I was in college in the mid-1970s, majoring in psychology. We had a class where we read and discussed writing relevant to the major, led by a grad student; it was basically an exercise in critical thinking, motivated by the typical undergraduate's teenage joy in finding and pointing out things wrong with adult, supposedly professional writing.
If I recall correctly - and after 45 years I might not - we read something by Wilson, and were predictably unimpressed. At any rate, I did read him back when he was topical, and wound up concluding that his problem was using what scientists call just-so stories, to motivate or explain "obvious" facts, aka things that might lack evidence, but were generally believed at the time of writing.
A contrived example: Suppose I believe that females are, and should be, at all times and places subordinate to males. In fact "everyone" knows this, except maybe a few "crazy" rebels. So to explain the relevance of evolution to human nature, I construct an evolution-based argument, possibly including some more "facts" everyone knows, to show how evolution explains female subordination. Every feminist or semi-feminist who read my book decries me, and rejects evolutionary influence as well.
A few of them know enough about biology and/or human behaviour to recognize that the "facts" are either unproven ("myth", rather than "data") or contradicted by other facts (maybe even supported ones) I neglected to mention. The rest are just jumping on the band wagon, displaying their tribal allegiance, or otherwise demonstrating their own examples of the cognitive deficits inherent to human nature. Those deficits result in progressive loss of nuance; pretty soon I'm being accused of everything any feminist considers evil.
Now I won't say that Wilson left himself open to this. I've seen cases where everything is based on real data, and those who don't like the conclusion still escalate their objections beyond nuance or even accuracy. But in Wilson's case, my memory tells me that the initial reaction was justified. It's amazing how little we knew about animal behaviour at the time, let alone the behaviour of other primates. We also knew precious little about forager lifestyles, yet mostly believed in some model "researched" in the works of Rousseau and/or Hobbes.
I may be misremembering what Wilson had to say for himself, and I certainly didn't follow him - or sociobiology - as it evolved. But while the idea of evolutionary influence on human behaviour was good, IMO the scientific community of the time didn't have the tools to do anything useful with it.
Now we have better knowledge, though much of it is vulnerable to issues connected with the well-known replication crisis, and are beginning to have ideas that may actually be useful.
Popular understanding still tends towards tendentious rubbish - evolution "proves" that we should all live like bonobos - or pan chimpanzees - or gorillas - or maybe bears, wolves or tigers - depending on what behaviour the speaker wants to support. Usually there's been no evolutionary change since some magical date in the past, referred to as "the environment of evolutionary adaptedness", which defines the true good life even today.
The science, however, is getting better. Maybe popular understanding will catch up to today's scientific knowledge in another 50 years, even while the scientific understanding improves farther.
Interesting reply! I think Wilson was pointing out a potentially fruitful area of research in the 1970s. The people who have done the work have had some interesting work, although - as you say - you always have to watch out for "just so" stories.
I was in college in the mid-1970s, majoring in psychology. We had a class where we read and discussed writing relevant to the major, led by a grad student; it was basically an exercise in critical thinking, motivated by the typical undergraduate's teenage joy in finding and pointing out things wrong with adult, supposedly professional writing.
If I recall correctly - and after 45 years I might not - we read something by Wilson, and were predictably unimpressed. At any rate, I did read him back when he was topical, and wound up concluding that his problem was using what scientists call just-so stories, to motivate or explain "obvious" facts, aka things that might lack evidence, but were generally believed at the time of writing.
A contrived example: Suppose I believe that females are, and should be, at all times and places subordinate to males. In fact "everyone" knows this, except maybe a few "crazy" rebels. So to explain the relevance of evolution to human nature, I construct an evolution-based argument, possibly including some more "facts" everyone knows, to show how evolution explains female subordination. Every feminist or semi-feminist who read my book decries me, and rejects evolutionary influence as well.
A few of them know enough about biology and/or human behaviour to recognize that the "facts" are either unproven ("myth", rather than "data") or contradicted by other facts (maybe even supported ones) I neglected to mention. The rest are just jumping on the band wagon, displaying their tribal allegiance, or otherwise demonstrating their own examples of the cognitive deficits inherent to human nature. Those deficits result in progressive loss of nuance; pretty soon I'm being accused of everything any feminist considers evil.
Now I won't say that Wilson left himself open to this. I've seen cases where everything is based on real data, and those who don't like the conclusion still escalate their objections beyond nuance or even accuracy. But in Wilson's case, my memory tells me that the initial reaction was justified. It's amazing how little we knew about animal behaviour at the time, let alone the behaviour of other primates. We also knew precious little about forager lifestyles, yet mostly believed in some model "researched" in the works of Rousseau and/or Hobbes.
I may be misremembering what Wilson had to say for himself, and I certainly didn't follow him - or sociobiology - as it evolved. But while the idea of evolutionary influence on human behaviour was good, IMO the scientific community of the time didn't have the tools to do anything useful with it.
Now we have better knowledge, though much of it is vulnerable to issues connected with the well-known replication crisis, and are beginning to have ideas that may actually be useful.
Popular understanding still tends towards tendentious rubbish - evolution "proves" that we should all live like bonobos - or pan chimpanzees - or gorillas - or maybe bears, wolves or tigers - depending on what behaviour the speaker wants to support. Usually there's been no evolutionary change since some magical date in the past, referred to as "the environment of evolutionary adaptedness", which defines the true good life even today.
The science, however, is getting better. Maybe popular understanding will catch up to today's scientific knowledge in another 50 years, even while the scientific understanding improves farther.
Interesting reply! I think Wilson was pointing out a potentially fruitful area of research in the 1970s. The people who have done the work have had some interesting work, although - as you say - you always have to watch out for "just so" stories.