Sociobiology and the Politics of Objectivity

The historiography of the sociobiology debate of the 1970s has tended to treat the episode as an example of the "politicization" of science that reveals the conflict between epistemic goals of science and the cultural norms of a particular moment in time. 1 This view, however, assumes a false dichotomy between "science" and "culture."More importantly, it obscures how the politics of sociobiologists had become normalized as the neutral or "objective" stance in subsequent debates about genetics, evolution, and human nature.We had long been suspicious of the claim-made by E. O. Wilson and his defenders-that Wilson's 1975 Sociobiology: The New Synthesis was unfairly maligned by Leftist agitators whose agenda was political rather than scientific.Beyond the fact that critics like Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Leon Kamin, Steven Rose, and others quite clearly identified a number of theoretical or empirical flaws in sociobiology, Wilson consistently denied his own politics in presenting himself as an unbiased seeker of truth.As Wilson stridently put it in a 1976 response to his critics, "The issue at hand, I submit, is vigilantism: the judgment of a work of science according to whether it conforms to the political convictions of the judges, who are self-appointed."