8 ms·

I read (not extremely closely, but better than skimming) Aaronson's foreword, the guest post, and the article in question; and I still don't know what about Wil

I read (not extremely closely, but better than skimming) Aaronson's foreword, the guest post, and the article in question; and I still don't know what about Wilson's work was supposedly "problematic". It's apparently something to do with the "nature vs. nurture" question, but I can hardly remember reading so many words with so little substance. For somebody not involved with the field (e.g. me), this omission of substance makes it very difficult to evaluate the merits of either perspective. It also sets off some alarm bells, since it's difficult for an intellectually honest (edit: and competent) author to write on the order of a thousand words of evasive fluff and deem it suitable for publication. OP's link aside, I don't think the SA article comes anywhere close to justifying its attack on Wilson ("racist ideas"), and the quoted bit regarding normal distributions is beyond the pale.

ljf 5y ago
For those (like me) who haven't heard of the scientist at the heart of the offending article, have a read of https://www.theguardian.com/science/2001/feb/17/books.guardianreview57 https://www.theguardian.com/science/2001/feb/17/books.guardi... This goes into some of the original accusations of racism he received in the 70s and the background behind them. Quote: They accused Wilson of sending human nature back to the concentration camps. Wilson isn’t a determinist who believes that life is purely mechanistic, and he isn’t right-wing - he remains a Democrat and fears the environmental worst from the George Bush presidency. Although Wilson argued that homosexuality might have a genetic element, he also argued that it was therefore natural and should be tolerated. But Gould was good-humoured and discursive, taking an apparently compassionate view of human nature, and Lewontin, a population geneticist who could show that racial differences are genetically tiny, added credence to charges of racism, even though Wilson hadn’t brought the subject up. Did he think that his opponents were themselves guilty of prejudice? “They were, although they never admitted it,” Wilson says slowly, reaching for the words. “I came from the Old South, I was raised as a racist. I mean, we all were. It was only in my teens that I began to change. But here, if you were called racist - well, in the 70s it was like a death sentence.”
- helmholtz 5y ago
  Lovely article and perhaps the first one that people new to Wilson's work, like me, should read. Having read it, I can't say that I came away thinking Wilson was racist, at all. If anything, it inspires me to try to be less emotionally charged when dealing with emotionally charged issues.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    Twitter, nor apparently SciAm, is suited to dealing with nuanced, multifaceted issues. Because invariably, people in the business of replying to short snippets with short snippets, will summarize someone's lengthy work in a short snippet. And on the basis of reading that summarization alone, someone will have an opinion (and possibly even a reasonable opinion, with no other context available), and then you're into the problem of (1) convincing someone to change their public opinion & (2) arguing from different viewpoints (if one has read the entire work & the other has not but won't admit to not having done so).
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  - jevgeni 5y ago
    "I haven't read Dr. Zhivago, but I feel obligated to condemn"
  - 317070 5y ago
    > Old white man raised in the American South makes me think he's likely to have a bunch of racist attitudes. So, he is likely racist because he was born in a certain place and time. Doesn't that notion itself seem racist? Yes, he might have been. But it is not kind to say someone was "maybe bad" (everybody is "maybe bad" after all), without stronger grounds to stand on.
  - zpeti 5y ago
    >Old white man raised in the American South makes me think he's likely to have a bunch of racist attitudes, and that those might leak into his science. Judging people based on their place of birth and skin colour... I feel like there's a word for that...
jmcgough 5y ago
I read big portions of Sociobiology while taking a lot of evolutionary biology coursework in college. As stated in the guest post, the book primarily focuses on non-human animals so it's bizarre to me that McLemore is trying to make this about racism in humans without any quotes or anything to tie him to that. It's just an astoundingly poorly written article that SA shouldn't have published for that reason alone. But I suspect they're employing the same strategy that The Washington Post and others use - post intentionally inflammatory guest op-eds and profit from the influx of clicks.
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  Your characterization of the book does not square, even remotely, with Wikipedia's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._O._Wilson#Sociobiology:_The_New_Synthesis,_1975 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._O._Wilson#Sociobiology:_The... Or that of EO Wilson himself: "the hypothesis that human nature has a genetic foundation" https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/06/specials/wilson-naturalist.html https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/06/s...
  - popcube 5y ago
    he just say human are not differ to animals, but usually department of biology will not concern social biology of human
pr_nik2 5y ago
The long answer to your question can be found in Pinker's "Blank Slate". In a nutshell: the nature/nurture discussion went off the rails after WWII. 'Scientific' racism and eugenics had culminated in the Holocaust. One generation later (i.e. 60s and 70s), a strand called "radical science" had emerged (in the US) that was into deconstruction of ideas. They creatively came up with the assertion than any notion of human nature was the bedrock of racism and eugenics. When Wilson published "Sociobiology" and mainly talked about non-human animals, they lost their shit completely. All of research, science, and academia, they asserted, was more a negotiation of power distributions than an honest attempt to make sense of the universe. The most aggressive tactic in that sphere was research on the nature of humans. Another generation later (90s), some of those "radical scientists" had secured tenure and made it their gig to teach creative deconstruction and cancel culture to students (yes, for real in the 90s). Pinker's book is from 2002, but you know the rest of the story.
- refurb 5y ago
  All of research, science, and academia, they asserted, was more a negotiation of power distributions than an honest attempt to make sense of the universe. Precisely. The approach seems more “ends justifies the means”. If your entire political theory depends on outcomes being socially determined, not genetically, then any science counter that must be attacked by whatever means necessary.
- garbagecoder 5y ago
  I was in college in the 90s and we called it PC. It was a thing, but it was mostly confined to campuses and adjacent places.
Veen 5y ago
> I still don't know what about Wilson's work was supposedly "problematic". To oversimplify slightly, his detractors have a deep ideological commitment to the blank slate theory of human development, largely because it implies human behaviour is socially determined and not biologically determined. They believe that if we accept that human behviour is influenced by our genes, it follows that that certain negative human behaviours like racism and sexism will be excused as natural and therefore permissible. Most people can agree that those behaviours are undesirable, but instead of arguing that we can overcome our genetic heritage, blank slate adherents argue that biology has no significant impact on human behaviour and anyone who thinks it does is a racist and a step away from being a Nazi-style eugenicist.
- kofejnik 5y ago
  … but also, at the same time, sexual orientation is predetermined genetically (“born this way”) and isn’t socially influenced in any way at all.
  - amanaplanacanal 5y ago
    I think you forgot the nine months spent in the pre-natal environment.
    - goatlover 5y ago
      The pre-natal environment isn't socially determined. It's part of the organism's biological development.
      - marcan_42 5y ago
        It's partially environmental, and therefore can be socially correlated. We know of many conditions that are caused by changes in pre-natal environment (e.g. folic acid deficiency in the mother causes neural tube defects). Genes you don't get to pick, but everything that happens after fertilization is absolutely impacted by the external environment in many ways.
lqet 5y ago
Here is a publication of the SA article's author in which she and her co-author explain their "default human" critique in more detail (linked in the SA article). https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.675788/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.6757... I only skimmed the text. The normal distribution isn't mentioned, but if you combine the SA article with this text (which is linked in the SA article as a reference for her normal distribution critique), it gives the impression that the author somehow thinks that the normal distribution is intentionally "engineered" / "used" as a tool of suppression.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  Wait what the hell? Someone should tell the author that normal distribution is a property of the central limit theorem: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem Take 10, 6-sided dice. Roll them all and sum the total. Do it many times and you’ll see a normal distribution magically emerge out of nothingness.
  - wokwokwok 5y ago
    - torstenvl 5y ago
      I'm not sure what you read, but I don't see any methodological critique of other studies' statistics. The link under discussion still insists on the "myth of the default human" and has some pretty inflammatory and dishonest language. GP is exactly right.
    - refurb 5y ago
      I didn’t read the paper I read the journal article from the author itself and it comes across a slightly insane.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 5y ago
Vetch 5y ago
Like you, I was confused by this whole thing. In my mind Wilson is slotted next to Attenborough as a kind and knowledgeable naturalist environmentalist. The only controversy I knew associated with him was his claim that skill with math is not necessary to be a great scientist. What I could piece together: People didn't like that he supported the idea that genetics has a large influence on personality, behavior or intellect, a genetic leash as he called it (he also argued against free will). I suppose the fact that Evolutionary Psychology (which is susceptible to just-so stories) derives from Sociobiology is also enough for current people to unfairly accuse him of promoting racism. Something surprising I learned from all this is cancellations, de-platforming and campus protests of certain ideas already existed way back in the 60s and 70s! The only difference with today is increased connectivity and mass. > In the ’60s and ’70s it became almost dogma — it was a dogma — to believe that the human brain was a tabula rasa, a blank slate. I don’t think scholars in this generation, even those of middle age, can appreciate how stern was the prohibition against believing that human behavior was influenced by genes in any manner whatsoever. > But I really was upset at being called a racist, promoting racism and sexism. I was accused of trying to reintroduce a retrograde, outmoded, dangerous philosophy. There was nothing in “Sociobiology” to suggest such a thing. The words had to be taken out of context and tweaked. > On one occasion, I had a little mob in Harvard Square parading and protesting and holding placards demanding that Harvard dismiss me. On another occasion, when I was to give a lecture at the Science Center, a crowd of protesters gathered at the entrance with signs and shouts and chants and so on. I was ushered in through the rear by University police. My class was disrupted at least once. --- The SciAm article spent only a few words on Wilson. It instead seemed to really want to air disagreements on how health studies are carried out and IMO, was sloppy in its attempt to shoehorn Wilson in. It would probably have worked better as a stand alone piece on how poverty impacts on health outcomes are ignored. --- Sources: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/04/search-until-you-find-a-passion-and-go-all-out-to-excel-in-its-expression/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/04/search-until-... https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sociobiology https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sociobiology https://old.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1bwoeg/e_o_wilson_vs_math/ https://old.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1bwoeg/e_o_wilson_vs_...
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago

ljf 5y ago

For those (like me) who haven't heard of the scientist at the heart of the offending article, have a read of https://www.theguardian.com/science/2001/feb/17/books.guardianreview57 https://www.theguardian.com/science/2001/feb/17/books.guardi... This goes into some of the original accusations of racism he received in the 70s and the background behind them. Quote: They accused Wilson of sending human nature back to the concentration camps. Wilson isn’t a determinist who believes that life is purely mechanistic, and he isn’t right-wing - he remains a Democrat and fears the environmental worst from the George Bush presidency. Although Wilson argued that homosexuality might have a genetic element, he also argued that it was therefore natural and should be tolerated. But Gould was good-humoured and discursive, taking an apparently compassionate view of human nature, and Lewontin, a population geneticist who could show that racial differences are genetically tiny, added credence to charges of racism, even though Wilson hadn’t brought the subject up. Did he think that his opponents were themselves guilty of prejudice? “They were, although they never admitted it,” Wilson says slowly, reaching for the words. “I came from the Old South, I was raised as a racist. I mean, we all were. It was only in my teens that I began to change. But here, if you were called racist - well, in the 70s it was like a death sentence.”

helmholtz 5y ago
Lovely article and perhaps the first one that people new to Wilson's work, like me, should read. Having read it, I can't say that I came away thinking Wilson was racist, at all. If anything, it inspires me to try to be less emotionally charged when dealing with emotionally charged issues.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  Twitter, nor apparently SciAm, is suited to dealing with nuanced, multifaceted issues. Because invariably, people in the business of replying to short snippets with short snippets, will summarize someone's lengthy work in a short snippet. And on the basis of reading that summarization alone, someone will have an opinion (and possibly even a reasonable opinion, with no other context available), and then you're into the problem of (1) convincing someone to change their public opinion & (2) arguing from different viewpoints (if one has read the entire work & the other has not but won't admit to not having done so).
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
- jevgeni 5y ago
  "I haven't read Dr. Zhivago, but I feel obligated to condemn"
- 317070 5y ago
  > Old white man raised in the American South makes me think he's likely to have a bunch of racist attitudes. So, he is likely racist because he was born in a certain place and time. Doesn't that notion itself seem racist? Yes, he might have been. But it is not kind to say someone was "maybe bad" (everybody is "maybe bad" after all), without stronger grounds to stand on.
- zpeti 5y ago
  >Old white man raised in the American South makes me think he's likely to have a bunch of racist attitudes, and that those might leak into his science. Judging people based on their place of birth and skin colour... I feel like there's a word for that...

jmcgough 5y ago

I read big portions of Sociobiology while taking a lot of evolutionary biology coursework in college. As stated in the guest post, the book primarily focuses on non-human animals so it's bizarre to me that McLemore is trying to make this about racism in humans without any quotes or anything to tie him to that. It's just an astoundingly poorly written article that SA shouldn't have published for that reason alone. But I suspect they're employing the same strategy that The Washington Post and others use - post intentionally inflammatory guest op-eds and profit from the influx of clicks.

KennyBlanken 5y ago
Your characterization of the book does not square, even remotely, with Wikipedia's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._O._Wilson#Sociobiology:_The_New_Synthesis,_1975 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._O._Wilson#Sociobiology:_The... Or that of EO Wilson himself: "the hypothesis that human nature has a genetic foundation" https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/06/specials/wilson-naturalist.html https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/06/s...
- popcube 5y ago
  he just say human are not differ to animals, but usually department of biology will not concern social biology of human

pr_nik2 5y ago

The long answer to your question can be found in Pinker's "Blank Slate". In a nutshell: the nature/nurture discussion went off the rails after WWII. 'Scientific' racism and eugenics had culminated in the Holocaust. One generation later (i.e. 60s and 70s), a strand called "radical science" had emerged (in the US) that was into deconstruction of ideas. They creatively came up with the assertion than any notion of human nature was the bedrock of racism and eugenics. When Wilson published "Sociobiology" and mainly talked about non-human animals, they lost their shit completely. All of research, science, and academia, they asserted, was more a negotiation of power distributions than an honest attempt to make sense of the universe. The most aggressive tactic in that sphere was research on the nature of humans. Another generation later (90s), some of those "radical scientists" had secured tenure and made it their gig to teach creative deconstruction and cancel culture to students (yes, for real in the 90s). Pinker's book is from 2002, but you know the rest of the story.

refurb 5y ago
All of research, science, and academia, they asserted, was more a negotiation of power distributions than an honest attempt to make sense of the universe. Precisely. The approach seems more “ends justifies the means”. If your entire political theory depends on outcomes being socially determined, not genetically, then any science counter that must be attacked by whatever means necessary.
garbagecoder 5y ago
I was in college in the 90s and we called it PC. It was a thing, but it was mostly confined to campuses and adjacent places.

Veen 5y ago

> I still don't know what about Wilson's work was supposedly "problematic". To oversimplify slightly, his detractors have a deep ideological commitment to the blank slate theory of human development, largely because it implies human behaviour is socially determined and not biologically determined. They believe that if we accept that human behviour is influenced by our genes, it follows that that certain negative human behaviours like racism and sexism will be excused as natural and therefore permissible. Most people can agree that those behaviours are undesirable, but instead of arguing that we can overcome our genetic heritage, blank slate adherents argue that biology has no significant impact on human behaviour and anyone who thinks it does is a racist and a step away from being a Nazi-style eugenicist.

kofejnik 5y ago
… but also, at the same time, sexual orientation is predetermined genetically (“born this way”) and isn’t socially influenced in any way at all.
- amanaplanacanal 5y ago
  I think you forgot the nine months spent in the pre-natal environment.
  - goatlover 5y ago
    The pre-natal environment isn't socially determined. It's part of the organism's biological development.
    - marcan_42 5y ago
      It's partially environmental, and therefore can be socially correlated. We know of many conditions that are caused by changes in pre-natal environment (e.g. folic acid deficiency in the mother causes neural tube defects). Genes you don't get to pick, but everything that happens after fertilization is absolutely impacted by the external environment in many ways.

lqet 5y ago

Here is a publication of the SA article's author in which she and her co-author explain their "default human" critique in more detail (linked in the SA article). https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.675788/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.6757... I only skimmed the text. The normal distribution isn't mentioned, but if you combine the SA article with this text (which is linked in the SA article as a reference for her normal distribution critique), it gives the impression that the author somehow thinks that the normal distribution is intentionally "engineered" / "used" as a tool of suppression.

systemvoltage 5y ago
Wait what the hell? Someone should tell the author that normal distribution is a property of the central limit theorem: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem Take 10, 6-sided dice. Roll them all and sum the total. Do it many times and you’ll see a normal distribution magically emerge out of nothingness.
- wokwokwok 5y ago
  - torstenvl 5y ago
    I'm not sure what you read, but I don't see any methodological critique of other studies' statistics. The link under discussion still insists on the "myth of the default human" and has some pretty inflammatory and dishonest language. GP is exactly right.
  - refurb 5y ago
    I didn’t read the paper I read the journal article from the author itself and it comes across a slightly insane.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 5y ago

Vetch 5y ago

Like you, I was confused by this whole thing. In my mind Wilson is slotted next to Attenborough as a kind and knowledgeable naturalist environmentalist. The only controversy I knew associated with him was his claim that skill with math is not necessary to be a great scientist. What I could piece together: People didn't like that he supported the idea that genetics has a large influence on personality, behavior or intellect, a genetic leash as he called it (he also argued against free will). I suppose the fact that Evolutionary Psychology (which is susceptible to just-so stories) derives from Sociobiology is also enough for current people to unfairly accuse him of promoting racism. Something surprising I learned from all this is cancellations, de-platforming and campus protests of certain ideas already existed way back in the 60s and 70s! The only difference with today is increased connectivity and mass. > In the ’60s and ’70s it became almost dogma — it was a dogma — to believe that the human brain was a tabula rasa, a blank slate. I don’t think scholars in this generation, even those of middle age, can appreciate how stern was the prohibition against believing that human behavior was influenced by genes in any manner whatsoever. > But I really was upset at being called a racist, promoting racism and sexism. I was accused of trying to reintroduce a retrograde, outmoded, dangerous philosophy. There was nothing in “Sociobiology” to suggest such a thing. The words had to be taken out of context and tweaked. > On one occasion, I had a little mob in Harvard Square parading and protesting and holding placards demanding that Harvard dismiss me. On another occasion, when I was to give a lecture at the Science Center, a crowd of protesters gathered at the entrance with signs and shouts and chants and so on. I was ushered in through the rear by University police. My class was disrupted at least once. --- The SciAm article spent only a few words on Wilson. It instead seemed to really want to air disagreements on how health studies are carried out and IMO, was sloppy in its attempt to shoehorn Wilson in. It would probably have worked better as a stand alone piece on how poverty impacts on health outcomes are ignored. --- Sources: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/04/search-until-you-find-a-passion-and-go-all-out-to-excel-in-its-expression/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/04/search-until-... https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sociobiology https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sociobiology https://old.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1bwoeg/e_o_wilson_vs_math/ https://old.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1bwoeg/e_o_wilson_vs_...

ZeroGravitas 5y ago