Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature

Edward O. Wilson's great work Sociobiology unleashed a furor of vitriolic criticism from mainstream social scientists, who preferred purely cultural models of human behavior, and from politically progressive crusaders who believed that the appropriate socialization processes could overcome the selfishness and mean-spiritedness inculcated by the possessive individualism fostered by modern capitalism. Both groups were deeply offended by the attempt to give biological explanations for human behavioral propensities. The ensuing steamy controversy is reviewed admirably by Ullica Segerstrale in her book, Defenders of the Truth: The Sociobiology Debate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Philip Kitcher's Vaulting Ambition may well be the only contribution to this debate that remains of scientific interest today, although Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin probably deserve a place with their famous paper, "The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme", Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 205 (1979):581-598. Sociobiology has come a long way since this book, however. Kitcher mentions but does not deal with Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman's seminal work, Cultural Transmission and Evolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), and does not mention the equally great Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson, Culture and the Evolutionary Process (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). The important contributions of Evolutionary Psychology were still some years away, in the form of Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (eds.) The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Similarly, most of the great evolutionary anthropological works of the behavioral ecologists had yet to be written in 1985. For this reason, Kitcher's book is outdated. But some of its broad arguments remain cogent today, and this book is well worth reading by anyone interested in the topic. The basic critique is summed up in the Postscript (p. 435): "Sociobiology has two faces. One looks toward the social behavior of nonhuman animals. The eyes are carefully focused, the lips pursed judiciously. Utterances are made only with caution. The other face is almost hidden behind a megaphone. With great excitement, pronouncements about human nature blare forth." Kitcher's point is that the sociobiology of non-human animals is carefully integrated into the research scholarship of animal behaviorists, where it is subject to minute scrutiny. There, Kitcher recognizes that evolutionary theory has had great impact. He would be much more impressed today, I suspect, since the evolutionary game-theoretic approach now dominates the field. In human sociobiology, by contrast, there were a few high-profile books that captured the attention of the public, but did not engage in the painstaking gathering of experimental and field data that would turn speculation into

In a field of much debate and little substance, this is one of the most useful and cogent critiques of sociobiology of Lumsden and Wilson, with a very detailed examination of the limitations in their mathematical modelling.