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eminent British bio logist with impeccabl y p rogressive political creden–
ti als, p ublish ed a fri endl y (and , as it turned out, pos thumous) review of
Sociobio logy
in
Th e New Y ork R eview of Books.
In res ponse, a
camarill a of Boston area academic ho tbl oods denounced his review in a
letter to the editor and chided the by then deceased Waddington for
failing to identify Wil son with the bogeymen of Marxist demonol ogy,
viz. the biological determini st and the comp lacent bourgeois scienti st.
In January of 1978, acti vists dou sed Wil son with water while he took
part in a panel discussion a t a scientific conventi on .
T he Uni versity of Chicago anthropologist Marshall Sahlins also
does not h ave much use for Wilson 's trea tise. But in hi s
The Use and
A buse of Bio logy
he offers a schola rl y critique of sociobiology that is
much more serious than the h ysterical and demagogic attacks emanat–
ing from "Science for the Peopl e" prop agandists. Sahlins opens his
critique with a di smi ssal of wha t h e calls "vul gar" sociobiology, as
exempli fied by the popul ar writings of Lorenz and of Robert Ardrey,
Desmond Morris, Li on el Ti ger, and Robin Fox. Vul gar sociobiology
"con sists in the explica ti on of human social behavior as the expression
of needs and drives of the human organism, such propensities h aving
been constructed in human nature by bio logical evolution ." Such an
expli ca tion-says Sahlins-demands a one-to-one correspondence, or
isomorphi sm, between th e character of human biological p ropensiti es
and the properties of human social systems. But-and thi s is Sahlins'
first important claim-no such isomorphi sm exists, because the pres–
ence of
cu lture
interrupts an y straightforward causal chain between
evoluti onary phylogen y and human social morphology. Culture has
evidentl y freed human behavior pa tterns from emotional and moti va–
tional necessities, as ev idenced by the anth ropological findin gs that the
same human moti ves appear in different cultural forms, and different
moti ves appear in the same forms. Hence there can be no biological
determini sm of human social behavior, and in so far as
H omo sapiens
is concerned, socio bi o logists, vul gar or otherwise, are whi stling in the
dark .
Here Sahlin s' argument seems convincing: any sociobiological
enterprise whi ch neglects the central role of culture in the shaping of
human social behavior is futil e. Moreover, he may be correct in
claiming that the vul gar authors whose writings he consigns to the
ashcan of sociological litera ture have no t taken tha t role suffi cientl y
into account. But Sahlins does no t show tha t there is no conceivable
version of sociobiology whi ch
cou ld
take the role of culture into
account and might thus provide a bi ological grounding for human
