ABSTRACT
The ideology of sociobiology is separable from its scientific merits. There is a fairly simple logical reason why the social sciences and the humanities cannot be “unified” with biology in the terms that Edward O. Wilson apparently contemplates. The central problem of sociobiology, he tells us, is how the individual organism, genetically predisposed to struggle for survival, can also carry “altruistic” genes that dispose it to sacrifice its individual existence for the group. As a science, sociobiology is new, and probably important. The ideology of sociobiology is separable from its scientific merits. But as an ideology, at least in Wilson’s formulation, it occupies one piece of common ground with the ideology of its critics. When Darwin produced massive amounts of data indicating that man and other primates had a common origin, he did not call attention to facts that no one before him had ever noticed.
