ABSTRACT
Erika Lorraine Milam argues that historians can better understand the intricate history by which accusations of “zoomorphism,” “biological determinism,” and “dehumanization” came to prominence in postwar and Cold War evolutionary theory by attending to changing definitions of what scientists meant by the phrase “human nature.” After the Second World War, biologists and anthropologists were keen to reconstruct the progressive evolutionary process by which humans had become truly human, and crafted a version of humanity's past that led to an anti-racist present. During the 1960s and 1970s, a new generation of scientists writing for colloquial audiences imbued this new universal human nature with inhumanity, as Milam shows, speculating that in learning how to kill each other, humanity's ancestors had sparked a series of physical and intellectual changes crucial to understanding modern humanity. Critics skeptical of this dark vision of anthropogenesis besmirched such theories as zoomorphic. When Edward O. Wilson then published Sociobiology in 1975, the outcry from his colleagues was shaped by their reactions to these earlier theories. Critics of the biological basis of human behavior mobilized a new descriptor—biological determinism—to conjoin their concerns over sexism, racism, and classism under this new conceptual umbrella. They suggested that comparisons to animal behavior could never capture the full scope of human nature, even if animals were used as foils to illuminate the fully human. In the 1980s, scientists linked earlier concerns with zoomorphism and biological determinism to emergent worries about dehumanization in late-Cold War evolutionary theory.
