The corruption of science by peecee politics (1)

I’m currently reading Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature and in it he reports on how politics can corrupt science. My first example, taken from his book, concerns E.O. Wilson (at 108-109). In 1975 Wilson published a monograph entitled Sociobiology, which “synthesized a vast literature on animal behavior using new ideas on natural selection from George Williams, William Hamiliton, John Maynard Smith, and Robert Trivers. It reviewed principles on the evolution of communication, altruism, aggression, sex, and parenting, and applied them to the major taxa of social animals such as insects, fishes, and birds. The twenty-seventh chapter did the same for Homo sapiens, treating our species like another branch of the animal kingdom. It included a review of the literature on universals and variations among societies, a discussion of language and its effects on culture, and the hypothesis that some universals (including the moral sense) may come from a human nature shaped by natural selection. Wilson expressed the hope that this idea might connect biology to the social sciences and philosophy, a forerunner of the argument in his later book Consilence.

The first attack on Sociobiology zeroed in on its main heresy. In a book length critique, the [Jewish, surprise!] anthropologist Marshall Sahlins defined ‘vulgar sociobiology’ as the challenge to Durkheim’s and Kroeber’s doctrine of the superorganism: the belief that culture and society lived in a separate realm from individual people and their thoughts and feelings. ‘Vulgar socio-biology,’ Sahlins wrote, ‘consists in the explication of human social behavior as the expression of the needs and drives of the human organism, such propensities having been constructed in human nature by biological evolution.’ Acknowledging fear of an incursion into his academic turf, he added, ‘The central intellectual problem does come down to the autonomy of culture and of the study of culture. Sociobiology challenges the integrity of culture as the thing-in-itself, as the distinctive and symbolic human creation.’

Sahlins’s book was called The Use and Abuse of Biology. An example of the alleged abuse was the idea that Hamilton’s theory of inclusive fitness could help explain the importance of family ties in human life. Hamilton had shown how a tendency to make sacrifices for relatives could have evolved. Relatives share genes, so any gene that nudges an organism to help a relative would be indirectly helping a copy of itself. The gene will proliferate if the cost incurred by the favor is less than the benefit conferred to the relative, discounted by the degree of relatedness (one-half for a full sibling or offspring, one-eighth for a first cousin, and so on). That can’t be true, Sahlins wrote, because people in most cultures don’t have words for fractions. This leaves them unable to figure out the coefficients of relatedness that would tell them which relatives to favor and by how much. His objection is a textbook confusion of a proximate cause with an ultimate cause. It is like saying that people can’t possibly see in depth, because most cultures haven’t worked out the trigonometry that underlies stereoscopic vision.”

See also Matt Nuenke’s review of The Blank Slate here:
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker. This is probably the best written book on evolutionary psychology yet. Pinker lays it all out, and does so in a thorough and entertaining way. My critique however takes issue with parts of the book that deny racial differences in intelligence and behavioral traits, as well as eugenics, morality, etc. (Revised 12/2005–it seems Pinker has changed his mind or has become more honest.)