Defenders of the Truth: The Sociobiology Debate by Ullica Segerstråle
“The characters in my story are all defenders of the truth — it is just that they have different conceptions of where the truth lies.”
— Ullica Segerstråle
It's always risky to return to something that made a big impression on you when you were young. If at 35 that favorite movie you had at 12 isn't as good as you remember it, and the book that blew your mind at 16 is actually pretty simplistic and juvenile upon revisit, do you really want to know?
I had such worries about Defenders of the Truth: The Sociobiology Debate, which I first read in 2008 at the age of 24 and recently decided to pick up again. I'd recommended it on a podcast and I wanted to know whether it was as good as I remembered or if I had made a fool of myself.
I once mentioned Defenders when introducing the word "erisology", an umbrella term for "the study of disagreement". And that's what this book is: a long, very thorough history and analysis of an extremely complicated disagreement. Or perhaps more correctly an extremely complicated structure of disagreements involving dozens of actors and spanning several decades. In retrospect I think my own preferred approach to making sense of disagreements owes a lot to Segerstråle's work in this book. It's certainly been a goal of mine to emulate it.
"The Sociobiology Debate" gets its name from Edward O. Wilson's book "Sociobiology", published in 1975. It was a massive tome discussing the biology of behavior across many species, among them Wilson's own specialty — the social insects. That didn't provoke much debate by itself, but the opening and closing chapters did. They took the thinking from the rest of the book and speculatively applied it to humans, arguing that a future, more developed science of sociobiology would be able to explain our behavior as well.
This caused a big stir that grew to involve scholars across various subdisciplines of biology as well as academic psychologists and philosophers, plus a good helping of political activists (including a group specifically formed to fight sociobiology). The fighting went on for years in books, articles, reviews and conference talks. It morphed and mutated and brought in new people over time, but it never really stopped. Defenders was published 25 years after Sociobiology and is itself 20 years old now. The battles have continued, more decentralised, complex and confused than before.
The author Ullica Segerstråle, a chemist turned sociologist originally from Finland and now at the University of Illinois, is likely better equipped to write this history than anybody else. Not only did she spend years doing research and interviewed all the major players about their role in the controversy, she was present at important events including meetings of the activist Sociobiology Study Group and the infamous seminar when a group of protesters poured a pitcher of water over Wilson.
Her book is divided into three parts, titled "What happened in the sociobiology debate?", "Making sense of the sociobiology debate" and "The cultural meaning of the battle for science". The first not only tells us what happened but also goes into the historical background. There's a lengthy history of the field leading up to Wilson, dipping more than once into the philosophy of science and of biology specifically. This part can be heavy to get through if you didn't come for a primer on population genetics, but it sets up the pieces for what comes later quite nicely.
After going through who said what and when for about 150 pages, Segerstråle in the second part turns to explaining the motives of the different sides and players — what they wanted, what they thought was important, what they took for granted, and the conclusions they drew from that. In the final third she returns to her own present, looks at the debate after two and a half decades to discuss its relationship to the Science Wars in the '90s, to philosophical debates about the nature of the will, and the meaning of the "Enlightenment Quest".
Wilson and Lewontin at the center
What stands out about the sociobiology debate is how many "fronts" it had and on how many levels you can describe it. From high up above there's the familiar macro-conflict between "nature" and "nurture"", which here like always turns into confused, muddy complexity as you get closer. Beneath there's a set of interlocking disagreements about the proper relationship between science and politics, the duties of scientists and the criteria for what counts as good science, all energized by personal scientific ambitions, deep moral convictions, clashing personalities and academic turf wars.
Segerstråle handles this by including a large cast of characters, each with their own concerns, but zooming in and focusing on one specific conflict for a good part of the story: that between Wilson and his Harvard colleague Richard Lewontin.
Lewontin, himself a population geneticist, became Wilsons primary critic (even though he didn't necessarily want the role). This is explained by him having, at the same time, scientific and political objections to Wilson's work.
Due to their differing temperaments and academic backgrounds they didn't agree on what constituted good science. Wilson was a naturalist, who spent most of his time in the field studying animals, and considered speculation based on observation to be scientifically respectable. He believed that science progressed through bold, creative leaps into new territory where rough drafts could establish a presence to be further developed later.
His claims about humanity in Sociobiology (and in his later books "Genes, Mind and Culture" and "On Human Nature") were thus not facts demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt and not intended to be. They were plausibility arguments that would in Wilson's mind later be worked out and put on more solid ground as the science of sociobiology progressed. Therefore he saw fit to use, for instance, formulas that were known to be flawed, because they were the sort of thing a stronger version of his theories would include.
To Lewontin this was all unacceptable. His philosophy of science was that of a hard-nosed experimentalist used to dealing with molecules. He disliked speculation and is described by a colleague as extremely smart but not very creative or imaginative. As he saw it, science progressed by the gradual establishment of reliable physical facts, and so-called "science" that didn't explain things in terms of the real, concrete mechanisms involved wasn't real science. A case in point was research on intelligence and its heritability. He believed it was possible in principle to study the influence of genetics on intelligence, but only in terms of the actual biochemical effects in the brain of known, identified genes. Research that dealt with abstractions like IQ scores derived from tests and then connected this mathematical construct to hypothetical genes was definitely not serious.
Moreover, he had a particularly cynical view of what motivated researchers in the fields he considered pseudoscientific. Because properly scientific reasoning established its conclusion as an incontrovertible fact, supposedly scientific arguments that fell short of this standard — such as the speculation and plausibility appeals that made up Wilson's draft of human sociobiology — was to Lewontin scientificially worthless not just in his own personal opinion, but clearly so even to the people who engaged in it. Thus they must have ulterior motives. These motives could be careerism, or lies in the service of a regressive political agenda.
Lewontin was primed to make negative assumptions about Wilson's ideas by having in mind examples from scientists in history that he considered obvious examples of outright lying for racist reasons. Segerstråle brings up his harsh judgment of the 19th century zoologist Louis Agassiz who he confidently declares a liar. In his eyes it was simply impossible to honestly believe something false — because it's impossible to have valid, incontrovertible, evidence for it.
At the centers of different worlds
This all illustrates how we often underestimate exactly how much and in how many ways other people's assumptions, concerns and motivations differ from our own. We use this miscalibrated understanding to draw further conclusions and build complex but often erroneous mental representations of other people's beliefs. That we also in turn overestimate other people's understanding of our motivations, concerns and assumptions and therefore misinterpret the reasons for their behavior towards us makes it even worse.
It also shows how often disagreements can't be reduced to a single issue. The conflict between Wilson and Lewontin wasn't purely scientific nor purely political. Scientists in different fields may disapprove of each other's methods but typically prefer to keep quiet to making a stink about it. But if politics come into play the equation changes. Lewontin was a self-described Marxist and radical who believed that bad science could easily be used by actors trying to justify the social status quo, in a way that good, correct science could not. In this way his scientific and political beliefs were intimately connected.
Given some core disagreements, and the fact that ideas can be more or less compatible with other ideas, you can almost picture how cohesive but mutually incompatible worldviews grow like crystals from a few divergent "seed" convictions. And it wasn't just the two of them. Segerstråle describes the formation of separate group belief systems on different sides of the conflict — belief systems that determined how various pieces of evidence was interpreted.
Thus, we can say that the two academic camps that had formed on the basis of the IQ and sociobiology controversies effectively came to live in two different worlds of factual knowledge, taken-for-granted assumptions, and attitudes towards such things as the media. Basic social psychological theory can make some predictions as to what will typically happen in a case of such pre-existing interpretive frameworks. Any incoming information will be accommodated in line with existing convictions; various well-known cognitive defense mechanisms will be operating to effectively protect the members of each camp from serious challenges to their existing 'knowledge'; and within each camp, members will reinforce one another's beliefs.
This in particular once convinced me that when you try to make sense of a disagreement you have to make the effort to understand the interpretive frameworks to which each side subscribes. It's difficult because it requires figuring out other people's underlying mental architectures that they themselves take for granted enough to be unwilling or even unable to articulate in communication. You have to look for clues and draw careful, tentative conclusions. It's like being a detective.
Planters, weeders, couplers and decouplers
Getting a glimpse what's in another's mind can be both fascinating and a little unnerving, like seeing the dark silhouette of a large animal under water. There were parts of the book where I was both fascinated and unsettled by getting a view of belief systems that at once made others' motivations easier to understand, but also felt threatening because of how incompatible with my own viewpoint they were.
For example, I'm a "planter" at heart. Segerstråle distinguishes between "planters and weeders in the garden of science" where planters focuses on science as the generation of new hypotheses, theories and explanatory models and "weeders" on criticizing the hypotheses/theories/models that aren't up to snuff. Members of the camp that agreed with Lewontin that not everything called science was created equal and that undercooked theorizing lent itself to political misuse and thus constituted a continuing threat of social harm, were more likely to be characterized as "weeders". Segerstråle quotes from "Not in our Genes" by Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose and Leon Kamin:
Critics of biological determinism are like members of a fire brigade, constantly being called out in the middle of the night to put out the latest conflagration, always responding to immediate emergencies, but never with the leisure to draw up plans for a truly fireproof building. Now it is IQ and race, now criminal genes, now the biological inferiority of women, now the genetic fixity of human nature. All of these deterministic fires need to be doused with the cold water of reason before the entire neighborhood is in flames. Critics of determinism, then, seem to be doomed to constant nay-saying, while readers, audiences and students react with impatience to the perpetual negativity.
The "planters" in question, who were more liberal with speculations, would in turn strongly disagree that their theories implied anything of the sort Lewontin and his coauthors claimed. Partly this reflects a difference of opinion on the relationship between science and society: planters tended to be scientific traditionalists who often believed that "is" didn't necessarily imply "ought", that the freedom of inquiry was essential and itself a moral good and that restricting research output due to political concerns was a serious threat. Conversely, the weeders acted as if it was the norm for scientists to consider the social consequences of their research. Perhaps, suggests Segerstråle, they wanted to bring about such a norm by acting as if it already existed.
This might sound familiar to anyone who's read my article on the spat between Sam Harris and Ezra Klein, which shares a lot of characteristics with the sociobiology debate and ended with a discussion of "coupling" vs. "decoupling" attitudes towards science and society. Was it simply a conflict between "decouplers", who prefer to decouple scientific questions from their social context and implications, and "contextualizers" (or "couplers") who believe it's impossible to do so and dishonest to pretend you can?
You might easily think so, especially since my initial characterization of decoupling is in fact an amalgam of two ideas: Keith Stanovich's notion of cognitive decoupling — the practice of excluding the real world aspect of a scientific/logical problem and treating it as a formal exercise — and what Segerstråle calls "coupled thinking". She mentions it twice in the book, the first time as the belief that good scientific practice and progressive social views goes hand in hand and thus that correct science could virtually by definition not be used for politically regressive ends, and the second time more generally as the belief that those who disagree with one's own scientific views do so for political reasons.
It explains some of the controversy but by no means all of it. Some scientists on both sides did strive for separating science and politics, like Richard Dawkins, Peter Medawar, John Maynard Smith and Salvador Luria, but notably not Wilson himself. Sociobiology and his following books, especially his 1998 work Consilience, was part of a grand moral-scientific agenda that involved putting morality on a genetic foundation and remaking the humanities to be informed by biology.
Does that mean that Wilson was in fact every bit the conservative (or worse) hierarchy-hugger the critics imagined? Not really. While nature vs. nurture is often cast as conservative vs. progressive, this fight took place in academia and genuine conservatives were nowhere to be seen. To the extent that the controversy had a political dimension, it was a fight between radicals (often but not always explicitly Marxist) and liberals. Wilson's desire to work out a genetic basis for morality did clash with a certain radical conception of humanity, which made some critics code it as right-wing, but it, and he, was not.
In other words, he didn't quite play along with the villain role assigned to him by some critics. Segerstråle discusses the often highly uncharitable readings some of them had to subject his words to in order to make him say what was required of him. His agenda was primarily anti-religious, not politically conservative. Wilson wanted to free people from the restrictive rules imposed on them by organized religion, and considered sociobiology a way to ground morality in something other than religious belief. In a way he was a bit like Lewontin in that he seems to have believed that true science (a "genetically correct moral code") would by default have beneficial social implications.
Dawkins and Gould: the next generation
This fighting of different, to each other orthogonal fights carries over from Wilson and Lewontin to their spiritual successors, Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould. Dawkins and Gould fought over the popular conception of evolution during the '80:s and '90:s, a rivalry Segerstråle discusses in the last third. To be very brief, Dawkins' view is centered on natural selection of individual genes and gradual adaptation to the environment as the core mechanism of evolutionary change, while Gould argues that this pure, algorithmic view is inadequate. He insisted that structural path-dependency and contingent events played large roles in evolution and couldn't just be brushed aside.
Just like the combination of political ideals and attitudes about good science animated Lewontin's criticism of Wilson, it seems as if, at least in part, Gould's distaste for the idea that society accurately rewards inherent merit animated his dislike of Dawkins's and others' narrow focus on natural selection and fitness at the expense of structural restrictions and the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. It's hard not to hear loud political overtones in his tireless complaints about "adaptationism" — the tendency to think of biological structures as by default having evolved to serve a particular function by natural selection. Gould had a Marxist background like Lewontin and demonstrated a strong distaste for anything suggesting that evolution was somehow "fair" and that differential survival implied differential "fitness" on some objective scale.
Having been interested in their differences for a long time, my judgment is that their actual beliefs about evolution don't differ very much. There's even a case where Gould uses an analogy involving a cake (originally thought up by Patrick Bateson) to criticize Dawkins, one that Dawkins had in fact used to describe his own view in an earlier book. They disagreed about emphasis and interpretation, and that was most likely due to them being preoccupied with different issues outside biology itself.
Dawkins's enemy was, just like Wilson's, religion — more specifically creationism. His books were meant to show how blind evolution was capable of creating complex life of the kind we see in the world. He intended to describe the mechanism that did the heavy lifting. Then there is lots of complexity and contingency involved in the actual, particular history of life on Earth, but Dawkins doesn't care as much about that because it's not load-bearing. It's part of what happened, sure, but doesn't do explanatory work for how it was possible for it to happen without intelligent design.
That stuff is all about incidentals, not essentials — noise rather than signal, and Dawkins doesn't mind putting it to one side because the details aren't what matters in the fight against creationism. However, if you are Stephen Jay Gould and want to focus on how in biology as in society, success is not determined by individual fitness or merit but is largely contingent and restricted by other factors out of individual control, then the incidentals, the "noise" part of the process, is exactly what you want to put front and center. Add to that a Lewontin-like view that good science requires real, exact details that Gould also seems to have shared, and I believe you have a decent account of that conflict as well.
Modern day descendants
The final third is both a retrospect of the sociobiology debate and the nature-vs-nurture debates that came with the increasing acceptance of biological explanations of human behavior (and the birth of evolutionary pshychology) in the 1990s, and an exploration of just how many philosophical questions these issues manage to touch: the nature of humanity, free will, the relationship between different scholarly disciplines and the status, role and responsibility of science in society.
I came away with the impression that it's especially difficult to summarize a debate where so many people involved are top-tier intellectuals who no doubt have spent a lot of time and effort meticulously building, sculpting and honing their worldviews to be internally consistent, and hold sophisticated, individually differentiated views on everything. The chances of simplifying well are a lot worse than if we were dealing with holders of disconnected beans-in-a-bag opinions or standard-issue partisan packages.
I can't help but think that this is getting even more difficult today, for different reasons. There are many more voices than in decades past and extended dialogue or even just plain honest communication across ideological borders is the exception. The unrestricted flow of decontextualized bits of information on social media at the same time means that carefully thought up ideas of top academics regularly get picked up by us second-, third- and fourth-rate thinkers without the context needed to understand them fully. Given that, it gets harder to know just how much sense you can expect something to make. If Joe says "X!" and Jane says "No, Y!", their exchange of rehearsed talking points might be playacting a conflict between whole schools of thought clustered around X and Y that they don't understand or even know about. And they might mistake each other's inability to justify X and Y to each other properly for proof of the inherent worthlessness of those beliefs. What is the best way to make sense of that disagreement? Do we go by person or by ideas invoked?
Circling back
This book really is as good as I remembered it, which is a huge relief. However, writing a positive review makes me a little bit suspicious with myself. Since 2008 I've learned to be more skeptical of that which caters to my own preconceptions and biases, so I can't help but wonder if I like it so much because it's relatively friendly to my own views. For example, Segerstråle is quite willing to call out the dishonesty with which some of Wilson's critics (most notably Stephen Chorover) twisted his words. She also paints a picture of Richard Lewontin's personality that isn't particularly flattering compared to her depiction of Wilson.
There's hardly anything in there about what she thinks herself. This is probably prudent, but it makes you wonder how fully you can trust her account. The only relevant info I could find was from this article in The Chronicle of Higher Education:
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'.
The same article quotes Irven DeVore, professor of biological anthropology at Harvard and minor character in the story, saying it's "unlikely that there will be another review of this tumultuous period in evolutionary biology that is so thoughtful and comprehensive." So I think my answer has to be that Segerstråle is likely as trustworthy on this as anyone can reasonably be. I would've liked to read some comments from Lewontin but according to the article he hasn't read the book and doesn't want to, stating that "I don't know what it'll tell me that I don't already know". In my opinion that doesn't speak in his favor.
Now after the second read I suspect I've been even more influenced by this book regarding how "erisology" is supposed to be done than I thought I was. It does a lot of work on its own to instill the kind of mindset I think you need in order to deal with disagreement well. It's full of quotable passages and if you're at all interested in the science, politics and philosophy of human nature, I absolutely recommend it.