A Conversation with E.O. Wilson (1929 2021)

Alice Dreger: I know you ve spoken about it many times before, but I would like to begin by asking you about the session at the 1978 AAAS [American Association for the Advancement of Science] conference during which you were rushed on the stage and a protester emptied a pitcher of water onto your head. By all accounts, the talk you then gave was very measured. How on Earth were you able to remain so calm after being physically assaulted?

Edward O. Wilson: I think I may have been the only scientist in modern times to be physically attacked for an idea. The idea of a biological human nature was abhorrent to the demonstrators and was, in fact, too radical at the time for a lot of people probably most social scientists and certainly many on the far-Left. They just accepted as dogma the blank-slate view of the human mind that everything we do and think is due to contingency, rather than based upon instinct like bodily functions and the urge to keep reproducing. These people believe that everything we do is the result of historical accidents, the events of history, the development of personality through experience.

That was firmly believed in 1978 by a wide part of the population, but particularly by the political Left. And it was thought at the time that raising the specter of a biological basis for human behavior was not only wrong, but a justification for war, sexism, and racism. Biological gender differences could justify sexism, and any imputation that we evolved a human nature, or that human qualities might differ from one race to another, was dangerously racist.

So, furious ideologically based opposition had built up in 1978. That opposition had been fanned by a small number of academics including [paleontologist] Stephen Jay Gould and [evolutionary biologist] Richard Lewontin and two or three others on the Harvard faculty who thought this was a very dangerous idea and said so. These people helped organize the so-called Science for the People movement, or the branch of it called the Sociobiology Study Group. Their purpose was to discredit me personally for having brought up such a dangerous and destructive idea.

via quillette.com

I’m not sure E.O. Wilson would now be regarded as a Hero of Science (and I certainly regard him as such) if he hadn’t come out so strongly for conservation of the natural environment and against Climate Change. Nevertheless, he won the battle of ideas about human nature for anyone with any objectivity. Of course, he might still lose the war if it is ultimately decided that being right in your ideas doesn’t really matter.