Mick Hartley

Daniel Finkelstein in the Times, prompted by the misconceived Scientific American attack that I mentioned the other day, writes in praise of the late EO Wilson. It isn’t racist to believe in genetic differences:

In November 1978 a woman approached the world’s leading expert on ants, told him he was wet and proceeded to pour a jug of water over his head.

The occasion was a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the head belonged to Edward O Wilson, who was about to deliver a lecture on sociobiology, a field in which he was a pioneer. But the attack was not only on him. It was an attack on truth, on freedom of thought and on scientific endeavour. And the attack isn’t over yet. There remains work to do resisting it.

Last week EO Wilson died, and the world lost one of its leading scientists. The professor had started by studying fire ants and his knowledge of ants was peerless. But he had broadened as he had aged and had begun to consider human beings. Humans are animals too, after all, so our social organisation, our behaviour, our hierarchies, our urges will, to some extent at least, be the product of our biology.

This, the foundation stone of sociobiology, seems an unremarkable observation, but it provoked a remarkable reaction. Marxists and radicals, well represented in American universities, saw it not as a scientific hypothesis but as a political attack. Their argument was that human behaviour was overwhelmingly the product of social and economic organisation. Humans were, in essence, a blank slate, one very much like another. If Wilson was right, then this idea was wrong. If Wilson was right, societies were going to be harder to change. If Wilson was right, people might not come out equal even with all the social engineering in the world. So Wilson simply couldn’t be allowed to be right.

The weapon of choice in the battle to take down sociobiology was the accusation of racism. Wasn’t Wilson arguing that the problems faced by African-Americans were a result of their biological inferiority? And didn’t he belong to the same intellectual tradition as the eugenicists and the Nazis, obsessed with breeding the “perfect” human?

At his lectures people chanted “Racist Wilson, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide”. Posters called him “the right-wing prophet of patriarchy” and encouraged people to bring “noisemakers” to his talks.

It is tempting to dismiss all this as juvenile student nonsense. The logical flaws in the arguments against him are glaring enough to be funny. It is absurd to argue that biological differences justify discrimination or, worse still, eugenics. And this would be ridiculous even if it were the case that Wilson was suggesting there were differences in abilities or character between races. But he absolutely was not.

Indeed one of the most useful results of studying the genetic and evolutionary basis of human behaviour has been that it has shown that the Nazis and other racists are wrong. And Wilson was quite clear about that. But unfortunately the accusation that Wilson was a racist was not made only by students. It was made by other academics seeking to protect unconvincing leftist ideas about social organisation. And it is still being made. A couple of days after Wilson’s death, Scientific American published an article by a University of California associate professor, reviving the charge of “racist ideas”.

It was an astonishingly muddled article whose vague arguments slip out of one’s hands every time one tries to grasp hold of them. Its appearance owed more to intellectual and political fashion than to rigour.

There are three reasons to rebut this challenge firmly. The first is that it is our duty to Wilson, a very great scientist. His contribution to the understanding of animal behaviour — of ants, of humans, of all nature — has been profound and it would be both cowardly and a tragedy to allow his reputation to be attacked when he is no longer here to defend himself against a baseless charge.

The second and even more important reason is that Wilson was achingly, obviously right. How likely is it that human beings are the one species whose capacities and behaviour aren’t largely influenced by biology? If every other animal’s behaviour demands an evolutionary explanation, how can it possibly be that ours does not?

And the more knowledge advances, the clearer it is that individual behaviour and capacity varies because our genes vary. Alcoholism, obesity, academic performance, they are all strongly influenced by our genetic differences. Many of our abilities are heritable….

We don’t have to live with the outcome of genetic disadvantages. That would be like saying that although I’m short-sighted I shouldn’t be allowed glasses. But we do have to recognise genetic differences, or we end up denying glasses on the grounds that short-sightedness is the fault of capitalism and we need to nationalise the water industry first.

The idea that discovering natural difference in capacity is somehow right-wing is deeply puzzling. The truth doesn’t have a wing, it’s just the truth. But it’s not just that. There is a randomness to genetic inheritance, just as there is in economic inheritance. With the latter it is left-wing to observe this randomness and argue that we should help the disadvantaged poor. Why would people on the left not wish to even acknowledge the randomness of genetic inheritance? It is perverse.

The argument that genetic differences make society harder to change is neither a left-wing nor a right-wing one. It is what you decide to do about it that is either left or right-wing.

And the third reason for defending Wilson?

Scientific methods and the search for truth matter. The accusation that sociobiology is racist rarely rises above the level of saying that as the Nazis were interested in genetics, genetics must be Nazi. It’s a bit like attacking Linda McCartney’s soya-based sausages on the ground that Hitler was a vegetarian.

As we develop our capacity to study our genes we are going to learn more about human nature. We must be allowed to talk about that, even if the things we discover unsettle political activists and the orthodoxy they have adopted. We must defend good science against bad politics.

If the controversy over EO Wilson teaches us that, than the great scientist will have rendered us one final service.

We thought perhaps that this particular battle was over, as sociobiology ceased to be controversial and became an accepted scientific discipline that can provide useful insights. Apparently not.

In a way its history was a kind of rehearsal for the current and more extreme battle between science – and the rights of women – versus the ideological requirements of gender activists.