Scientist, page 20
The real fireworks burst on the following evening, in advance of the sociobiology sessions beginning Friday morning. The evening plenary session was supposed to be a business meeting. It was instead nearly a public hanging. Nap Chagnon recalls it vividly in his memoir Noble Savages, which is pointedly subtitled My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes—the Yanomamö and the Anthropologists:
The ballroom in which the business meeting was held was full beyond capacity. A motion had been placed on the agenda by opponents of sociobiology aimed at preventing the sessions that Irons and I had organized…. It was as if the last two bastions of opposition to the theory of evolution by natural selection were fundamentalist fire-and-brimstone preachers and cultural anthropologists! Heated debate and impassioned accusations of racism, fascism, and Nazism punctuated the frenzied business meeting that night.
When Chagnon had listened to as much as he could stomach, he moved to table the motion. “Nobody heard me,” he remembers, “because Margaret Mead, the ‘Mother Goddess’ of anthropology, stood up to address the motion to prohibit our sessions.” Mead was a former president of the association and had just ended a year as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The room went silent:
She began by expressing her opposition to Ed Wilson’s book and his whole idea of a “science of sociobiology” that would possibly subsume anthropology as a subordinate discipline. However, she said, in spite of her opposition to Wilson’s book and to sociobiology, she felt that the motion as worded was essentially a “book burning” motion and, for that reason, she thought that it was not something our association should advocate and be identified with. She then sat down, somewhat regally, and the vote on the motion was taken almost immediately. The motion was defeated, but not by a wide range.
Mead was seventy-four, a cultural anthropologist of world celebrity. Her opposition to sociobiology was evidently professional, founded on her rejection of Wilson’s claim that sociobiology would incorporate her scientific field. A year later, she invited Wilson to dinner, specifically to discuss sociobiology, during a conference they both happened to be attending in Virginia. “I was nervous then,” he writes, “expecting America’s mother figure to scold me about the dangers of genetic determinism.” But the great anthropologist had decided instead to claim priority. “I had nothing to fear. She wanted to stress that she, too, had published ideas on the biological basis of social behavior…. Over roast beef and red wine…she recommended several of her own writings that she thought I might want to read.”
In 1976, Wilson was awarded a National Medal of Science, the nation’s highest scientific honor. One of fifteen recipients, he received the award from President Jimmy Carter on the morning of 22 November 1977, almost exactly a year after the contentious AAA annual meeting, in a ceremony held in the Old Executive Office Building. A twelve-member committee of the National Science Foundation had chosen the awardees; Wilson’s award citation credited him “for his pioneering work on the organization of insect societies and the evolution of social behavior among insects and other animals.” If there were anthropologists on the NSF committee, their opinion hadn’t prevailed. The award, Wilson told me, was one important factor in the fading away of public controversy about sociobiology as the seventies wound down. Another was the success of his book On Human Nature, published in 1978 and awarded a Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction the following year—Wilson’s first Pulitzer, but not his last.
Between those years, a less noble savagery marred the 1978 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, held on five days in mid-February in Washington. According to Chagnon, after the infighting at the 1976 anthropology meeting, campuses across the United States had sponsored debates about sociobiology, “the general theme [of which] was something like ‘What’s Dangerous About Sociobiology?’ ” By that time, Chagnon writes, “the very word sociobiology had become a lightning rod in the social sciences on college campuses.” Chagnon had participated in some of the debates, as had Bob Trivers. Always outspoken, the irascible Trivers had told Chagnon at one point, “I’ve finally figured out what they mean by a ‘balanced’ debate. For every clear demonstration of how effective a sociobiological explanation is of some phenomenon, it must be ‘balanced’ by a completely nonsensical appeal to bullshit, emotions and political correctness.”
In response to these acrimonious campus debates, Chagnon recalls, the AAAS decided to sponsor a national debate on sociobiology at its 1978 annual meeting, “hoping to put an end to the squabbling and to the unreasonable and false accusations against those who wished to study human behavior with new theoretical insights into natural selection.” A biologist and an anthropologist served as conveners, inviting leading proponents and opponents to participate. Margaret Mead was scheduled to serve as moderator—that was the reason she had invited Wilson to dinner not long before the event—but a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer forced her to withdraw. She died of that implacable disease the following November.
A full two-day program, “Beyond Nature-Nurture,” culminated in a symposium on Wednesday afternoon, 15 February 1978, where Wilson was to appear as the final speaker. Chagnon and Bill Irons had presented earlier; Chagnon had noticed “that the first two rows nearest the podium were filled with mostly sullen-looking young men who showed no signs of interest in the papers.” All the presenters for and against, Stephen Gould among them, were seated in a line in chairs onstage divided by a central podium. As the meeting proceeded, detractors in the audience challenged the speakers, including both Bill Hamilton and the British ethologist Richard Dawkins, whose popular book The Selfish Gene had been published less than two years earlier. Hamilton responded solemnly and somewhat shyly. Dawkins climbed up on his chair, Chagnon writes, “and delivered from that commanding position well-considered and highly informed responses to the criticisms of his work.”
Then it was Wilson’s turn. He had come to the meeting at a physical disadvantage: on crutches, with a cast on his right ankle, from a fall he had taken on black ice while jogging in Cambridge only two weeks before. He stayed seated as he began his talk; he could not easily have stood or moved.
The “sullen-looking young men” and women in the first rows of the audience immediately rushed the stage, shouting slogans and insults, including one of their favorites: “Racist Wilson, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!” Wilson had been cautioned before the session began that the same International Committee Against Racism that had harassed him in Harvard Square was planning a demonstration. Two InCAR members had passed out protest leaflets, refusing one to Wilson. The group was known for violent actions, and here they were.
About eight InCAR men and women, Wilson estimates, lined up behind the row of presenters. “Several held up anti-sociobiology placards, on at least one of which was painted a swastika.” Their leader strode to the lectern to take the microphone. Chagnon remembers the moderator, Alexander Alland, Jr., a Columbia University anthropologist, “shouting ‘Please stop! Please stop! I’m one of you people…. I’m also a Marxist! This is unacceptable!’ ” Chagnon, who was trying to push forward through the crowd of fleeing audience members to go to Wilson’s aid, adds, “Maybe Marxists had some kind of secret code I didn’t know about, but it didn’t work: the ‘Marxists’ continued to attack Wilson…. It was the most hateful, frightening, disgusting behavior I’ve ever witnessed at an academic assembly.”
Following AAAS procedure, Alland turned over the microphone to the InCAR leader, telling him he had two minutes before hotel security would be called. The man began haranguing the audience. Then, the most humiliating moment of all for Wilson, a young woman behind him hauled up a pitcher of ice water and drenched it over his head as the demonstrators chanted, “Wilson, you’re all wet!”
The thoroughly soaked sociobiologist dried himself off as best he could with his handkerchief; someone passed him a paper towel. “In a little over two minutes,” he recalls with evident anger, “they left the stage and took their seats. No one asked them to leave the premises, no police were called, and no action was taken against them later. After the symposium several stayed behind to chat with members of the audience.”
A report in the AAAS journal Science blandly recites the rest of the story: “The moderator then made an apology to Wilson and his copanelists which prompted a standing ovation from the audience.” (Wilson: “Of course they [applauded], I thought. What else could they do? They might be next.”) The Science report concludes: “Whereupon Wilson, who had to take all of this sitting down because his ankle was in a cast, proceeded with his paper on ‘Trends in Sociobiological Research.’ ”
For Wilson, one good result at least came out of these ugly episodes: Jim Watson invited him to keynote a conference at Cold Spring Harbor on neurobiology and behavior. “I went,” Wilson recalls, “and I gave the lecture, and that’s when Watson and I became good friends. He introduced me in a way that showed the generosity of his soul. He said, ‘Ed Wilson is the kind of biologist who makes the discoveries we work on.’ ” Bruce Stillman, Watson’s successor as director, said Watson told him, “Any enemy of Ed Wilson’s is an enemy of mine.” On two episodes of Charlie Rose, the talk show on PBS television, the two old enemies sparred in a friendly way but clearly liked and enjoyed each other.
Wilson wrote two more books about sociobiology, both with a young Canadian theoretical biologist, Charles J. Lumsden: Genes, Mind, and Culture, published in 1981, and Promethean Fire, published in 1983. Their common theme was the coevolution of genes and culture. In these works, they coined the term “culturgen” to refer to ideas that are culturally transmitted, a variant of Richard Dawkins’s earlier and more popular term “meme.” Debate continued, muted to the book-review pages of scientific journals and, inevitably, The New York Review of Books.
“I got tired of the sociobiology controversy,” Wilson told me. “I think I won it hands down, because there were not that many outspoken critics like Lewontin and Gould, and they just grew silent, most of them. Maybe they’re still murmuring in classrooms, but, no, I was happy to get back to something I felt more comfortable with. Arguing with scientists or others who are strongly against something you’ve done is not a pleasant occupation.”
That something Wilson got back to in the years after 1980 was ecology, and particularly the disturbing and intensifying decline in biodiversity and even outright extinction that followed from increasing human exploitation of the natural world.
11
Crossing the Line
Ed Wilson’s book Biophilia, published in 1984, almost sings with the joy of returning to the natural world from the mean precincts of academic brawling. “Biophilia,” love of the natural world, Wilson defines as “the rich, natural pleasure that comes from being surrounded by living organisms.” He claims it among “our deepest needs,” a genetic endowment, and whether it is or not, it certainly felt that way to him.
He had not set aside his scientific communications in the years of fighting for sociobiology: between 1975 and 1984, he published ninety-eight papers, essays, books, introductions, and book reviews, including his books on sociobiology (Sociobiology; On Human Nature; Genes, Mind, and Culture; Promethean Fire), two edited books, Animal Behavior and The Insects, and one study, Caste and Ecology in the Social Insects, co-written with the University of California mathematical biologist George Oster. He carried on his Harvard teaching as well, an academic star, adding a lecture course on sociobiology to his load. The self-described workaholic continued to pour forth work.
In 1980, he found a new and transformative cause: species extinction from the accelerating destruction of wildlife habitat, especially the great tropical rain forests of Central and South America. It recalled him to his visit to Cuba as a Junior Fellow in 1953, before he ventured out to the South Pacific, when he had seen the ravages of a country almost entirely given over to the cultivation of sugar cane, with only isolated shreds of forest left on hills and mountainsides too steep to cultivate. Then the destruction had seemed regional and local, not yet advanced enough globally to raise urgent concern. That was when the natural world still felt immortal to him.
In the 1960s, he had explored island biodiversity, even deliberately depopulating mangrove islands in the Florida Keys with Dan Simberloff to see how life returned. He and Robert MacArthur had researched and written The Theory of Island Biogeography, published in 1967, observing there that islands might be other than elevations of land surrounded by water. A forest remnant surrounded by pasture, farmland, or human settlement was an island—a “habitat island,” he and MacArthur called it. They had observed as well that “a reduction of habitat is inexorably followed by a loss of animal and plant species. Very roughly, we learned, a 90 percent reduction of forest cover…eventually halves the number of species living there.” But then he had grasped the opportunity to synthesize an entire field of study, years of independent discoveries by dozens of biologists published in scattered journals about social insects, and The Insect Societies diverted him, and then, through the 1970s, sociobiology.
The battering he took over sociobiology made him wary. In Naturalist he describes a recurring nightmare from this period, in which he fails to collect an island’s riches of flora and fauna before he’s forced to leave it, and from which he awakens “knotted with anxiety and regret.” He wondered, as the 1970s passed, if and when scientists should become activists: “Speak too forcefully, I thought, and other scientists regard you as an ideologue; speak too softly, and you duck a moral responsibility.” There were large organizations devoted to the cause of habitat destruction. Maybe the next generation of young biologists would embrace it.
A scientific report alerted him to the accelerating crisis. The U.S. National Research Council had commissioned it in 1978 from a British ecologist trained at Berkeley, Norman Myers, seeking to learn “which biological questions can be answered only in the tropics, or can be answered better or more efficiently there than elsewhere.” Myers pulled together whatever documentary evidence of tropical rain-forest conversion he could find, focusing on forest farming, timber trade (solid wood and paper pulp, commercial logging, wood chips), cattle raising, and firewood cutting.
The world’s rain forests, the NRC consultant found, occupied at that time about 7 percent of the world’s land area—about the same as the land area of the contiguous forty-eight United States—but, in Wilson’s words, “they teem with the greatest variety of plants and animals of all the world’s ecosystems.” And roughly .25 percent of their species were “extinguished or doomed to early extinction each year” by the annual cutting and burning worldwide of an area of forest equal to about half the area of Florida.
Myers’s grim conclusion: the world was losing not one species per year, as most biologists had previously assumed, but one species or more per day:
It is not unrealistic to suppose that, within perhaps the next two decades, many thousands of species could disappear in [tropical rain forest]…. Elimination of a substantial proportion of the planetary spectrum of species will mean a gross reduction of life’s diversity on earth; and it will entail a permanent shift in the course of evolution, and an irreversible loss of economic opportunity as well.
The chair of the NRC committee was an old friend of Wilson’s, Peter Raven, a botanist and former Stanford professor and since 1971 the director of the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis, the second-largest such institution in North America. “A distinguished scientist,” Wilson writes of him, “…increasingly a public figure, Peter was determined and fearless. He had no qualms about activism.” During the half-decade of the later 1970s when Wilson was preoccupied with defending sociobiology, his fearless friend, he says, “was writing, lecturing, and debating those still skeptical about the evidence of mass extinction…. More than anyone else Raven made it clear that scientists in universities…must get involved; the conservation professionals could not be expected to carry the burden alone.”
These accumulating challenges worked on Wilson, moving him in the direction of activism. His first public statement was brief, but it marked his debut as an environmental activist: for its first issue in 1980, Harvard Magazine, an independent bimonthly affiliated with its namesake university, invited seven Harvard professors to describe what they believed to be the most important problem facing the world in the new decade. “Four [of the seven],” Wilson writes, “cited poverty arising from, variously, overpopulation, the influx of rural masses into cities, and capitalism. Another, focusing on the United States, cited the welfare state and excessive governmental control. The sixth chose the global nuclear threat.” None mentioned the environment. Wilson stepped up, opening his brief, column-long statement with a prediction:
Permit me to rephrase the question as follows: What event likely to occur in the 1980s will our descendants most regret, even those living a thousand years from now? My opinion is not conventional, although I wish it were. The worst thing that can happen—will happen—is not energy depletion, economic collapse, limited nuclear war, or conquest by a totalitarian government. As terrible as those catastrophes would be for us, they can be repaired within a few generations. The one process ongoing in the 1980s that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.
