Genes uber A//es

"Descended from apes! My dear, let us hope it is not so; but if it is, let us hope that it does not become generally known. "

--Wife of the Bishop of Worcester, 19th century

The bishop's dithering wife is alive, well, residing in modern America and very dangerous, says Harvard Anthropologist Melvin J. Konner. In fact, he fears, she was very much in evidence at the annual American Anthropological Association meeting in Washington, where the subject of angry debate was the divisive new discipline of sociobiology and its chief spokesman Edward O. Wilson. The bishop's wife, says Konner, "did not like what Darwin said, what Marx and Engels said, what Freud said, and now she does not like what Wilson says: they all make her feel 'lower.' "

Male Dominance. Wilson, a Harvard zoologist, may not yet have achieved the stature of a Darwin, a Marx or a Freud. But he and his colleagues are sending the same kind of shock waves through the academic community. Sociobiology is the study of the biological basis for social behavior in every species; its practitioners believe that some--and perhaps much--of human behavior is genetically determined. It is not a message that many academics want to hear. Says Harvard's Richard Lewontin, an evolutionary biologist: "This is fundamentally a very conservative world view, which serves the very important function of saying that there is no sense in rocking the boat--we are what our genes make us--and I think that's bullshit." Lewontin is hardly alone. Marxist anthropologists criticize sociobiology as a rationale for reactionary capitalism, and feminists score it as a defense of male dominance. Others fear it will be used to support the notion that there is a genetic basis for racial differences in intelligence.

Eager for a showdown at the anthropology convention, opponents of sociobiology tried to push through a ham-handed resolution condemning the new science as "an attempt to justify genetically the sexist, racist and elitist status quo in human society." The resolution also deplored sociobiology's pernicious influences on the young, through its use in school texts.

But after an hour's debate, the 300 assembled anthropologists overwhelmingly defeated the resolution--partly because to many it was reminiscent of the church's denunciation of Galileo or William Jennings Bryan's attack on the theory of evolution at the Scopes "monkey" trial. Margaret Mead shuddered at the thought of anthropologists joining the far right in "book-burning" efforts in the schools. Said she: "We are supporting the people who attack everything we believe in! We are getting ourselves into an insane position." Concluded University of Chicago Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, a strong opponent of sociobiology who also opposed condemnation: sociobiology is surviving "largely because it can claim persecution."

Sociobiology is essentially the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin expressed in the terms of modern genetics: the central struggle of life is the drive to survive and reproduce. Yet the chief actors in the drama are not individuals or groups, but the genes themselves. Like the old aphorism, a chicken is just one egg's way of making another egg, a body can be viewed as merely a vehicle by which strings of genes produce other strings of genes. Ethologist Richard Dawkins writes that genes "swarm in huge colonies safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, manipulating it by remote control. They are in you and me; they created us body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence ... we are their survival machines."

This genetic Weltanschauung as perceived by sociobiologists appears to solve some problems in evolutionary theory. Darwin's version of the struggle for survival could not fully account for altruistic acts in some species--soldier ants laying down their lives for the colony, or birds risking death to save the rest of the flock by sounding an alarm about a nearby predator. The sociobiological explanation: the ant or bird that gives up its life is actually protecting nearby relatives with many of the same genes and maximizing chances that some of those genes will survive. If it is viewed as a selfish strategy by genes and not an altruistic one by individuals, the action makes evolutionary sense. It also implies that human altruism, and perhaps a good deal more of mankind's morality, may be genetically based. Anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy reported to the convention the sociobiological explanation for another puzzling practice in some animal species: infanticide. For instance, the male monkey langur has been seen to kill the infants when he takes over a group from another male. If he allows them to live, their nursing mothers will not ovulate for many months, delaying and reducing his chances of impregnating the females and getting his own genes into the next generation. Says Hrdy: "Infanticide is adaptive behavior, extremely advantageous for those males who succeed at it."

Heavier Stake. Sociobiologists have a number of explanations for differences in behavior between the sexes. One example: because males can spread their genes widely by impregnating many females, they are usually less devoted to rearing their young than females. The female has a heavier stake in protecting her offspring, because she can start fewer pregnancies in her lifetime than the male. The upshot of this argument, bound to outrage many feminists: in many situations, there is a built-in tendency for females to focus on food and nesting sites and for males to focus on many females. Even more provocative to women is Wilson's opinion that the sexual division of labor among humans "can be safely classified as genetically based."

Harvard's Lewontin dismisses theories like these as "barroom generalizations." Indeed, sociobiologists seem prone to concoct theories to explain a wide array of human problems. Harvard Biologist Robert L. Trivers presented the convention with his sociobiological view of parent-child relationships. Conflict is built in, he said, because parents divide their genetic investment--and their attention--among their children; while each child has a 100% investment in itself and struggles for 100% of the parents' time.

Though almost any human activity can be viewed through the lens of sociobiology, Wilson has stressed his belief that, at most, 10% or 15% of human behavior is genetically based. "For the moment, perhaps," he wrote in his 1975 book Sociobiology, "it is enough to establish that a single strong thread does indeed run from the conduct of termite colonies and turkey brotherhoods to the social behavior of man."

Yet the sociobiologists, including Wilson, continue to upset their colleagues with talk of "biologicizing" ethics and revising the entire study of man. Says Trivers: "I think that every field that deals with humans is going to have to change sooner or later, whether it is economics, law or international relations. The reason is that social theory must rest on some conception of what the organism is attempting to do." In other words, mankind must learn to understand the drive of its selfish genes.

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