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SUNDAY SCIENCE: HOW STEPHEN JAY GOULD FOUGHT THE SCIENCE CULTURE WARS
 
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Myrna Perez
January 12, 2025
Jacobin
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_ In the 1970s, a crop of books purporting to provide a scientific
basis for gender inequality met sharp criticism from figures like
Stephen Jay Gould. Decades later, these debates have fallen out of
public memory, but right-wing pseudoscience persists _

Stephen Jay Gould in 1990. , Steve Liss / Getty Images

 

Adapted from _Criticizing Science: Stephen Jay Gould and the Struggle
for American Democracy_
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Myrna Perez (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024).

The issue of biological determinism is not an abstract matter to be
debated within academic cloisters. These ideas have important
consequences. . . . The most immediate impact will be felt as male
privilege girds its loins to battle a growing women’s movement.  

—Stephen Jay Gould, “The Nonscience of Human Nature,” 1974

The American evolutionary biologist and historian of science Stephen
Jay Gould’s column for _Natural History_ magazine began as a way
to balance the political convictions of his civil rights experiences
with his desire to revolutionize evolutionary theory. As his career
soared to new heights in later decades, his professional ambitions
eventually eclipsed his leftist politics. But in the late 1970s, he
was still using the column to address contemporary debates over
science and politics. In the spring of 1976, he decided to weigh in on
a controversy close to home with a column titled “Biological
Potential vs. Biological Determinism,” which joined in the leftist
criticism of the biologist Edward O. Wilson’s 1975
book _Sociobiology: The New Synthesis._

 

By then, he and Wilson had been colleagues in Harvard’s biology
department for several years. At first glance, Wilson’s book might
not have appeared to be the most likely candidate to spark leftist
outrage. It was a long academic volume that synthesized empirical work
on a host of animal taxa with the aim of clarifying a new program for
the evolutionary study of social behavior. Wilson was convinced that
the qualities of social life — e.g., aggression, cooperation, and
hierarchies — were as much a product of natural selection as were
physical traits. And in what would become an infamous last chapter, he
extended this argument to the study of human societies. The book was
far more empirically grounded in its treatment of human evolution than
the popular works of Robert Ardrey, Konrad Lorenz, and Desmond Morris,
which had fed into narratives of inevitable race war at the height of
civil rights activism. Nevertheless, _Sociobiology_ was at the heart
of the most consequential debate between the leftist and liberal
perspectives on science and American democracy of the era.

Wilson’s writings became a flash point as a new set of evolutionary
models of sex difference clashed with the political demands of an
intense phase of the American women’s movement. New legal triumphs
that guaranteed the right to contraception for married couples, the
right to abortion, and protections against sex-based discrimination
were counterbalanced by a ferociously energetic conservative Christian
movement that fought against the Equal Rights Amendment and any
possibility of changing women’s place in American society. Even as
women across the country reimagined their roles at home, at work, and
at church — and pushed for the legal protections to do so —
reactionary politics continually insisted on limiting what women could
do and be.

 

It was in the midst of this political tumult that Wilson’s book
(alongside other texts on the evolution of social behavior, including
Richard Dawkins’s 1976 _The Selfish Gene_) promoted a new
evolutionary narrative that claimed that contemporary American gender
roles were the products of prehistoric adaptations encoded in
humanity’s genes. Sociobiologists like Wilson and Dawkins envisioned
a prehistoric past in which women gathered food and lived in family
camps, while men went out to hunt and seek new sexual partners. In
subsequent decades, scientists and nonscientists alike would deploy
this narrative in both scientific and popular settings to rationalize
gender disparities in STEM fields and the workplace and to naturalize
rape. Gould’s criticism of Wilson was joined by critiques developed
by other leftists from the sciences and the humanities, who viewed
sociobiology as reactionary politics rather than sound science. And
the sustained protest against the sexism of sociobiology over the next
two decades would be led by the leaders of feminist science
collectives, including Ruth Hubbard, a biologist at Harvard, and Ethel
Tobach, a psychologist at the American Museum of Natural History.

Before sending his column on sociobiology to _Natural History_ for
publication, Gould sent a draft of it to Wilson. Wilson’s outraged
reply and the subsequent exchange between the two men reveals far more
than just the contours of their personal animosity. As expressed in
his letters to Gould and in later publications, Wilson had a more
classically liberal view of science’s proper role in American
democracy. Liberals view science as truthful knowledge that serves as
a foundation for an enlightened society to guarantee equality and
enact rational governance. Thus, they consider science essential for
democracy, but they do not prioritize a democratic approach to the
actual practice of science. As liberals see it, even when science is
only done and understood by a few elite white men, the reliability of
its knowledge of the natural world enables it to be the foundation of
an equitable society.

This understanding of science and democracy was unacceptable to Gould,
as well as to other leftists in the radical and feminist science
circles that protested Wilson’s book. Although their understanding
of science for the people was by no means consistent, members of these
movements shared a conviction that the elitism of science impeded its
capacity to support democracy. For leftists, the inclusion of women
and minoritized racial groups in the professional practice of science
was essential if science was to contribute to a progressive society.
Wilson, for his part, characterized the attacks by Gould and others in
what became known as the Sociobiology Study Group (SSG) as an attempt
to restrict the freedom of scientific research and a worrisome sign of
intellectual censorship.

By the end of the century, many public scientific liberals would
castigate both Gould’s historical accounts of scientific racism and
the feminist accounts of gender bias in science as
“anti-scientific.” But the history of this late 1970s moment
reveals that neither Gould nor feminist scientists saw their
criticisms of sociobiology as anti-science. In fact, they understood
the debate to be a conversation within the scientific community about
the evidence for a new model within evolutionary science.

They believed that a better science, one that acknowledged the
pitfalls of gender and racial bias, could be achieved through
collective self-reflection on the motivations and practices of
scientific work. And this better science could, in turn, be used to
combat what these leftist academics feared were reactive and
oppressive political actions. Their willingness to address the role of
social influence in science and to publicly criticize current
scientific research, however, set the stage for a new cultural divide.
By the end of the century, sociobiology had claimed the mantle of
scientific authority on human sexuality. And feminist and other
leftist academics struggled to stave off accusations that their
approach to scientific knowledge was itself anti-scientific.

_MYRNA PEREZ is an associate professor of gender and American religion
at Ohio University. She is the coeditor of Critical Approaches to
Science and Religion and a series editor of Osiris._

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