It is exactly 25 years since Edward O Wilson published his Sociobiology: a new synthesis

It is exactly 25 years since Edward O Wilson published his Sociobiology: a new synthesis. With its blend of new research and vivid popularisation, the book changed the course of intellectual history. The tedious charades of space exploration became a sideshow, and the unimaginable formalisms of relativity and quantum mechanics were sent back to the specialists. Evolutionary biology became the public’s favourite science and has remained so.
Wilson’s synthesis promised to explain the whole of human existence – mind and consciousness as well as body and instinct – in terms of evolution; but its basic principles were not novel. The general idea that populations tend, over the generations, to become better adapted to their circumstances went back to Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. The same applies to the notion that biological progress comes about not through will or purpose but as an automatic outcome of blind natural selection. Wilson’s elaboration of the mathematics of evolution had long roots, too, and he was far from the first to suggest that biological explanations could be extended into human self-knowledge, reducing such conceited disciplines as literature, art, philosophy and the social sciences to “branches of biology”.The success of Sociobiology was due in part to Wilson’s mastery of the art of making enemies.

As Kenan Malik explains in Man, Beast and Zombie, there was soon an organised opposition called the Sociobiology Study Group, which included Wilson’s Harvard colleagues Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould. In a letter to the New York Review of Books, the group denounced sociobiology as a right-wing conspiracy, an attempt to “provide a genetic justification of the status quo” that had affinities with “the eugenic policies which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany”.A little later, a band of demonstrators interrupted a public lecture by Wilson, pouring water over him and yelling, “Wilson, you’re all wet now!” It was not a very strong argument, and Wilson now likes to recall his triumphs over “the last of the Marxist intellectuals”.The hullabaloo marked the end of a century-long friendship between Darwinism and those who liked to consider themselves progressive. The Darwinist notion of the mutability of species had hitherto seemed to rhyme with the leftist idea that nothing lasts for ever. And the doctrine of evolution seemed to suggest that the human race was riding on a biological escalator to ever-higher levels of intelligence, health and happiness. It had always seemed as if Darwin and Marx were comrades.During the seventies, as Malik shows, all the ideological furniture was rearranged. Leftists began to prefer sociology and anthropology to the natural sciences, and it became an article of faith that changes in the human world must be a matter of cultural choice rather than natural selection. The new progressive conscience concerned itself less with improving the wealth of the masses than with protecting individual rights.

In that context, the inoffensive truism that our capacities depend on genetic inheritance began to seem like an excuse for racial prejudice rather than an argument for equality. Wilson fired his opening shot, and the science wars began.Malik provides lucid and readable explanations of Wilson’s neo-Darwinism and traces its ramifications in modular psychology and artificial intelligence. He also pays his respects to the opposition, noting that on points of science they sometimes got the better of Wilson. (They were right to insist that biological structures that now serve one purpose might originally have developed because they served another.) But in the end Malik cuts both sides down to size by setting them in a vast historical landscape as participants in the dispute between “human exceptionalism” and “scientific reductionism” that has raged since the Renaissance.Malik’s governing argument is that science and humanism are not really alternatives. Scientific reasoning itself points to the conclusion that humans are exceptional, and explanations of human behaviour will remain scientifically incomplete as long as “objective causes” are not supplemented by “subjective reasons”. As Malik demonstrates with force and eloquence, the idea of irreducibly subjective reasons contains nothing that need offend even the most puritanical naturalists: it does not rest on anything more mysterious than networks of social relationships developed through history and mediated by language.Malik’s attempt to broker a theoretical peace between hard-headed Darwinists and tender-minded humanists has obvious appeal. But the problem is a matter of points of view rather than theories, and it is hard to believe that the settlement will last.