The New Modern Synthesis: E. O. Wilson and Julian Huxley

E. O. Wilson’s subtitle, The New Synthesis, was a revision of the subtitle to Julian Huxley’s study from thirty years earlier, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942).¹ The connecting “synthesis” was explicit on Wilson’s part, but in what ways should we therefore read him as an inheritor of a Huxley tradition, and is there any benefit in doing so? Placing Wilson in a Huxleyan lineage makes me wonder just what it was about Sociobiology that incited such a strong reaction, given how familiar previous generations of biologists and humanists were with the complexities and implications of thinking human society inside evolutionary biology.² Wilson’s work was modestly derivative not only in content but also in form: Julian Huxley had made a living as well as a career from popularizing the proposition of evolved and biologized human nature and culture, in a suite of nonfiction bestsellers. In many ways, that genre was more common in Huxley’s day than it was in the 1970s and ’80s flurry of biological bestsellers that followed Sociobiology and its discontents.

Wilson’s breakthrough book happened to be published in 1975, the year that Julian Huxley died. This signals a generational shift, less in the idea of sociobiology itself than in the context for its critique. This long tradition of similar but not necessarily controversial work suggests it was the specific context of the response to Sociobiology, more than the substance of the book itself, that made it such a landmark publication.

It is always useful to think generationally. In his own early and mid-twentieth-century contexts—the First World War, the Second World War, and the Cold War—Julian Huxley’s sociobiology was progressive vis-à-vis Catholic conservatism on birth control, vis-à-vis fascism on biological “race,” and vis-à-vis Soviet-endorsed Lysenko, to name a few of his discontents. He influentially argued from population genetics against any phenomenon of a biological “race,” for a biologically based equality of opportunity, for birth control, and constantly attached explicit leftist politics to biological and evolutionary principles, as well as their useful social application. He was hardly alone; indeed, the collaboration that was typical of that generation often built from political alignment and conviction, and perhaps contrasts with the high individualism of Wilson and his interlocutors. The 1939 so-called Geneticist’s Manifesto, the work of Muller, Huxley, Haldane, Waddington, Hogben, and Dobzhansky, is exemplary here. And in the context of Sociobiology we should recall that the “Geneticist’s Manifesto” was called that only retrospectively; the famed original Nature letter was actually titled “Social Biology and Population Improvement.”³

Wilson was never so radical as Muller, Haldane, Hogben, or even the more liberal Huxley. But by the time his book appeared, the very prospect of “social biology” was received by reviewers as reactionary and deterministic. Eric Holtzman, for example, was wary of the “baleful history of misuse of biology in justifying or designing social policies and practices.”⁴ A new progressive generation critiqued social biology, not just primed but often trained (by an emerging “science studies”) to problematize social applications of biology, especially through a then-new historicization of eugenics. The influential critique of an apparent biological determinism was in the ascendant over the 1970s, bedded down over the 1980s, and arguably has remained orthodox, if refined, in the social sciences ever since. In other words, the same sociobiological intervention that made Julian Huxley a progressive in the second and third quarter of the twentieth century rendered E. O. Wilson a mild reactionary for many reviewers after 1975, rightly or wrongly.

Both Huxley’s and Wilson’s work built on population genetics that synthesized gradual evolution and Mendelian genetics. It is also important to appreciate them both as original observers of animal behavior. If Wilson started with ants, Huxley started with birds. Yet it is not quite correct to presume that they therefore followed similar paths from non-human animals to humans. From the very beginning Julian Huxley folded nature and culture, animals and humans, evolution and psychology together. Wilson’s “sociobiology” was more than sixty years away when young Julian started looking at the courtship habits of the great-crested grebe, and even then, he moved seamlessly between human and non-human animals, especially when it came to understanding emotion after Darwin. Sometimes it was sociobiology in reverse, Huxley speculating on the meaning of grebe courtship rituals by thinking about human behavior. Humans “express their emotion” through a range of ritual actions, he explained: holding hands, putting their arms round each other’s waists, kissing, and other ways. “The kiss exhausts itself, but leaves a memory, a trace and desire to repeat itself.”⁵ He applied this idea to the grebe “courtship ritual” as readily as he applied grebe mating selection to human sociability. It is notable that ritual and ritualization organized some of Wilson’s thinking on “Man.” More broadly, we might see Huxley’s seamless reach into the canon of English literature on love in his foundational ethological essay on grebes in the Zoological Society’s Proceedings as a profound antecedent to Wilson’s Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998). And yet Julian Huxley thought it hardly profound but rather ordinary: why wouldn’t the evidence of human culture and the evidence of human nature be part of the same inquiry? His friend C. H. Waddington might declare that “of course” a biologist would always look at man first as an animal,⁶ but Julian Huxley from the beginning thought of human culture and the human mind as evolved phenomena.

This was all discussed in Huxley’s volume The Humanist Frame (1961), one of the outcomes of the Darwin anniversary year, 1958–59. The parallels signal how Julian Huxley was E. O. Wilson’s humanist model as well. Wilson’s scientific humanism as a worldview borrowed from Huxley’s efforts to present “humanism as a comprehensive system of ideas,” refined into “evolutionary humanism.” Indeed, when Wilson signed the Humanist Manifesto, he was following not just Julian Huxley’s active and organizational (presidential) Humanism but also therefore Thomas Henry Huxley’s agnosticism.

Wrapping up my recent book on the Huxleys, I recall standing back and assessing their family library, now sequestered at Rice University. We might say that there on the shelves was everything that made up Wilson’s later “consilience: the unity of knowledge,” showing how geology and anthropology, theology and biology had been linked all along, and how the natural and human sciences arrived together, conjoined twins throughout the modern period, aging, not born with, “sociobiology” in 1975. The great science communicator of that next era, E. O. Wilson, is still sometimes called “the new Darwin,” but in many ways he was the new Huxley: secular humanist, popularizer of natural sciences, political ecologist, synthesizer of “genetics, developmental physiology, ecology, systematics, paleontology, cytology, mathematical analysis,” as Huxley had listed his own modern synthesis.⁷