E.O. Wilson Interview (page: 5 / 8) Father of Sociobiology	Print Interview

Curiously, your book, The Insect Societies, didn't produce anything like the storm of controversy that your later work, Sociobiology, did.

Edward O. Wilson: That's because I didn't mention people. I went up to the rhesus macaque. My student, Stuart Altman, was working on the sociobiology of rhesus macaque, he even had a similar idea. I said in that close of the 1971 book, when we have a general theory that can use the same language to embrace termites, the social insect, and rhesus macaque monkeys, we would really have a new science of sociobiology.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. When I finished that book, I don't know what I was planning to do then, but then one idea kept gnawing at me which was, "What the heck, might as well add the vertebrates." There were a whole large number of people working in the world on vertebrate social behavior. How would they react if an entomologist said he's going to include all the vertebrates within the insects and try to write a book on sociobiology?

[ Key to Success ] Courage

That must have been an enormous undertaking.

Edward O. Wilson: Well, it seemed that way, but...

Get the Flash Player to see this video. It turned out that the vertebrates are far simpler, and the literature is far easier to get into than was the case with social insects. Social insects was bibliographically an extremely difficult job, but not so for the vertebrates. To my pleasant surprise, I found that when I started recruiting vertebrate sociobiologists, behavioral biologists, to give me literature and help and so on, they were enthusiastic that somebody would try to put all of this together, and so it went. In 1974, I had finished the book, and now a new thought was gnawing. I thought of stopping at the chimpanzees, and I know now that if I had stopped at the chimps, there would have been no controversy. Probably then or possibly then, the ideas of sociobiology would have seeped their way into the social sciences in a less toxic manner. It wouldn't have caused the tremendous reaction that did ensue. But at the time, I said, "I can't leave out Homo sapiens as a primate, as a species. I've got to encompass it."

Were you at all nervous about doing this? Darwin, we know, was apprehensive about publishing The Origin of Species.

Edward O. Wilson: I wasn't as scared as he was. I just never realized that a storm would erupt over that. He was afraid of the religious response, and I didn't know or care about the Marxists or the current dominant ideology.

So you were caught really by surprise.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Edward O. Wilson: I caught them by surprise, (by) including humans, and I saw right then and there that this could be very important, to include humans in this. I caught them by surprise, and then they caught me by surprise because I didn't expect to be blindsided, literally, from the left. I won't go into all of that, except to say that it was a period in which the whole subject came close -- that is, as it applied to humans -- came dangerously close to being politicized. It was politicized. The animal part was enormously successful. It resulted in a couple of new journals, a very substantial increase in the studies of animal social behavior. It was accompanied by an explosive growth of behavioral ecology, a closely related subject which included solitary animals and their behavior. At one point, the Animal Behavior Society voted Sociobiology: The New Synthesis the most important book on animal behavior ever, even got more votes that Darwin's book. But I think so many of the social scientists, philosophers, and particularly those who were defending a Marxist ideology, considered it the worst book on human behavior in history, or one of them, and it was a tumultuous period in which what they considered the dangers of returning biology to the consideration of human behavior were too great to be tolerated.

[ Key to Success ] Courage

It's surprising, re-reading that last chapter of Sociobiology now, 25 years later. It seems so innocuous. It's hard now to see what the fuss was all about. Was it the political climate of the time?

Edward O. Wilson: Oh, that is exactly right. 1975 was the last year of the Vietnam War. It was also the twilight of the New Left in the academy, which had become almost dominant and very violent in several respects in the '60s. It involved a minority of students and professors, but nonetheless, they were so vocal and demonstrative that they tended to rule the learning climate in the academy. It was a very unfortunate trend. The main antagonists -- Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin for example, and several others who organized the movement against it -- their idea was to strangle it in the crib. So their language was extremely strong.

Didn't that backfire on them later?

Edward O. Wilson: I think it quickly backfired.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Today, 25 years later, gradually the malodor drifted away, and today it is one of the most popular subjects, particularly going under the name "evolutionary psychology." There is an entire library of books it seems, almost every year, published. It never was rejected as heavily as the criticism seemed to indicate -- that is, the conspicuous criticism. I made a count not too long ago of books published from 1975 to '95 -- in my library, which is nearly complete -- on human sociobiology, and in that period, the books favorable, predominantly favorable, ran something like 20 to one against those that were unfavorable. The ones that were unfavorable were often paid a great deal of attention to because everybody likes a fight.

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

Nowadays, they have just about gone to nothing. So I think that struggle is largely over.

You really have triumphed with the passage of time. Some of your worst critics have become researchers in the field.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Edward O. Wilson: What was new about sociobiology -- and it finally began to dawn -- was that, for better or for worse, right or wrong in its basic presumptions, for the first time, biology was in a really serious way coming up to the social sciences. That will only happen once, and that was another reason why there was so much trouble. The social scientists weren't prepared for this. They didn't understand it, or they think they saw fundamental flaws in it. They thought it was unhealthy. They thought it was hegemonic, and a great many of them still feel that way. That is one reason that I wrote my book Consilience, was to try to show how knowledge might be unified, and in a manner that would mean coalition and cooperation and joint exploration of the big remaining gap, rather than translation of the great branches of learning -- the other great branches of learning -- into scientific language and scientific rules of validation. Many who resisted Consilience resisted Sociobiology for the belief that somehow the scientists who didn't really know what they were talking about were coming into the social sciences, humanities, and trying to take over in a destructive way. I hope that Consilience might have moderated that response.

[ Key to Success ] Courage

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