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The Sociobiology Controversy
The ferocious 1975 backlash against Wilson's attempt to apply evolutionary biology to human social behavior — a case study in how disciplines punish boundary-crossing.
Wilson's 1975 Sociobiology: The New Synthesis synthesized three decades of research on social behavior across the animal kingdom into a single evolutionary framework. The book's first twenty-six chapters, covering insects through mammals, were received as a landmark contribution. The twenty-seventh chapter, which tentatively extended the framework to human beings, provoked a response so violent it included physical assault: a pitcher of water poured over Wilson's head at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in 1978, accompanied by chants from demonstrators. The objection was not primarily to Wilson's evidence. It was to the act of crossing the boundary — to a biologist's presumption that evolutionary theory had anything to say about culture, ethics, or the organization of human societies.
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The controversy exhibited, in unusually pure form, the institutional mechanisms by which disciplines defend their territory. The critics were not primarily other biologists. They were social scientists, humanists, and biologists aligned with specific political commitments that Wilson's framework appeared