EO Wilson, a biologist and Alabamian, passed today at 92. He was undoubtedly a lion in his field, often called Darwin’s heir. He founded the discipline of conservation biology, which is not without its critics globally, but his contributions to the scientific canon are without equal. However, his forays into social science are misguided and rudimentary at best and colonialist at worst.
Wilson wrote a book in 1975 called Sociobiology. In this book he argues that human behavior, like the behavior of animals, is largely genetic. This is not a new argument. Early social science categorized societies based from primitive to civilized on what they thought were evolutionary markers. Of course, European societies were thought to be the most evolved while hunter-gatherer societies were most primitive. Wilson merely transfers this argument to a genetic level.
The problem with such a framework is that it justifies colonialism and other forms of oppression based on some version of “The White Man’s Burden,” a poem by Rudyard Kipling, where it becomes necessary for white men to help evolve less evolved societies. Sociobiology goes further providing tacit justification for high levels of repression based on the fact that crime, poverty, and other malaise are genetically determined and not shaped by social/cultural/politic forces. Ultimately, sociobiology is just another form of scientific racism.
As I watch the celebrations of Wilson’s life, and rightfully so, I’m struck that many of those celebrating his life also are in favor of teaching Critical Race Theory in schools. I don’t think people truly understand what CRT is because CRT is more targeted at institutional processes like Wilson’s scientific racism and less at Joe Bob down the street who flies a Confederate flag. Certainly, it’s both/and, but the focus of CRT is on (or should be on) institutional power, which people like Wilson have a ton of and respectability to go with it. CRT was made for white men like Wilson.
What we need to be teaching is decolonial science and not vulgar materialism. Vulgar materialism is that the object dictates the subject, e.g. genetics dictates culture and not the other way around. The more we’re learning about genetics, the more clear it’s becoming that the material is shaped as much by the subjective (and even spiritual) as the material determines the subjective. Robert Lewontin coined the phrase “dialectical biology” to study living beings as a process of creation between material and subjective.
Furthermore, Western science should listen more thoroughly to other forms of science from indigenous and non-Western cultures. Science itself is a human universal. All human societies observe systematically and experiment though timescales are quite different and much of this science is entertwined with spirituality.
Finally, the assumption that more “civilized” societies are more evolved is quite suspect. David Graeber has called into question whether civilization was to any human benefit at all and that “primitive” non-hierarchical societies were actually quite large, complex, and sophisticated.
Maybe much of what the West knows about the world is wrong and one day we’ll look back on people like EO Wilson and feel sorrow for their ignorance.