Triumph or travesty?

The Triumph of

Sociobiology

by John AlcockOxford UniversityPress, 2001. £16.95 hbk (257 pages) ISBN 0 19 514383 3

Imagine a textbook for students entitledThe Triumph of Genetics (or of Ecology, or Biochemistry, or Neuroscience).Inconceivable? Under whatcircumstances might one want to call ascientific discipline triumphant? Only,presumably, when it feels its statusuncertain and its premises under attack.Precisely this problem has dogged thebranch of behavioural ecology that seeks to find evolutionarily adaptiveexplanations for individual and socialbehaviours among animals, and, morecontroversially, humans. This issociobiology, a term which came toprominence with the publication ofE.O. Wilson’s book1 in 1975. That book and its successors were bothextravagantly praised and vociferouslycriticized. A quarter century later, battlehas been re-joined around sociobiology’soffspring, evolutionary psychology.The Triumph of Sociobiology is but onewarrior in what have become known asthe ‘Darwin wars’, and, despite beingdirected towards ‘college students andtheir instructors’, it is not exactlydisinterested pedagogy. (It is of courseonly fair to point out that mine too is not a disinterested review, being, as I am, one of those authors who attracts Alcock’s specific ire.)

Alcock’s aim is to define sociobiology,to defend the scientific legitimacy of itsevolutionary approach, to give examplesof its methods and findings, and to fendoff its various critics from within biology,the social sciences and philosophy. I fullyrespect his right to do so, but suspect thathe is less than willing to accord similarrespect to his critics, who are brushedaside as Marxists, feminists, socialconstructionists or ‘blank slate’ social

scientists. He certainly gives a bizarreaccount of these various positions, aswhen he characterizes ‘Marxistphilosophy’ as ‘founded on the premise ofthe perfectibility of human institutionsthrough ideological prescription’ beforegoing on to claim that such distinguishedevolutionary geneticists as RichardLewontin’s critique of sociobiology wasnot so much scientific as an attempt ‘toraise the political consciousness of societyat large’. The ignorance of the firststatement is only matched by theoffensiveness of the second. I have noobjection to political and culturalpolemic, but surely it has no place in astudent text?

Despite Alcock’s claims, biologistcritics of sociobiology and evolutionarypsychology have no wish to deny thelegitimacy of evolutionary arguments –how could we, who share Dobzhansky’sview that, ‘Nothing in biology makessense except in the light of evolution.’The problem is that although Alcockaccepts a degree of pluralism in biologicalexplanation by distinguishing between‘proximate’ and ‘ultimate’ explanations of behaviour, there is little doubt whichtype of explanation he regards asdetermining – only consider the almostmetaphysical power of that word‘ultimate’. But he is generally insensitiveto the power of words, as when he defendsthe use of the word ‘rape’ to describeseemingly forced copulation amongvarious insect species, and then blithelytransfers the same word to thequalitatively different human context.The point is that apart from broaduniversal statements, the humangenome and evolutionary adaptationsseem to be able to support a wide varietyof human behaviours and institutions.Thus, for most purposes, evolutionaryexplanations are at best enabling and notdetermining. This is why they have beendisparagingly dismissed as ‘Just-So’stories, because for science to beproductive, rather than speculative, ithas to be able to identify determiningcauses. If popularizing sociobiologists,ever since Wilson and Dawkins, had notbeen so triumphalist, so immodest intheir claims, but had pursued theirresearch in the manner of more normalscientific disciplines, asking perfectlylegitimate questions – even within the

adaptationist or selectionist frameworkthat other biologists find too confining –they would not have run into suchtrouble. It’s a pity, as there is seriouswork to be done, and, as Alcock describeswhen he relaxes his polemic, the resultscan be fascinating.

Steven Rose

Dept of Biological Sciences,Open University, Milton Keynes,UK MK7 6AA.e-mail: s.p.r.rose@open.ac.uk

Reference

1 Wilson, E.O. (1975) Sociobiology, HarvardUniversity Press

At last – a third edition

of human cytogenetics!

Human Cytogenetics:

Constitutional

Analysis (3rd edn)

edited by Denise E. Rooney.Oxford UniversityPress, 2001. £65.00 hbk/£32.50 pbk (302 pages) ISBN 0 19 963839 X

Human Cytogenetics:

Malignancy and

Acquired

Abnormalities

(3rd edn)

edited by Denise E. Rooney.Oxford UniversityPress, 2001. £65.00 hbk/£32.50 pbk (306 pages) ISBN 0 19 963841 X

In 1986, D.E. Rooney andB.H. Czepulkowski published the firstedition of Human Cytogenetics:A Practical Approach. This was followedin 1992 by a two-volume second editionthat separated out malignancy andacquired changes from constitutional(non-acquired) ones. This year, thelong-overdue and very welcome thirdedition, edited by Rooney alone, has been published.

TRENDS in Genetics Vol.17 No.12 December 2001

http://tig.trends.com

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