Naturalist

"...During the McCarthy era, Harvard had been a celebrated—if imperfect—sanctuary for academics accused of being members of the Communist Party. It was supposed to be a forum in which people could exchange ideas with civility, protected from defamation by political ideologues. Yet the fact that it was well populated by leftist ideologues put that genteel goal at risk. Shortly after the publication of Sociobiology, fifteen scientists, teachers, and students in the Boston area came together to form the Sociobiology Study Group. Soon afterward the new committee affiliated itself with Science for the People, a nationwide organization of radical activists begun in the 1960s to expose the misdeeds of scientists and technologists, including politically dangerous thinking. The Sociobiology Study Group was dominated by Marxist and New Left scholars from Harvard. Two of the most prominent, Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, were my close colleagues and fellow residents of the Museum of Comparative Zoology. Three others, Jonathan Beckwith, Ruth Hubbard, and Richard Levins, held faculty posts in other parts of the university.
Although the unofficial headquarters of the Sociobiology Study Group was Lewontin’s office, located directly below my own, I was completely unaware of its deliberations. After meeting for three months, the group arrived at its foreordained verdict. In a letter published in the New York Review of Books on November 13, 1975, the members declared that human sociobiology was not only unsupported by evidence but also politically dangerous. All hypotheses attempting to establish a biological basis of social behavior “tend to provide a genetic justification of the status quo and of existing privileges for certain groups according to class, race, or sex.
... [Such] theories provided an important basis for the enactment of sterilization laws and restrictive immigration laws by the United States between 1910 and 1930 and also for the eugenics policies which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany...”

"...To come to the final and most tumultuous track of my eclectic existence, the twelve years since the original publication of Naturalist have seen many changes in sociobiology, from which I have received, as its nominal founder, both anguish and satisfaction. Applied to ants and other animals, it has flourished. Applied to human social behavior it has also proliferated, but under the name “evolutionary psychology,” now an academic subject with a life of its own. Evolutionary psychology has generated some excellent research and much else that is less than distinguished. Overall it has created an industry of popular books, with substantial combined impact, and become part of the popular culture. Criticism of the kind that followed the publication of my Sociobiology: The New Synthesis in 1975 has largely disappeared. However, attacks of the early era, which were heavily ideological in origin, have left a residue of misunderstanding not just about the content but about the very meaning of the term “sociobiology.” It should be kept in mind that sociobiology is a discipline and, as such, is defined as the systematic study of the biological basis of all forms of social behavior.
The thrust of criticism in the 1970s and 1980s, which arose from the now discredited conception of the human brain as a blank slate, was that sociobiology entails a belief in biological determinism. This was a canard, and one mischievously intended. Sociobiology is not a doctrine or a particular conclusion but a discipline, an open field of inquiry, allowing in theory for the human brain to be a blank slate (disproved), or completely hardwired (never claimed), or the product of interaction between genetic predisposition and environment (well established and now almost universally accepted)..."