The following 3-book review ran in the Washington Post on June 25. For those not
in the D.C. area here is the original article. My original title was "The
Evolution Wars." They retitled it "Biology, Destiny and Dissent." As usual I
didn't like the change at first, but now I do. I guess editors are good for something
(good thing, since I am one!).
The Evolution Wars
By Michael Shermer
A review of:
Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and
Beyond by Ullica Segerstrale, Oxford University Press, 2000, 493 pp., $35.
The Monk in the Garden: The Lost and Found Genius of Gregor Mendel, the
Father of Genetics by Robin Marantz Henig, Houghton Mifflin, 2000, 224 pp.,
$24.
The Riddled Chain: Chance, Coincidence, and Chaos in Human Evolution by
Jeffrey K. McKee, Rutgers University Press, 2000, 256 pp, $27.
Creationism, in some form, will probably be with us as long as biblical
fundamentalists continue their misguided efforts to squeeze the square peg of
religion into the round hole of science. But the debate over whether
evolution happened was played out over a century ago; the evolution wars
today are over how evolution happened. Of course, outside of professionals in
the field no one cares one whit about how cockroaches or coelacanths evolved.
The evolution wars are being fought over how one particular species evoltion
wars began in 1859 with the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of
Species. But it heated up in 1975 with the release of E. O. Wilson's
Sociobiology and has not let up since, as evidenced by the controversies
generated by sociobiology's doppleganger--evolutionary psychology--and it's
attempt to account for human behavior in terms of evolutionary adaptations
(for example, the recent attempt to explain rape as an adaptive strategy by
males who could not pass on their genes by non forceful sex). The modern
evolution wars now have their chronicler in sociologist Ullica Segerstrale,
whose masterfully comprehensive Defenders of the Truth was twenty-five years
in the making and is packed with first-hand observations and interviews--she
was a student at Harvard in the late 1970s and has built her career around
tracking the controversy.
At stake in this battle is nothing less than how human societies should be
structured, the nature of human nature, and, as Segerstrale notes, "the soul
of science." How an academic textbook by an entomologist could result in one
of the most rankerous debates in all of science, is marvelously explained in
intricate detail beginning with the reactions to Edward Wilson by his Harvard
colleagues Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin. Their Sociobiology Study
Group, along with the politically-charged Science for the People, resulted in
the now famous incident at the 1978 meeting of the American Association for
the Advancement of Science in which demonstrators chanted "Racist Wilson you
can't hide, we charge you with genocide!" followed by someone pouring a
jug of ice-water over his head, shouting "Wilson, you are all wet!"
Why, Wilson wondered two decades later in his autobiographical book
Naturalist, didn't Gould and Lewontin just come up to his office from theirs
one floor below in the same Harvard building to discuss their concerns? Why
attack him in the very public pages of the New York Review of Books when this
all could have been handled in private? The reason, as Segerstrale so
brilliantly shows in this properly contextualized history, is that science is
not the private and always-rational enterprise it is often made out to be.
Why, Gould and Lewontin could just as easily have asked, didn't Wilson come
down one floor to their offices to discuss with them in private his ideas
about applying principles of animal behavior to human societies? The answer
is the same: if you want to get your theories out into the marketplace of
ideas you cannot sequester them in your office. You've got to make them
public, and the more public the better. Hashing the debate out in public
gives you the forum you would never get in private.
An analogy here will help. On March 14, 1994 I appeared live on Phil
Donahue's national television show to debunk the Holocaust deniers. The
producers went to great lengths to keep me separated from them--different
limos to the studio, different dressing rooms, different green rooms,
different entrances to the set, and no talking during commercial breaks. Why?
Because, I was told, they wanted the fresh drama of an initial encounter. As
Segerstrale argues, correctly I think, this is exactly what happened in the
sociobiology debate. Gould and Lewontin had a scientific agenda that they
wanted to air publicly--that adaptationist, gene-centered arguments in
evolutionary theory can be carried too far, and that much in the history of
life can be explained by nonadaptive processes and a multi-leveled analysis
of genes, individuals, and groups. What better way to do it than to use
Wilson as their foil?
But who in the general public knows or cares about adaptations, exaptations,
spandrels, contingencies, and other esoterica of evolutionary biology? What
the public does understand quite well are Nazis, eugenics, race purification
programs, and other abuses of biology of the past century. Thus,
sociobiology's critics reasoned, the best strategy is to begin with its
ideological implications--particularly the racist overtones of genetic
determinism--to capture an audience, then segue into the scientific arguments
about the problems with hyperadaptationism. Gould said as much at a 1984
Harvard meeting Segerstrale attended: "We opened up the debate by taking a
strong position. We took a definitive stand in order to open up the debate to
scientific criticism. Until there is some legitimacy for expressing contrary
opinions, scientists will shut up." From this (and numerous interviews with
all parties involved) Segerstrale concludes: "What I take Gould to be saying
here is that the controversy around Wilson's Sociobiology was, in fact a
vehicle for the real scientific controversy about adaptation! Far, then, from
'dragging politics into it,' or being 'dishonest' as [Ernst] Mayr accused
Gould and Lewontin of being, their political involvement would have been
instead a deliberate maneuver to gain a later hearing for their fundamentally
scientific argument about adaptation. What Gould seems to have been saying
here is that the scientific controversy about adaptation could not have been
started without the political controversy about sociobiology."
Before we accuse Gould and Lewontin of being overly Machiavellian in their
political machinations, however, Segerstrale points out that Wilson was not
an innocent victim in this debate. It seems unlikely that a Harvard professor
could author a book whose title defines a new science of applying biology to
human social behavior, in the middle of a decade that was defined by its
ideological emphasis on egalitarian politics and cultural determinism, and
not expect trouble. In fact, the central point of Segerstrale's book is
that all scientists have an agenda and the sooner we recognize that fact and
come
clean with our own, the better able will the public be to judge scientific
theories.
Certain Gould and Lewontin went too far, as all social movements are wont to
do. When I first met Ed Wilson I couldn't believe what a kind, generous, and
soft-spoken man he is--anything but what I had expected from following the
sociobiology debates. Then again, as Segerstrale convincingly shows, it would
appear that Wilson knew exactly what he was doing all along. From
Sociobiology to his latest book Consilience, Wilson has brilliantly
orchestrated a scientistic program of biologizing all of human behavior, from
mate selection and maternal love to war and religion. No wonder the evolution
wars have been so heated. Much is on the line, and if you don't mind weeding
through the sometimes overly detailed recounting of events and lengthy quotes
(professionals in the field will relish every word however), Defenders of the
Truth will put you right in the heart of this epic tale that continues
unfolding before us, exactly three-quarters of a century after the
rediscovery of Gregor Mendel's revolutionary research on heredity.
If there is an individual besides Darwin at the beginning and Wilson at
present whom we can identify as the figurehead of the evolution wars, it is
Gregor Mendel, whose work was nearly simultaneously rediscovered in 1900 by
Hugo De Vries, Karl Correns, and Erich von Tschermak. And, like Darwin and
Wilson, by temperament Mendel was about as unlikely a revolutionary as one
can imagine. He truly was the "monk in the garden," as his biographer and
science writer Robin Marantz Henig describes him in the title of her engaging
book. Unlike Darwin, however, of whom we have libraries filled with works by
and about, we have almost nothing on Mendel, thus opening the door to science
myth-making at its best, as Henig explains:
"Part of the allure of Mendel as a hero of modern science is that we can
picture him puttering in his garden, seeking answers to universal questions
in his crops of peas. To some extent, Mendel's story is primarily the story
of a gardener, patiently tending his plants, collecting them, counting them,
working out his ratios, and calmly, clearly explaining an amazing
finding--then waiting for someone to understand what he was talking about. It
is the story of a gentle revolutionary who was born a generation too soon."
Henig has done a remarkable job of fleshing out the myth with what few facts
there are, and as such that part of her book is a loving tribute to a man we
will sadly probably never know much about, either personally or even how he
actually did his science. (Thus, the question some have raised as to the
possibility of Mendel fudging his data to make his famous 3:1 ratio come out
clean, is most likely an insoluble one since all we have to go on is a couple
of letters written to a German botanist and a single 44-page paper Mendel
called a mere summary of his public lectures written for clarity, not
historical accuracy. "We do not know exactly how the experiments were done,
in what order, during which seasons, even precisely where in the wide
courtyard of the St. Thomas monastery in Brunn," Henig recounts in
frustration. "We do not know for sure how many generations Mendel squeezed
into a single growing season, nor how often he grew plants in the greenhouse
and how often in the garden. Nor do we know the total number of pea plants he
used, whether anyone helped him in his labors, or where he was on any
particular day during the most intense period of his experimentation."
Therefore the action really begins in the second half of the book, long after
Mendel is dead, when the evolution wars started heating up again over whether
traits were inherited in discrete units or whether they blended with other
traits into a new amalgam. Just as Gould and Lewontin would use Wilson to
promote their own vision of nature (while both sides claimed Darwin as their
hero), so too did the two major characters in the Mendel story, William
Bateson and Hugo de Vries, use each other.
The parallels are erie. Just as Wilson coined "sociobiology," Dawkins the
"selfish gene," and Eldredge and Gould "punctuated equilibrium," Bateson
created "zygote," "homozygote," and in 1905 "genetics" (from the Greek
genetikos, meaning "origin" or "fertile"). De Vries shortened Darwin's
"pangenesis" to "pangen," but in 1909 the Dutch plant physiologist Wilhelm
Johannsen bettered him with "gene," a concept he naively presupposed to be
"free from any hypotheses." Why the fight over terminology? Because language
matters, as Henig notes: "This universal language was the first step in
turning the emerging science of genetics into a coherent discipline."
It is here where Mendel once again enters the picture. "Every new science
needs a hero--someone on whose giant shoulders his disciples can stand--and
Mendel was an easy man to lionize." And just as today's debators each believe
they are "defenders of the truth," Henig shows how even when it began a
century ago, "Both sides were playing for the highest stakes: the right to
claim a truthful insight into the workings of the natural world. What they
uncovered eventually became the foundation of a science that has taken us to
the very brink of human possibilities."
What the future holds for the evolution wars may be glimpsed in the next
generation's writings, an intriguing representative sample of which can be
found in paleoanthropologist Jeffrey McKee's The Riddled Chain. The subtitle
alone, "Chance, Coincidence, and Chaos in Human Evolution," tells us that
this is not a strickly gene-focused, adaptationist analysis. The alliterative
reference is to influences outside the traditional forces of study that have
shaped the course of evolution; and once again the topic is our favorite
species. McKee cleverly draws the reader into theoretical debates about human
evolution through personal stories of his own field work in South Africa. But
McKee is not just in the search of our origins, which is now reasonably well
fleshed out in a very bushy tree of life. There is no linear chain in the
"ascent of man" that can be cleanly drawn from Lucy to us. Instead, as McKee
demonstrates through a convergence of evidence ranging from fossils to
computer simulations, "Natural selection is severely limited both in its
power to promote useful genes and in its freedom to tinker with morphology.
Human bodies are not particularly well adapted in many respects, revealing
the chance origins of nature's 'designs.' Chance and chaos, as much as the
ever vigilant selective process, made us what we are."
To a strict adaptationists like Richard Dawkins and Edward Wilson, these are
fight'n words. If natural selection is not the be all and end all of
evolution, then what is? Autocatalysis, McKee argues in the book's most daring
chapter. "Autocatalytic evolution simply means this: evolution is caused
(catalyzed) by itself (auto). It is self-propelled by feedback loops. If this
means that most evolutionary change is catalyzed or caused by the inherent
nature of a species, then the grand theories of environmental forcing fall
away. Evolution would proceed with or without changes in climate or in the
plant and animal community with which a species interacts. Evolution is the
cause of evolution, and it continues by its chaotic devices." Indeed,
autocatalysis is what chaos and complexity scientists call feedback loops, as
when a PA system generates "feedback" between the microphone and speakers.
The figure from McKee shows just how nonlinear and interactive the
process of evolution can be. The old linear model of bipedalism --> tool use
--> meat eating --> big brains --> language --> culture is replaced by an
autocatalytic feedback loop in which "each morphological aspect has
functional or behavioral consequences or correlates (solid arrows), which in
turn reinforce the evolved features through positive natural selection (open
arrows)."
Autocatalysis is a superior model for explaining the complexities of life
because as biologists have discovered in recent decades (particularly with
the rise of the science of ecology), simple linear models fail to account for
complex biological systems. The same has to be true for the history of life.
It certainly is in human cultural history, which is riddled with
autocatalytic feedback loops and, in fact, forms the core of Jared Diamond's
revolutionary work Guns, Germs, and Steel. McKee believes that he's on to
something here that could very well start yet another evolution war. "The
theory of autocatalytic evolution is painfully simple, horribly mundane, and
probably correct."
Is it? The evidence is good, but it is too soon to tell, so as in the debate
over Wilson's sociobiology and Mendel's genetics, the battle for science will
be determined in both the private and public spheres of influence.