Sociobiology and the Politics of Objectivity

The historiography of the sociobiology debate of the 1970s has tended to treat the episode as an example of the “politicization” of science that reveals the conflict between epistemic goals of science and the cultural norms of a particular moment in time.¹ This view, however, assumes a false dichotomy between “science” and “culture.” More importantly, it obscures how the politics of sociobiologists had become normalized as the neutral or “objective” stance in subsequent debates about genetics, evolution, and human nature.

We had long been suspicious of the claim—made by E. O. Wilson and his defenders—that Wilson’s 1975 Sociobiology: The New Synthesis was unfairly maligned by Leftist agitators whose agenda was political rather than scientific. Beyond the fact that critics like Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Leon Kamin, Steven Rose, and others quite clearly identified a number of theoretical or empirical flaws in sociobiology, Wilson consistently denied his own politics in presenting himself as an unbiased seeker of truth. As Wilson stridently put it in a 1976 response to his critics, “The issue at hand, I submit, is vigilantism: the judgment of a work of science according to whether it conforms to the political convictions of the judges, who are self-appointed.”²

Wilson’s personal papers, now housed at the Library of Congress, tell a different story. Beginning almost immediately after public criticism of sociobiology appeared, Wilson engaged in an aggressive behind-the-scenes campaign to contact prominent colleagues, denouncing Gould and Lewontin as “Marxists” and enlisting support for his own defense. A series of identical letters in Wilson’s papers, sent to “a few other close colleagues in population and behavioral biology,” decry the “intense political campaign by a group of Science for the People, led (sadly for me) by Dick Lewontin.” Complaining that “the charges of the group present a false, indeed libelous picture of both the nature of the book and my own political beliefs,” Wilson enclosed a “set of articles and other materials” that he hoped the recipients would read “in the event the matter comes up for serious discussion.”³

Publicly, Wilson insisted for decades that he had been misunderstood and presented himself as blindsided by accusations of determinism, racism, and sexism. Yet even many of his friendly colleagues may well have been unaware that the publication of Sociobiology was not Wilson’s first “political” debate with colleagues like Lewontin. In September of 1971, The Atlantic Monthly, now The Atlantic, published a controversial article titled, simply, “IQ,” by Harvard psychology professor Richard Herrnstein. The subject of Herrnstein’s essay was the hereditarian basis for human intelligence, and it forcefully argued that the so-called “Black–White” education gap in the United States was the product not of environmental or sociological factors, but rather innate differences in average intelligence—as measured by IQ tests—between different racial groups.⁴

Even before arriving at Harvard in 1973, Lewontin forcefully denounced Herrnstein’s article as racist, and he and Herrnstein engaged in a testy private exchange through the publication of Sociobiology. Herrnstein shared all of this correspondence with Wilson, and many of Herrnstein’s own complaints mirrored those Wilson would employ in defending sociobiology: that Lewontin’s criticism was “slanderous,” “an assault upon intellectual freedom,” and that group inequality does not imply individual inequality. In late 1975, Herrnstein sent Wilson a letter announcing that he had retained a lawyer and intended to sue Lewontin. A handwritten note Wilson added to the letter stated “Prof. Herrnstein has given me permission to share this correspondence to any interested person.”⁵ Herrnstein would eventually expand his IQ arguments in the 1994 bestseller The Bell Curve, co-authored with Charles Murray; Wilson supported and defended the book publicly and privately.

The irony here is that, while consistently invoking “objectivity,” “intellectual freedom,” and the like, Herrnstein and Wilson’s responses to criticism were, inherently, political: they rallied support from colleagues using innuendo and ad hominem attacks, attempted to block publications critical of sociobiology and hereditarianism, and even—in one remarkable incident—worked to prevent Gould from being elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.⁶

Moreover, hereditarians steadfastly refused to apply the same “ideological” scrutiny to their own work. In a striking letter to Gould, Wilson chided Gould for engaging with activist groups like Science for the People, which he described as “morally indefensible.” Continuing, Wilson compared his treatment by the “radical left” to McCarthyism and decried the “chilling effect…achieved by words without violence, aided only by the silence of good people and (as in your case) the voluntary association of otherwise reputable persons with the campaign against the reputation of their colleagues.”

We draw two important lessons from this exchange. First, we argue that Wilson’s knowledge of Herrnstein’s debate with Lewontin conditioned him to respond in kind when his own ideas were challenged after the publication of Sociobiology. Moreover, it would lead him to be receptive to—and to find common cause with—ideas that were far more explicitly racist and pseudoscientific than his own work on sociobiology. Wilson may not have approached sociobiology with racial differences in mind, but by the 1990s he increasingly identified his own “unfair” treatment with broad academic opposition to race science, including a lengthy engagement with Canadian psychologist J. Philippe Rushton, an overt racist.⁷ Beyond his friendship with Rushton, Wilson also became involved with the hard-right National Association of Scholars, a group established to defend “Western Intellectual Heritage” from perceived attacks by liberal academics. Even in the late 2000s, Wilson openly complained that scientific study of race was “completely taboo,” and he continued to blame the “radical Left” for placing ideology above truth.⁸

Second, the manner in which Wilson, Herrnstein, and others defended themselves has now become internalized by current defenders of hereditarian determinism. By claiming that any opposition to racial or gender determinism is “ideological,” authors as diverse as Charles Murray and Kathryn Paige Harden wield scientific “objectivity” as a shield from empirical criticism.⁹ This is the politics of objectivity, and we as historians of science must identify it and hold it to close scrutiny. Our field has long insisted that knowledge is co-constructed: there is no way to separate “politics” or “ideology” from the process of making science, and “objectivity” itself is constructed and reconstructed as culture and society change.¹⁰ But increasingly the politics of objectivity have been used as a magic wand to justify ideas—about race, gender, climate change, etc.—that have clear political ramifications and social consequences.

We historians have the tools and expertise to communicate the complexity of science to the public, and—as our examination of the archives shows—the material evidence to illuminate it.