sociobiology: real and imagined

Inclusion of all manner of expertise and political views on the list.
Caution against injudicious condemnation of whole branches of knowledge
and their empirical contributions, especially in the name of political
dogma, no matter how well-intentioned.  Critique of disciplinary
chauvinism.  Questioning of social-scientific orthodoxy.

Beautiful sentiments (if not always elegantly stated) with which I would
wholeheartedly concur.  But now that they've been aired and apparently
elicited no objection, perhaps it's time to reexamine the source of the
controversy to see more clearly what is at stake.  Mark Whitaker's
contribution has been a most welcome introduction to the variety of ways
in which sociobiology (and related fields) have been defined, and the
extent to which the claims of each one have been substantiated.  I would
like to follow up by letting sociobiology speak for itself in order to
more clearly perceive its goals as a knowledge movement.  The movement,
like any other, is composed of a diversity of voices; nevertheless, it
seems prudent to allow it to be characterized by the scholar who comes
closest to being its founder, eminence grise, and source of its
institutional strength and prestige:  E. O. Wilson.

The first notable thing about Wilson's sociobiology is that it is an
epistemological program rather than a theory.  On page 4 of the abridged
edition to the textbook which serves as an introduction to a new field -
_Sociobiology_ (1980: Belknap: Cambridge), he defines sociobiology as

"the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior."

Fair enough.  Since we all agree that human behavior, including
sociability, has a biological basis (as well as others), it would indeed
be chauvinistic of us not to make room for methodologies that differ from
our own.  But Wilson continues:

"For the present it focuses on animal societies, their population
structure, castes, and communication, together with all of the physiology
underlying the social adaptations.  But the discipline is also concerned
with the social behavior of early man and the adaptive features of
organization in the more primitive contemporary human societies.
Sociology sensu stricto, the study of human societies at all levels of
complexity, still stands apart from sociobiology because of its largely
structuralist and nongenetic approach.  It attempts to explain human
behavior primarily by empirical description of the outermost phenotypes
and by unaided intuition, without reference to evolutionary explanations
in the true genetic sense.  It is most successful in the way descriptive
taxonomy and ecology have been most successful, when it provides a
detailed description of particular phenomena and demonstrates first-order
correlations with features of the environment.  Taxonomy and ecology,
however, have been reshaped entirely during the past forty years by
integration into neo-Darwinist evolutionary theory - the 'Modern
Synthesis', as it is often called - in which each phenomenon is weighed
for its adaptive significance and then related to the basic principles of
population genetics.  It may not be too much to say that sociology and the
other social sciences, as well as the humanities, are the last branches of
biology waiting to be included in the 'Modern Synthesis'".

Now we are at the crux of the problem.  This approach, for which social
scientists et al. want to leave room in the study of human sociability
apparently bears no such illusions about them.  Like the natural
historians of the past, the best among them can prepare for a future of
being museum curators, journalists and producers of family programming on
TV, and as for the rest, well...  In all fairness, though Wilson does add
that "[w]hether the social sciences can be truly biologized remains to be
seen", his assumption is that there are two types of knowledge:  the
Truth, which is demonstrated by the laboratory sciences' ability to
replicate empirical findings and to make accurate predictions, and
approximations, useful when no positive science exists to address their
problems, but retrograde and ideological when they have been superceded.

While there is nothing inherently problematic in the (final) chapter on
human societies, which makes some suggestive inferences regarding the
possibility that traits responsible for the plasticity of human social
organization may be an inheirtance from primate ancestors, or that the
rise of the modern world may have been the product of evolutionary change
at the genetic level; in sum, the chapter makes obvious that the
sociobiological project is still very much in the programatic stage;
nevertheless, Wilson's claims of what sociobiology should ultimately be
able to explain illustrate the above point.  Claims such as:

"self knowledge is constrained and shaped by the emotional control centers
in the hypothalamus and limbic system of the brain.  These centers flood
our consciousness with all the emotions - hate, love, fear, and others -
that are consulted by ethical philosophers who wish to intuit the
standards of good and evil.  What, we are then compelled to ask, made the
hypothalamus and the limbic system?  These evolved by natural selection.
That simple biological statement must be pursued to explain ethics and
ethical philosophers, if not epistemology and epistemologists, at all
depths" (p.3)

or:

"scientists and humanists should consider together the possibility that
the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of
the philosophers and biologized" (p.287)

One does not have to be a Lockean or a Rawlsean to find such claims deeply
objectionable.

Closer to home for most on this list is the proposition that sociology "is
now in the natural history stage of its development.  There have been
attempts at system building but, just as in psychology, they were
premature and came to little.  Much of what passes for theory in sociology
today is really labelling of phenomena and concepts, in the expected
manner of natural history" (p.300).  The more problematic aspects of such
a statement are not so much that the social sciences have failed at
system-building but that they will succeed in this as soon as they
incorporate positivist methodology.   

I find it hard not to interpret these statements as anything other than
patronizing to the inexact branches of knowledge and dismissive of their
methodologies.  Wilson supports his claims by reference to the history of
science, but his reading of it is highly tendentious.  It's true that
epistemologically and institutionally, zoology and botany have been
displaced by evolutionary biology.  It is also true that there have been
periodic revolts against imperialist campaigns by the natural sciences,
and it is as a result of one of these revolts that the humanities and
social sciences came to be constituted in the first half of the 19th
century.   Though the proponents of the so-called Romantic Reaction have
been traditionally accused of being obscurantist ideologues in the face of
scientific fact, the more astute among them always maintained that they
objected to the exaggerated claims of mechanistic natural philosophy (e.g.
color IS a vibration of light particles.  Period.), and not to the
quantitative and empirical approach to the study of phenomena in general.
After more than a century of reproaches to Goethe that he should have kept
his poetic nose out of the serious business of science, his critique of
Newtonianism has been recognized as largely accurate by Planck and other
founders of modern physics (Stephenson 1995).  Historically, it has been
the disciplines outside the natural sciences which have had to fight
for the privilege of constructing methodologies which constitute
"alternative" perspectives, not the other way around, and they have had to
do it under conditions where critiques of the natural sciences'
exclusivist claims to the Truth have been purposely interpreted as as
dismissals of all of the latter's research. 

There is little question that rejecting these disciplines' claim as
alternatives and insisting that they are really immature attempts to
develop positive sciences of human sociability invite efforts to reify
social scientific and humanistic categories as biological ones.  Of
course, until racial and other genetic theories are conclusively proven
they remain theories, but given the lack of positive theories in the
social sciences, Rushton and the _Bell Curve_ can be granted identical
levels of legitimacy, especially because these latter do consistently
apply quantitative methods and laboratory techniques.  The legitimacy
granted by Wilson's standing at Harvard and the relatively uncontroversial
status of his research (as opposed to his epistemlogy) carries over to all
such work (in fact, Wilson does cite some of Herrnstein's research
concerning the racial roots behind the differences of child socialization
in the modern world).  It is commonly alleged that the abuse of scientific
theory does not discredit the theory itself, but given Wilson's own 
claims regarding the "intuitive basis" of current social knowledge, it is
hard to blame others for the "hoopla" around sociobiology. 
In the now nearly forty years since Kuhn opened the natural sciences to be
studied by social-scientific methodology, the dissociation of research and
Great Ideas from institutions, the teleological bases of paradigms and
their basis in major cultural trends at large rings quite hollow.  This is
all in addition to the fact that scientistic movements on both the 
left and the Right, from Condorcet's social mathematics to Social
Darwinism have been singularly unsuccessful in overturning the
claim that "quality is noumenal, essential, unmeasurable and determined by
intellectual intuition" (Quinn 1997, 47) and in reducing it to a function
of some "natural" mechanism. 

Finally, Wilson's claim to in effect resolve the division of knowledge
into disciplines and more broadly, Cultures (as per C. P. Snow), made more
explicit in the more recent _Consilience_ (1997), probably
has particular salience on this list, since the same is the stated goal of
world-system theory and especially of Wallerstein's Structures of
Knowledge project.  While the goal of transcending the largely artificial
divisions between disciplines and cultures is certainly a noble one, the
two projects are diametrically opposed to one another.  Whereas
Wallerstein understands this division  - one peculiar to the modern world
- as a product of the defensive reaction to the institutional successes of
natural philosophy in the 18th century, Wilson seems to feel that they are
merely a stage in the construction of a comletely positivist world-view.
The rise of his "New Synthesis" comes about precisely at the time when
outsiders are demanding the right to study scientists and the practice of
science, when physics, the erstwile flagship science which showed a vision
of the future to all other disciplines has largely abandoned the pursuit
of certain knowledge and when the many of the theories promising the
unification of all knowledge are becoming untestable (see e.g. Horgan's
_End of Science_ [1996]).  In this climate, and propped up by the
practical achievements of the ongoing biotech revolution, sociobiology
rallies the troops, reaffirms the belief in the positivist
project and reinforces scientific hegemony, and thus the culture of
disciplinarity.  Whether Wallerstein's project is in turn a bid for the
hegemony of the social sciences is an intriguing question which deserves
to be debated, but there is no prior cause to accuse people on this list
of academic chauvinism when they question the hegemonic
tendencies of sociobiology.       
 
References

Quinn, William W. (1997).  _The Only Tradition_. Albany: SUNY Press

Stephenson, R. H. (1995). Goethe's Concenption of Knowledge and Science_.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University.

-- 
Boris Stremlin
bc70219@binghamton.edu