Segerstråle’s book offers you everything you always wanted to know about the sociobiology debate, but it is certainly not a crib for those seeking to impress their friends at dinner parties. The text fills over four hundred large-format pages and provides a mass of detail culled from both publications and interviews with the participants. The narrative is partly historical, but the author’s insights are also released in sequence through the text, with no quick overview provided in either the introduction or conclusion.

The debate was initiated by E O Wilson’s bold attempt to show how animal social behaviour is shaped by natural selection, and his hints that the same programme might be applied to humans. Richard Dawkins’ work on the ‘selfish gene’ provided an equivalent stimulus on this side of the Atlantic. Segerstråle is well aware of the differences between the American and British responses to sociobiology, including the initial reluctance of British biologists even to use the term ‘sociobiology.’ Left-wing critics such as Richard Lewontin rushed to attack the theory, alleging that it represented a new wave of genetic determinism, racism and social Darwinism. To the critics, sociobiology was bad science supported by those who were quite willing to have their judgement distorted by their prejudices. They opposed the whole determinist program and also Darwinian evolutionism – Lewontin and Steve Gould’s attack on adaptationism was part of their campaign. Gould’s Mismeasure of Man brought in history to link the old and the new determinism. The sociobiologists saw themselves as the victims of a witch-hunt by those whose left-wing beliefs forced them to rule whole areas of science out of bounds.

To some extent Segerstråle’s analysis vindicates the sociobiologists. Wilson is not a racist and Dawkins is not a simpleminded determinist, whatever their critics claimed. In the end, sociobiology has been accepted as legitimate science, and even its human applications are no longer shunned. But why was there such vociferous opposition from the start, and why were both sides so intransigent in the positions they took up? The intransigence was in part a rhetorical strategy by which each side sought to present its opponents in the blackest possible terms, while portraying itself as the victim. But Segerstråle’s sociological approach uncovers a complex and interacting pattern of differences which accounts for the original divergence of opinion. Partly, of course, the differences are political: each side was prepared to invest valuable time that could have been spent on research in trying to gain “moral capital” in the public debate. Wilson was from the rural south and politically naive, Gould and Lewontin were urban radicals ever alert for anything that smacked of right-wing bias. There were also differences in their scientific backgrounds and their views on what makes good science. Wilson is a ‘planter’ – he assumes that the scientific method guarantees objectivity and wants to forge ahead with new ideas that can be tested by observation. Lewontin is a ‘weeder’ – he suspects scientists can always be led astray by their prejudices and wants to stamp out any new theory that is politically suspect. More generally, Wilson is sloppy but adventurous while Lewontin is brilliant at analysis without being very creative. Wilson works in the field, where the testing of hypotheses is necessarily a more indirect process, while Lewontin is a laboratory geneticist used to rigorous testing from the start. All of these forces were at work guaranteeing that the two sides would remain at loggerheads.

Segerstråle’s book is a good example of the modern sociological analysis of how science operates, and her efforts to be even-handed will probably leave both sides unsatisfied. Her dense style of presentation may also leave some readers unsure about the implications of the new approach. The concepts of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ science are highly problematic: the left-wing critics of sociobiology thought that they could identify bad science because they were convinced that certain ideas were false and hence that anyone supporting them had abandoned true objectivity. But the sociological approach requires the analysis to be symmetrical – if one side’s science incorporates its values, then so must the other. It simply will not do to say that only politically correct theories represent good science as measured by the standards of science itself. In this sense, the sociobiologists’ claim that they were the victims of a witch-hunt instituted by critics whose values were embedded in their own science seems valid. Yet the critics may have been right to warn that the determinist approach has its dangers; however sophisticated its new foundations, it is all too easily misused by those who are racists and social Darwinists. The critics who still warn about the public’s enthusiasm for genetic determinism have a point, if not about science itself then certainly about the way it is perceived.

Peter J Bowler
The Queen’s University of Belfast