In response to the publication of the letter “Human Beings Are Not ‘Ants’—E.O. Wilson and the Junk Science of Sociobiology,” Ashutosh Jogalekar, who hosts the “Curious Wavefunction” blog, tweeted the following:

This tweet packs in so much garbage into 288 characters it is hard to know where to begin, but here are some basics:

First, Wilson argued (and never publicly retracted) that genetic differences between men and women were so great as “to cause a substantial division of labor in even the most free and egalitarian of future societies.... Even with identical education and equal access to all professions, men are likely to continue to play a disproportionate role in political life, business and science.” (1978)

This is sociobiology in practice—where the genes of women pre-determine their subordinate position in society—i.e. not only their “biological destiny” but their social position as well.

Second, Jogalekar wants the reader to blindly accept E.O. Wilson’s construct that the debate over sociobiology is between “nurturists [who] can now be seen to believe that human behavioral genes have very broad norms of reaction while hereditarians think the norms are relatively narrow. In this sense the difference between the two opinions is thus one of degree, not of kind.” (my emphasis)

WRONG! In referencing Not in Our Genes and Ardea Skybreak’s review of that book, the letter exposes the BAD SCIENCE Wilson employed to make his arguments for sociobiology—“reductionism” as a method, which Skybreak defines in her review:

Reductionism seeks to understand the properties of complex wholes solely in terms of the properties of their component parts, which are themselves analyzed in isolation from the larger process. Such analytical reductionism typically fails to recognize the emergence of wholly new properties of matter at the level of the more complex whole and, conversely, does not recognize that even the component parts of a whole can manifest properties stemming from interactions within the whole which they simply do not have in isolation.

This exposure of Wilson’s reductionism, which Jogalekar completely avoids, is central to understanding why sociobiology is junk science—and this is not a matter of difference in “degree” on a continuum, but ultimately of “kind” in its dynamic interactions with the rest of the biological processes, environment and society, leading to qualitatively different outcomes.

Further and finally, there is no “coming together” between sociobiologists and those fighting for a scientific understanding of human society. Wilson revealed this himself in Consilience when he wrote:

There is a biologically based human nature, and it is relevant to ethics and religion. The evidence shows that because of its influence, people can be readily educated to only a narrow range of ethical precepts. They flourish within certain belief systems and wither under others. We need to know exactly why.¹(my emphasis)

Once again, more sociobiology-bullshit!—where biology determines our social being, our fixed “human nature,” our “destiny”—and a rationalization for this system, where people “flourish within certain belief systems,” and its dominant ethical precepts of “dog-eat-dog, conquer or die.” This is what Wilson fought for—with great harm—and what Jogalekar is defending!

In contrast, Ardea Skybreak and the authors of Not in Our Genes (others), as referenced in the original letter, have brought forward a much more dialectical and scientifically based approach to understanding our social behavior, spoken to in the conclusion of Ardea Skybreak’s review:

Finally, there is no such thing as a rigidly predetermined, biologically based human nature, a collection of fixed individual and social traits which lead inevitably to particular forms of social organization and especially to various types of hierarchies. In fact what stands out in human evolution is the tremendous flexibility of individual humans who are typically capable of a wide range of behaviors in response to changing social circumstances; furthermore this flexibility and variability is qualitatively greater at the level of human society, which greatly amplifies individual human capabilities and whose organizing principles cannot be understood solely (or even mainly) as collections of individual properties and acts. Thus it is not our biology which stands in the way of the emancipation of humanity from outdated social relations.

This potential for transformation, on every level of human social behavior, is part of what constitutes hope for humanity on a scientific basis. This potential is what Bob Avakian addresses in Birds Cannot Give Birth to Crocodiles, But Humanity Can Soar Beyond the Horizon which I want to end with again:

So here, once more, I want to return to the question of "human nature"—specifically in relation to the advance to communism, which represents a transition not just beyond capitalism, and its remnants in socialist society, but in a larger sense a transition from a whole prior epoch of human history—including early communal society as well as different forms of class society—to an entirely new era in human existence. This new era, of communism, represents not some kind of "perfect state"—one in which, somehow, there are no contradictions, in human beings or in human society—but a whole new "plateau" upon which human beings will continue to interact, with each other and with the rest of nature, on a qualitatively, radically different basis from how such relations have found expression in the past. (Bob Avakian in Birds Cannot Give Birth to Crocodiles, But Humanity Can Soar Beyond the Horizon)