. Holloway 1982, Alper 1985). This study was publicized with headlines such as His and Hers Brains. An earlier series of studies showed women more able than men to process different messages fed simultaneously into left and right ear, though these studies made no tie with actual brain anatomy.(Kimura 1987) Differences in scores on math aptitude tests of boys and girls were used to infer a male math gene. (Benbow and Stanley, 1980). The genetic explanation was chosen because the boys and girls were claimed to be in the same environment because they had taken the same math classes! This theory lives on. (Hammer and Dusek, 1995) These various claims were popularized in a book which combined them with quotes from Steve Goldberg on the inevitability of patriarchy, and from Michael Levin on the lack of competitiveness and motivation of women and the common but now erroneous claim that there are no female chess grand masters in a popular book Brain Sex: The Real Differences Between Men and Women (Moir and Jessel, 1991) which was in turn made into an even worse video marketted for secondary school classroom use.
In the 1990s, however, Functional MRI studies, which are able to trace moment-to-moment changes in glucose concentrations in the brain, were claimed to show defnititive differences in brain localization of men and women thinking in a particular linguistic task (Shaywitz, Shaywitz, and Pugh 1995). However only about half the female subjects showed the different localization from the males. The other half of the females showed the same result as the males. Composite color diagrams of a brains with all the male subjects scanning results colored in on one and all the females on another illustrated the article, and this was misinterpreted in the popular press to be a direct photographs of single male and female subject, giving "visual proof" that men and women think differently. "Every social explanation has been exhausted. It is innate." (Leo, 1995).
Finally, the initially controversy of E. O. Wilson's sociobiology had been forgotten by many. It took a bit over a decade for the sociobiology debate to recede from memory and many of its theses to be revived under the banner of "evolutionary
psychology."
Now, people do not want to confront the history of sociobiology in the US. They are completely blind on this issue, and see sociobiology as a method of science only. We know that US Supreme Court declared the constitutionality of sterilization laws in 1927, and many states practiced them till 1960s.
The Mankind Quarterly is one of the "scientific" journals in the dicipline of sociobiology that extensively publishes in the areas like eugenics and evolutionary phschology by scientists ie., Lynn, Rushton and Peterson. The journal publishes articles so called "Virtues in Racism" (http://www.mankind.org/index.html) or critiques of anti-discrimnation laws by Washington policy analysts in its co-associate JPSES.here you go...(http://www.mankind.org/ss4.htm?mgiToken=CDA00E1263E02C939)
"Discrimination and Differentiation:
An Ethical and Biological IssueGeorge Sunderland
Policy Analyst, Washington, D.C."This paper discusses the ethical and biological implications of the concept of discrimination. The author perceives freedom of speech and action as endangered by prevailing anti discrimination laws and notes that certain of these run counter to sociobiological reality".
Mine Aysen Doyran
PhD Student
Department of Political Science
SUNY at Albany
Nelson A. Rockefeller College
135 Western Ave.; Milne 102
Albany, NY 12222
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Mine Aysen Doyran
PhD Student
Department of Political Science
SUNY at Albany
Nelson A. Rockefeller College
135 Western Ave.; Milne 102
Albany, NY 12222