The Colonial Life of Sociobiology

In the Christian imagination, Eden is the place before the world. It is the world before the earth is to be populated. In Genesis 1:28 after God has made the heavens and the earth and filled it with swarms of living creatures and vegetation, Adam and Eve are told, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” Eden is thus both empty and filled with God’s creative power. It has its potential in absence—in the lack of sin and knowledge, but also in that this first pair of humans is to fill an empty earth with their offspring.

Eden is the grounding belief in the western Christian relationship to land, water, and non-human beings. The desire for a garden empty of others and yet lush with every good kind of fruit and plant. It is through Eden that the English colonized the shores of North America. And it is Eden that lives in the memories of those who wish to claim the dominion over the world that God grants to Adam.

In 1969, E. O. Wilson and Daniel Simberloff created an Eden on a set of mangrove islands in the Everglades National Park. With permission of the United States Department of the Interior, they entirely removed the original fauna with methyl bromide fumigation and then observed the colonization of the islands over the next year. They found that the arthropods returned to the previous species equilibrium in less than a year. It was the first time that researchers had established evidence of this kind of equilibrium through direct observation.¹

Wilson had worked on these questions before. Together with Robert MacArthur he published The Theory of Island Biogeography (1967) where they used the “recolonization episode of the Krakatau Islands” as a natural experiment for their stochastic models.² In 1883, the volcano on Krakatau had erupted and killed all fauna and flora on the island. The following rapid repopulation was tracked by Karel Dammerman and Docters van Leeuwen, both directors of the “Lands Plantentuin,” the Botanical Garden founded by the colonial government of the Dutch East Indies.³ It was their published data that Wilson and MacArthur relied on and that Wilson and Simberloff emulated experimentally.

The fumigation study was an early example of twentieth-century “invasion biology”—a field in Anglo-American ecology that studied so-called foreign and alien species.⁴ And it was referenced a few years later in Wilson’s far more famous publication, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, in the chapter on “Group Selection and Altruism.” This is important not because Simberloff and Wilson’s study was foundational to Sociobiology (it wasn’t), but because the thread helps us to see clearly that Sociobiology is part of the history of Christian Empire. The theoretical and empirical work that fed into the synthetic vision of Sociobiology came through the material and intellectual history of empire that continued in the American empire—deeply Christian in its cosmology.

After all, the Everglades study did not just create a metaphorical Eden. It was made possible by the U.S. Department of the Interior—the department that controls the lands and waters claimed by the United States. Permission to fumigate those islands emerged out of this history—a history that had created the material domination of lands across the continent.

And the 1969 study was not the only time that Wilson’s empirical work depended on American claims and dominion over islands. His work on Micronesian ants in the 1950s—that formed the basis of his writings on social insects and the evolution of social behavior—was also made possible by the geography of American empire. The United States put military bases and extended nuclear testing sites in Micronesia and the rest of the Pacific as part of its military expansion during and after the Second World War. Wilson’s access to island Edens, and thus his ability to imagine that he had gained a before-time and God’s eye view of evolutionary processes, must be seen as dependent on the material realities of these imperial expansions.

But we don’t see Sociobiology as part of the continuing work of Christian empire because we fall prey to the self-narration of Wilson and others in the field: that their work is enlightened, objective, secular, universal.⁵ That their work does not belong to a particularity, is not an expression of a specific cosmology or an individual cultural vantage point. But when we allow ourselves to see how the American empire is the inheritor to the Christian European empires that came before it, we see how the work of its scientists was part of an imperial cosmology, just as we have recognized this for the British, French, Spanish, and Dutch colonialism.

When we read sociobiology through this colonial lens, we are better able to situate it in the rich historiography of science and empire. Wilson’s science emerged from a longer tradition of EuroChristian biogeography—the science of mapping plants, animals, and people onto geographies to make sense of who and what belonged where. Janet Browne has called biogeography one of the “most obviously imperial sciences in an age of increasing imperialism” for good reason—it was the epistemological framework for the British empire to make commercial and military sense of the worlds they conquered.⁶ And just as the natural historians, evolutionary theorists, and scientific collectors of the nineteenth century were dependent on the naval and military strengths of British empire, we can see that Wilson and Simberloff’s work emerged from a dependence on American’s military and territorial power.

After all, Wilson sets himself out to correct and reform “the ancient religions” in Sociobiology. Telling us that a “science of sociobiology” “might transform the insights of ancient religions into a precise account of the evolutionary origins of ethics and hence explain…why we make certain moral choices.”⁷ How else are we to understand the foundation of our morality unless we get back to the garden? Simberloff and Wilson found at least one way to do so—through the noxious gases of industrial empire.