Darwin’s Progress

GREAT fiction does not grow obsolete. Nor, in its own way, does great propaganda. In contrast, truly important scientific books render themselves obsolete by opening new fields for subsequent scholars to elaborate. Edward O. Wilson’s 1975 landmark, Sociobiology, which introduced neo-Darwinism to the public—and which has now been reissued to mark its 25th anniversary—is just such a book. Vast yet coherent, Sociobiology demonstrated in rigorous detail how Darwinian selection molded the various ways in which all animals— from the lowly corals to the social insects to the highest primates—compete and cooperate with others of their own species.

Outraging the leftists who dominated academia, Wilson suggested numerous analogies between animal and human societies. While men have been drawing such parallels since long before Aesop, Wilson’s command of natural history and the power of neo-Darwinian theory in unifying this vast body of knowledge lent credibility to his grand ambition to reduce social science to a branch of biology, just as, he argued, biology could ultimately be reduced to chemistry, and chemistry to physics.

SS

About the Author

Steve Sailer

Featured Tags

GREAT fiction does not grow obsolete. Nor, in its own way, does great propaganda. In contrast, truly important scientific books render themselves obsolete by opening new fields for subsequent scholars to elaborate. Edward O. Wilson’s 1975 landmark, Sociobiology, which introduced neo-Darwinism to the public—and which has now been reissued to mark its 25th anniversary—is just such a book. Vast yet coherent, Sociobiology demonstrated in rigorous detail how Darwinian selection molded the various ways in which all animals— from the lowly corals to the social insects to the highest primates—compete and cooperate with others of their own species.

Outraging the leftists who dominated academia, Wilson suggested numerous analogies between animal and human societies. While men have been drawing such parallels since long before Aesop, Wilson’s command of natural history and the power of neo-Darwinian theory in unifying this vast body of knowledge lent credibility to his grand ambition to reduce social science to a branch of biology, just as, he argued, biology could ultimately be reduced to chemistry, and chemistry to physics.