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The Molecular Wars
Wilson's name for the internal disciplinary warfare within biology during the 1950s–1970s, when molecular biologists attempted to delegitimize organismal and ecological biology as intellectually inferior.
Beginning in the 1950s, the rise of molecular biology produced a new kind of biologist who regarded the older traditions of organismal biology, ecology, and taxonomy as intellectually primitive. Armed with a powerful tool (the gene), a powerful method (sequencing), and a powerful framework (DNA makes RNA makes protein), the molecular biologists saw no reason to know what species looked like, how they behaved, where they lived, or why they had evolved in the particular configurations they occupied. Wilson watched, from inside Harvard's biology department, as molecular biologists dismantled the sub-departments and defunded the field stations and canceled the taxonomy positions that had produced the knowledge of biodiversity on which the molecular work ultimately depended. He called it the Molecular Wars, and he identified it as a case study in exactly the disciplinary warfare that consilience was designed to prevent.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The Molecular Wars were not merely an academic spat. They reshaped biology departments across the United States for half