In 1975 Edward O. Wilson published a book that would change his life, divide his field, and give a new science its name. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis was a vast work, the fruit of a naturalist who had spent two decades among the ants and had come to believe that the principles he had worked out in the insect societies could be extended, with modification, across the whole animal kingdom — and, in its final and most fateful chapter, to human beings themselves. The book was an act of enormous intellectual ambition, an attempt to gather the scattered study of animal social behavior into a single unified discipline grounded in evolutionary biology. It largely succeeded in that aim. It also ignited one of the most bitter scientific controversies of the twentieth century, a firestorm that would follow Wilson for the rest of his days. This chapter tells the story of that book: what it proposed, why it mattered, and why it provoked such fury.
The idea had grown, as so much of Wilson's thought did, out of the ants. His work on the social insects had led him, almost inevitably, toward a more general science of social behavior, for he had come to see that the questions he asked of an ant colony — how cooperation evolves, how labor is divided, how communication coordinates a society, how the interests of the individual and the group are balanced — were questions that could be asked of any social animal. Why should the study of a wolf pack, a baboon troop, a coral reef, or a human tribe not proceed by the same evolutionary logic that illuminated the ant nest? Wilson's ambition, as he later described it in his memoir, was nothing less than to unify the study of social behavior across all animals under a common set of evolutionary principles. The general science he envisioned needed a name, and he gave it one: sociobiology.
The making of the book was itself a feat of synthesis on a scale few scholars would attempt. Wilson set out to integrate the entire literature of animal social behavior — an enormous and scattered body of work spanning ethology, ecology, population genetics, and comparative zoology — into a single coherent structure, organized around evolutionary principles. He recounted the enterprise in his memoir as a deliberate act of intellectual empire-building, a staking-out of new territory, and the labor was immense: years of reading, comparing, and ordering, the assembling of thousands of scattered findings into chapters that moved systematically up the scale of biological complexity. The result was a large, encyclopedic, richly illustrated volume that reviewers immediately recognized as a landmark, whatever their reservations about its final chapter. His biographer would later describe the achievement as the synthesis of social behavior, population biology, and ecology into a genuinely new discipline — the founding document of a science that had not existed before Wilson named it.
The initial reception, before the storm broke over the final chapter, testified to the scale of the accomplishment. Reviewers recognized at once that a major synthesis had appeared, a work that gave a diffuse and fragmented field a spine and a theoretical program, and that would organize research for a generation. The book's very comprehensiveness — its systematic march up the scale of animal complexity, its integration of findings from disciplines that had rarely spoken to one another — made it an instant reference, a work that scientists across many specialties would consult and cite. Wilson had not merely written a book; he had, by the act of gathering and ordering, brought a discipline into being and equipped it with its founding text. That the same book which established him as one of the leading biologists of his age would also, through its last thirty pages, embroil him in years of public conflict, is one of the sharper ironies of his career. The achievement and the ordeal were inseparable, two faces of a single act of intellectual daring.
That Wilson should have been the one to build this synthesis was no accident, for it grew directly from the particular shape of his scientific life. He had come to the general science of behavior not as a theorist reasoning from first principles but as a naturalist who had mastered one group of animals so thoroughly that their lessons began to seem universal. The ants had taught him how to think about societies, and the confidence to extend that thinking across the animal kingdom came from the depth of his particular knowledge. This is the characteristic pattern of Wilson's career: the movement from intense, concrete, specialized study toward sweeping general synthesis, from the ant colony to the theory of all social behavior. Sociobiology was the grandest expression of that pattern, the moment when a lifetime of looking closely at small creatures issued in a claim about the whole of social life.
He defined the new discipline with deliberate boldness, as the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior — a definition that staked out entirely new intellectual territory and announced an ambition to bring the rigor of evolutionary biology to a domain that had long been the province of natural history, anecdote, and the softer sciences of behavior. The act of naming and defining was itself a claim: that there was a coherent science here, a field with its own principles and methods, waiting to be assembled from the fragments scattered across zoology, ethology, ecology, and population genetics. Wilson meant to do the assembling. Sociobiology was to be a synthesis in the fullest sense, a joining-together of what had been separate, and the subtitle he chose — The New Synthesis — deliberately echoed the great modern synthesis of Darwinism and genetics earlier in the century, laying claim to a comparable unifying ambition.
The foundation on which Wilson built the new discipline was population biology, and this choice reveals the seriousness of his scientific intent. Understanding social behavior, he argued, requires the mathematics of gene frequencies and population dynamics — the study of how the genetic composition of populations changes over time under the pressures of selection. Social behavior, in this view, is not to be explained by loose appeals to instinct or to the good of the species, but by the rigorous accounting of how particular behavioral tendencies affect the reproduction of the genes that underlie them, and how those genes therefore spread or dwindle in a population across the generations. Wilson had already applied exactly this population-biological thinking to the ant colony, analyzing its growth, maturation, and reproduction with demographic tools, treating the colony's trajectory through time as a problem in population dynamics. Sociobiology extended that quantitative, population-based approach to social behavior at large.
To this population-genetic foundation Wilson added the powerful tools of optimization and strategy, importing into the study of behavior the reasoning of economics and the young mathematics of game theory. Behaviors, in this framework, could be analyzed as strategies, and one could ask which strategy, among the available alternatives, would be evolutionarily stable — that is, which could not be displaced by any competing strategy once it had become common in a population. This way of thinking allowed sociobiology to make predictions: given an animal's ecological circumstances, one could reason about what behavior selection ought to favor, and then check the prediction against nature. Aggression, for instance, Wilson treated not as a fixed instinct or an indwelling drive demanding release, but as a conditional, evolved capacity for regulating competition over resources, mates, and territory — deployed when it pays and withheld when it does not, its expression tuned by circumstance. This was a characteristic move: to replace the old language of instinct and drive with the sharper language of strategy, cost, and benefit.
This predictive ambition was, for Wilson, what distinguished a science from a mere collection of observations, and it was the standard to which he wished to hold the study of behavior. A mature sociobiology would not simply describe what animals do; it would predict what they should do, given their circumstances and their evolutionary interests, and would then submit those predictions to the test of observation. In the study of the social insects this program had already borne fruit, yielding testable predictions about caste ratios, sex investment, and colony structure that could be checked in the field. Wilson's hope was to extend the same predictive rigor across the whole range of animal societies, and ultimately to human behavior as well — to build a science of social life as quantitative and as testable as the physical sciences he admired. The aspiration outran the achievement, as such aspirations often do, and the prediction of human behavior in particular proved far harder than the prediction of insect behavior. But the ambition itself was clarifying, for it insisted that behavior is not beyond the reach of science, and that even the most complex social phenomena might, in principle, be brought under the discipline of hypothesis and test.
Wilson opened the book, in fact, on a deliberately provocative note that announced how far he meant to go. He proposed that even ethics, emotion, and social behavior — the very phenomena that seemed most distinctively mental, most removed from biology — could be examined as products of genes acting through the evolved circuitry of the brain. This was the boldest of promissory notes, and it set the tone for everything that followed: nothing about social life, not even our moral sentiments, was to be placed beyond the reach of evolutionary analysis. It was a reductive program in the precise sense that it sought to ground the higher phenomena in the lower, the mental in the biological, and it was exactly this reductive ambition that would both drive the science forward and provoke the fiercest resistance.
Upon this foundation Wilson raised an edifice of breathtaking scope. Sociobiology surveyed the social behavior of the entire animal kingdom, and it did so systematically, beginning at the bottom with the colonial microorganisms and the social invertebrates, ascending through the cold-blooded vertebrates, the birds, and the mammals, up through the social carnivores and the ungulates and the primates — and arriving, in the book's twenty-seventh and final chapter, at Homo sapiens. The sweep was deliberate and it was total: the book announced that common evolutionary principles run through all of social life, from the simplest cooperative microbes to the most complex human societies, and it set out to demonstrate the claim across hundreds of species and hundreds of pages. Few books in the history of biology have attempted so much, and the sheer comprehensiveness of the synthesis was, by itself, a formidable scientific achievement, whatever one made of its more contentious claims.
Woven through the synthesis was a theoretical question that would occupy Wilson for the rest of his life: what, exactly, is the unit on which natural selection acts? In Sociobiology he introduced the tension between the organism and the gene as candidate units of selection, foreshadowing debates that would preoccupy him and the wider field for decades. Is it the individual animal that selection favors or disfavors, or the genes it carries, or — a possibility Wilson treated with caution in 1975 but would later embrace — the group? The book weighed the contested proposition that selection can act on groups as well as on individuals and genes, treating it warily at a time when group selection was in bad odor. This thread, left deliberately unresolved in Sociobiology, would become the central preoccupation of Wilson's late career and the source of his most controversial scientific claims (the full story is told in Chapter 5, The Evolution of Social Behavior). Even at the founding of the discipline, in other words, Wilson had identified the deep theoretical fault line along which the science — and his own thinking — would later shift.
Holding this vast survey together was the comparative method, the intellectual engine of the whole enterprise, and here Wilson drew directly on the naturalist's oldest tool. Throughout the book he relied on systematic comparison across the enormous diversity of animal societies to extract the recurring principles beneath the variety — asking what social arrangements appear again and again in unrelated lineages, and under what ecological conditions, so that the general rules of social evolution might be distinguished from the particular accidents of any one group. Just as the convergence of ants and termites had taught him that social evolution follows repeatable paths, so the broader comparison across the animal kingdom promised to reveal the deep regularities of social life as such. The comparative method was what turned a catalog of animal societies into a science: it was the means by which principle was lifted out of particular.
For twenty-six of its twenty-seven chapters, Sociobiology was received as what it largely was — a magisterial, if in places speculative, synthesis of animal behavioral biology, a landmark of scholarship that gave a sprawling field new coherence and new theoretical depth. Had the book ended at chapter twenty-six, with the non-human primates, it would have been celebrated as a monument of biology and its author spared the ordeal that followed. But Wilson did not end there. In the final chapter he turned the whole apparatus of sociobiology upon the human species, insisting that Homo sapiens, whatever else it might be, is a biological animal, an evolved organism whose social behavior is as legitimate an object of evolutionary study as that of any other species. With that turn, the controversy began.
Wilson's argument about human beings was, at its core, a claim about continuity: that our species is not exempt from the evolutionary analysis that applies to the rest of life, that human social behavior has an evolved, biological dimension, and that this dimension can be studied scientifically. To make the case, he pointed to human universals — features that recur across human societies the world over, such as kinship systems and the classification of relatives, the division of labor, incest avoidance and its associated taboos, status-seeking and hierarchy, and patterned forms of aggression. The very universality of such traits, appearing in culture after culture regardless of history or environment, Wilson took as evidence that they reflect an evolved human nature rather than arbitrary cultural invention. He compared human behavior with that of other primates and social mammals, seeking to identify which of our traits are likely to be ancestral and evolved, part of the deep behavioral inheritance we share with our relatives, rather than the products of culture alone.
Central to Wilson's account of human nature was the role of the emotions, which he refused to treat as incidental to reason or as mere noise in the machinery of thought. Human emotional responses, he argued, are seated in the ancient, evolved centers of the brain, and they underlie our moral and social behavior in ways that cannot be understood apart from their biological origins. Love, fear, anger, disgust, the pang of guilt and the warmth of gratitude — these are not cultural inventions but evolved regulators, shaped by natural selection to move us toward the behaviors that, in our ancestral past, served survival and reproduction. Reason, in this picture, does not sit above the emotions in serene command but works among and through them, and any account of human morality that ignored the emotional, biological substrate of our judgments would be building on air. Here sociobiology touched the deepest questions of ethics and psychology, and it did so by insisting that the human mind is, first and last, an evolved organ.
From this rooting of emotion in biology, Wilson drew a conclusion about ethics that was among the most provocative of all his claims and that would occupy him for decades: that our moral sense itself is a product of evolution, seated in the emotional centers of the brain and shaped by natural selection to guide the behavior of a social animal. If our sense of right and wrong arises from evolved emotional responses rather than from reason alone or from any external source, then ethics becomes, in part, a subject for biological investigation — one can ask why we have the moral intuitions we have, and what evolutionary function they once served. Wilson did not claim that biology tells us what we ought to do; he was careful, at his best, to keep the question of moral origins separate from the question of moral justification. But he did insist that any adequate account of human morality must reckon with its biological substrate, and that the philosophers who had theorized about ethics for millennia in ignorance of its evolutionary sources had been working with only half the picture. This argument, latent in Sociobiology and developed in the books that followed, opens onto his mature reflections on the moral sense (see Chapter 22, Ethics & the Moral Sense).
An illustration Wilson returned to with evident pleasure was the human response to snakes. Our species shows a striking readiness to fear and attend to serpents — a bias that appears early, spreads easily, and far outruns most people's actual experience of danger from snakes. Wilson read this as the signature of an ancient evolutionary heritage, shaped over the long ages when venomous snakes posed a real and recurring threat to our ancestors and their primate forebears. The snake-fear was, for him, a clean example of what he meant by an evolved predisposition: not a rigid instinct that forces a fixed behavior, but a prepared bias, a readiness to learn certain associations more easily than others, laid down by selection and expressed through the interaction of the evolved brain with experience. Such prepared biases, he argued, pervade human mental life, tilting our fears, our aesthetic preferences, even our social judgments in directions that made evolutionary sense in the environments where our nature was formed.
When Wilson catalogued the specific features of human nature that he took to be evolved, he chose examples calculated to show both the reach and the limits of the biological approach. Incest avoidance he regarded as a particularly clear case: the near-universal human aversion to sexual relations between close kin, and the taboos that formalize it, correspond to a real biological hazard — the genetic damage of inbreeding — and appear across cultures in a way that suggests an evolved predisposition rather than an arbitrary rule. Kinship classification, the universal human tendency to categorize relatives and to organize social life around those categories, he read as another mark of our evolved sociality, echoing the kin-based structure of animal societies. Status-seeking and the formation of hierarchies, patterned across societies and echoed in our primate relatives, he took as further evidence of an evolved human nature. None of these, he insisted, is rigidly fixed; all are expressed variously across cultures. But their recurrence, he argued, is not random, and the biologist who ignores it in the name of pure cultural explanation is refusing to see a real pattern in the human animal.
It is important to be clear about what Wilson did and did not claim, because the controversy that followed often obscured it. He did not argue that human behavior is rigidly determined by genes, nor that culture is unimportant, nor that existing social arrangements are biologically ordained and therefore just. Indeed, he explicitly rejected some of the cruder biological theories of human nature then in circulation — repudiating, for instance, the popular killer-ape myth, the notion that humans are driven by an innate bloodlust or instinct for violence, insisting that the evidence supported a far more nuanced picture. His actual claim was more measured, and in retrospect more defensible: that human nature exists, that it has an evolutionary history, that it shapes and constrains our behavior and our cultures in describable ways, and that we can understand ourselves better by studying it. But measured claims are easily lost in a storm, and a storm was precisely what Wilson had, by his own admission, anticipated.
For Wilson had seen the controversy coming, and had tried, in the book itself, to head it off. He explicitly predicted that applying sociobiology to human beings would provoke intense resistance, and he attempted in advance to distinguish the scientific study of human nature from the ideological uses to which such study had historically been put. He knew the terrible history — the way earlier claims about biology and human behavior had been marshaled to justify racism, eugenics, and oppression — and he wished to separate his enterprise from that legacy. But the attempt at prophylaxis failed. The wound was too fresh, the memory of biological determinism too bound up with atrocity, and the political stakes too high. The final chapter of Sociobiology, and the book On Human Nature that followed it three years later, drew a firestorm of criticism that Wilson, by temperament a reserved and courteous man, found genuinely shocking.
To understand the intensity of the reaction, one must remember the moment. Sociobiology appeared in the mid-1970s, a time of acute political sensitivity to any claim that biology might shape human destiny, when the memory of how such claims had been abused — in the service of racism, of eugenics, of the Nazi horror — was still raw, and when many intellectuals held, as a matter of principle, that human nature was essentially a product of society and could be remade by changing society. Against this background, a prominent Harvard biologist asserting that human social behavior had deep evolutionary roots seemed to some not merely mistaken but dangerous, a reopening of doors that had been closed at great cost. The critics feared that to locate the sources of human behavior in biology was to suggest that inequality, aggression, and the traditional arrangements of the sexes were natural, inevitable, and therefore beyond the reach of reform. Whether or not this followed from anything Wilson actually wrote — and he insisted it did not — the fear was real, and it was not, given the history, an unreasonable fear.
The attacks were fierce, and they were personal. Wilson recounted the intense controversy that erupted over the human implications of his work, describing the firestorm of criticism that came especially from within his own university and even his own department, where colleagues publicly denounced him. The central charge was that sociobiology implied genetic determinism — that it reduced human beings to puppets of their genes — and that in doing so it served, whether Wilson intended it or not, to naturalize and justify existing social inequalities, to suggest that the hierarchies and injustices of human society were written in our biology and therefore immutable. Critics linked his work to the discredited biological determinisms of the past and warned that it would furnish ammunition for reactionary politics. The dispute spilled out of the seminar room and into the streets; in one notorious incident, protesters poured water over Wilson at a scientific meeting. He found himself, almost overnight, transformed from a respected entomologist into a lightning rod for one of the great ideological battles of the age.
The charge of determinism, which stood at the center of the assault, rested in part on a genuine ambiguity in how sociobiology could be read, and in part on a refusal to read Wilson charitably. To say that a behavior has an evolved, biological component is not to say that it is fixed, inevitable, or immune to change through learning and culture; but the distinction is subtle, and in the heat of controversy it was often lost. Wilson labored to make it clear, drawing the line between the scientific proposition that human nature exists and has an evolutionary history, and the ideological proposition that any particular social arrangement is thereby justified. The former he affirmed; the latter he denied, and denied vigorously. The naturalistic fallacy — the mistaken inference from what is to what ought to be — was one he explicitly warned against, insisting that discovering the evolutionary origins of a behavioral tendency tells us nothing about whether we should endorse or resist it. That his critics persistently attributed to him the very fallacy he warned against was, he felt, the deepest injustice of the whole affair.
Wilson defended himself, and the defense occupied a substantial part of his subsequent work. He insisted, against the charge of determinism, that acknowledging a biological component to human nature is not the same as claiming that genes dictate behavior in any rigid way — that nature and nurture interact, that human beings are flexible and cultural creatures as well as biological ones, and that to study our evolved dispositions is not to endorse them. In Genes, Mind and Culture, written with the physicist Charles Lumsden, he tried to place human sociobiology on a rigorous and predictive footing, developing the theory of gene-culture coevolution precisely to answer the charge of crude determinism by showing how genes and culture shape each other in a continuous interaction. The critics, he felt, had attacked a caricature of his position, a genetic determinism he had never actually held; his real view had always allowed for the power of culture and learning, even as it insisted that these operate upon and through an evolved human nature.
The theory of gene-culture coevolution, which Wilson and Lumsden developed at length, was his most systematic answer to the charge of determinism, and it deserves a word here even though its full treatment belongs to a later chapter. Wilson and Lumsden frankly acknowledged that classical sociobiology, including Wilson's own earlier work, had not adequately addressed learning, cognition, and culture — a striking concession that the critics had identified a real gap. Their remedy was to model the two-way traffic between genes and culture: genes, acting through what they called epigenetic rules, bias the mind toward certain perceptions, preferences, and behaviors; culture is built from these biased minds; and culture in turn feeds back, through downward causation, to alter the selective pressures acting on the genes themselves. Genes and culture, in this account, are bound in a continuous coevolutionary dance, each shaping the other across the generations, so that neither genetic determinism nor cultural autonomy is the whole truth. It was an ingenious framework, and whatever its ultimate scientific fate, it demonstrated that Wilson's position was never the crude genetic determinism his critics attacked (the full theory is taken up in Chapter 14, Genetics & Gene-Culture Coevolution).
With the passage of time, the ferocity of the original controversy has faded, and a more measured assessment has become possible. Many of the specific ideas Wilson advanced — that human beings have an evolved nature, that our behavior bears the marks of our evolutionary history, that the study of that history can illuminate our psychology and our societies — have become, in modified form, the common ground of large fields of research, from evolutionary psychology to behavioral ecology to the modern study of human universals. The word sociobiology itself became so politically charged that much of the research it named migrated to other labels, but the underlying program survived and, in important respects, prevailed. At the same time, the critics were not simply wrong to worry: the history of biological claims about human nature genuinely was, and remains, entangled with ideology, and the caution they urged about the political misuse of such claims was not baseless. The controversy, seen clearly, was not a simple contest between enlightened science and benighted resistance, but a collision between a legitimate scientific ambition and a legitimate historical fear.
Wilson's own account of the affair, given years later in his memoir, was notably free of bitterness, and revealed something of the man. He presented his decision to include humans in Sociobiology not as a provocation but as a matter of intellectual integrity — for how could a synthesis that claimed to cover all social behavior honestly exclude the most complex social species of all? To have left humans out would have been to betray the very ambition of the book, to concede that our species stands outside nature, which was precisely the proposition Wilson's whole scientific life denied. He had followed his logic to its conclusion, as a scientist should, and had accepted the consequences. If he regretted anything, it was less the substance of his claims than the pain of the estrangement they caused, the discovery that ideas he had advanced in good scientific faith could be received as moral offenses by people he respected.
The deeper significance of Sociobiology, beyond the controversy, lies in what it did to the boundary between the natural and the human sciences. Wilson's central and most subversive contention was that this boundary is artificial — that there is no wall separating the biological study of animals from the study of human beings, that we are continuous with the rest of life and can be understood by the same means. This was, in embryo, the argument he would later expand into his grand vision of consilience, the unification of all knowledge under a common explanatory framework (see Chapter 20, Consilience). Sociobiology was the first great salvo in that campaign, the opening attempt to extend the reach of evolutionary biology into territory long claimed by the social sciences and the humanities. The resistance it met was, in part, a territorial defense, a reaction against what many saw as biological imperialism, an incursion of the natural sciences into domains where they were held to have no authority.
Wilson and Lumsden themselves came to see gene-culture coevolution as the natural next step beyond classical sociobiology — a further synthesis, extending the evolutionary framework deeper into the territory of mind and culture, and answering the objection that the first synthesis had slighted them. They were ambitious for this next stage, hoping to place the study of human nature on a rigorous and even predictive footing, generating from their models expected distributions of cultural traits that might be checked against the ethnographic record. The full apparatus of that program — the culturgen as a unit of culture, the epigenetic rules that bias the developing mind, the mathematical modeling of the flow from genes through minds to culture — was elaborate, and its scientific reception was mixed; much of it did not take hold in the form proposed. But the underlying insight, that human culture is neither free of biology nor reducible to it but bound with it in a two-way evolutionary relationship, proved durable and influential, and it marked Wilson's mature answer to the question his critics had pressed most sharply.
It is worth pausing on how thoroughly, in the decades since, the central contentions of sociobiology have entered the mainstream of thought, however quietly and under whatever names. The proposition that human beings have an evolved nature, that our emotions and social dispositions bear the imprint of natural selection, that the comparison with other animals illuminates our own behavior — these once-incendiary claims now underlie whole flourishing fields of inquiry, and are taught without scandal to students who have never heard of the controversy that once surrounded them. The victory was not total, and it was not clean; the cruder forms of biological reductionism deserved and received continuing criticism, and the political anxieties that animated the original resistance have not vanished, nor should they entirely. But the essential vision — that our species belongs to nature and can be studied as part of it — has substantially prevailed. Wilson lived to see the discipline he founded, stripped of its inflammatory name, become a permanent part of the intellectual landscape.
Seen in the long view, Sociobiology was less an endpoint than a beginning — the first full statement of a program that Wilson would pursue, under various names and in various forms, for the remaining half-century of his life. The core conviction never changed: that human beings are part of nature, continuous with the rest of life, and susceptible to the same evolutionary understanding; and that the artificial walls between the biological and the social sciences, between the sciences and the humanities, could and should be brought down. Sociobiology attacked one stretch of that wall, the boundary around the study of behavior. His later campaigns would attack others, culminating in the frank call for the unification of all knowledge that he issued in Consilience. The controversy of the 1970s, for all its bitterness, can be seen in hindsight as the opening engagement of a much longer war — Wilson's lifelong campaign against the fragmentation of knowledge and the exemption of humanity from natural law. He lost some battles and won others, but he never abandoned the field, and the direction of intellectual history has, on the whole, moved his way.
For all the pain it caused him, Wilson never repudiated the essential vision of Sociobiology, and in his later books he returned to its themes again and again, refining and extending them. The application of evolutionary thinking to human nature runs through On Human Nature, through the gene-culture coevolution of Genes, Mind and Culture, and through the late works on the social conquest of the earth and the meaning of human existence. The controversy, however painful, did not deflect him; if anything, it confirmed his sense that he had touched something deep and important, some raw nerve where science meets our image of ourselves. He had proposed that human beings are animals, evolved and biological, and that this fact, far from demeaning us, is the beginning of any honest self-understanding. It was a hard saying, and it cost him dearly, but he believed it to the end.
There is, in the whole episode, a lesson about the cost of intellectual courage that Wilson's life illustrates as clearly as any in modern science. He had not sought controversy; he was, by disposition, a Southern gentleman of scrupulous manners who disliked confrontation and prized the collegial life of the university. Yet he found himself, because he had followed an argument where it led, at the center of a storm that pitted former friends against him and made his name a byword in battles far from entomology. He did not recant, and he did not retreat into the safety of the insects, though he might easily have done so. He continued to develop and defend the ideas that had brought him grief, through book after book, for the rest of his long career. His biographer presents this steadiness as central to his character — the quiet persistence of a man who believed he had glimpsed a true and important thing, and who would not disown it to buy peace. Whatever one concludes about the science, the example of the scientist has its own value, and it is not a small one.
The story of Sociobiology is, in the end, the story of a scientist who saw further than his moment could comfortably accommodate, and who paid the price of premature vision. The synthesis he proposed — the unification of animal and human social behavior under evolutionary principles — was sound in its ambition and substantially vindicated in its outcome, even as its cruder popular versions deserved the criticism they drew. The extension to human beings, which cost him so much, has become, in chastened and qualified forms, part of the mainstream of the human sciences. And the man himself, who had wanted only to build a science and found himself instead at the center of an ideological war, emerged with his convictions intact and his courage tested and proven. The chapters that follow trace where his vision led: to the detailed study of human nature and its evolution (see Chapter 16, Human Evolution & Sociobiology), and to the sweeping dream of a unified knowledge (see Chapter 20, Consilience). But it began here, with a vast green book and a final chapter that dared to include ourselves among the animals.