Ideology as Biology

^{"E.O. Wilson 5" by afagen is
licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0}

The death of renowned biologist Edward O. Wilson in December occasioned an outpouring of appreciation and commemoration appropriate for the passing of a Great Man of Science. Widely beloved for his contributions to the study of ants, biogeography, and biodiversity conservation, Wilson received laudatory obituaries and reflective essays in scientific journals and major newspapers. More than once, he was described as a “modern-day Darwin.” Yet few of his eulogizers cared to dwell on a central preoccupation of his career: the development of the field of “sociobiology” in the mid-1970s, which he defined as the study of the biological aspects of animal behavior. In the years that followed, Wilson became embroiled in a very public controversy over his application of sociobiology to human evolution and behavior. That dispute is very much alive today—and without reckoning with it no account of Wilson’s legacy can be complete.

In 1975, Wilson published a lengthy treatise on the evolution of social behavior in animals titled Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. While Wilson’s primary focus...