My Father's Teacher and Mine: Remembering E.O. Wilson
You never quite know who you're going to influence or what they're going to do
Update: Fixed for typos.
'The question of interest,'' Professor E. O. Wilson wrote in 1978, ''is no longer whether human social behavior is genetically determined; it is to what extent. The accumulated evidence for a large hereditary component is more detailed and compelling than most persons, including even geneticists, realize. I will go further: it already is decisive.''
The relationship between father and son is always tricky. My father was Harvard class of 1975 in biology. Recalling E. O. Wilson my father said merely that he was “mourning him” and “[E. O.] was my teacher, advisory, and friend. He was a great Southern gentleman. He will be very missed.”
My father, who is 68 years old, came up at a time pre-computers and I came up at a time of their full flowering. That has made all the difference in our respective careers. The technology enabled by genetic insights has made me rich beyond my wildest expectations. But long before I was materially rich I was rich in information and books. That’s a better inheritance than most and, of course, I have passed it on.
But I didn’t get into Harvard — thank God! — and so I learned of E. O. Wilson from his books, especially his more controversial ones. Yes, I confess to loving a good controversy and I may even seek it out on occasion. I grew up in the Boston area and while other parents were concerned about stranger danger my parents set me loose in the world with an MBTA and library card and enough cash to get home. My parents owned a business in Harvard Square — some hour or so away from our home and I would attend lectures from the great E. O. Wilson after school. “He was our Attenborough,” recalls my dad.
Wilson was much more than that. He was that last vestige of brilliant American meritocracy before Harvard fell to globalized mediocre and to taking money from Jeffrey Epstein or Chinese potentates or Saudi gangsters. It’s fitting that Wilson died the same week that fellow Harvard professor Charles Lieber was sentenced for essentially being a Chinese spy.
And Wilson was hated for his insights by men later outed as frauds. (Go read my friend Nick Wade’s great analysis of the scientific fraud in Stephen J. Gould’s Mismeasure of Man for The New York Times.)
It’s my contention that some of the great gatekeepers of our time are also frauds and it’s nice to see my friend Nassim Taleb says as much too.
The New York Times’s Colin Campbell described the controversy in 1986 over Wilson’s work.
…Whether civilly or angrily, a number of biologists, philosophers, anthropologists, political partisans and others have objected that Mr. Wilson's intriguing connections between what is genetically determined, on the one hand, and human culture, on the other, are scientifically implausible and politically dangerous. He has, for example, postulated the existence of genetic roots for such varied social behaviors in human beings as female coyness, altruism, fear of snakes, fear of strangers, tensions and hostilities in large populations, the aversion to incest, warfare, competition, homosexuality, a feeling for the sacred, and a susceptibility to indoctrination.
The genome wide associated studies have more or less confirmed that Wilson was right about pretty much all of that more than three decades later. That’s in large measure why we made Traitwell.com, the company of which I am CEO. Today you can take your 23andme results and learn all manner of valuable naughty things about yourself. This is only possible because Wilson was right.
While Wilson posited that as much as ten percent of human behavior might be genetic, the totality of the evidence seems to indicate that it’s a lot more like 90 percent genetic. The hereditarians are basically crushing the environmentalists.
When human behavior is examined for its biological constraints and tendencies, the zoologist argued, it is a scandal only in the eyes of American leftists and Marxists.
Mr. Wilson does not contend that most human social behavior is genetically determined. ''In rough terms,'' he has said, ''what we are talking about is that I see maybe 10 percent of human behavior as genetic and 90 percent environmental. Lewontin would see it as zero percent genetic and all environmental.'' But even 10 percent has always seemed arbitrarily high to sociobiology's critics, and evidently it still is.
My friend Razib Khan also pointed to this Wilson gem — as indicative that maybe Wilson was sloppy in his theorizing.
My own guess is that the genetic bias is intense enough to cause a substantial division of labor even in the most free and egalitarian of future societies. Thus, even with identical education and equal access to all professions, men are likely to play a disproportionate role in political life, business and science. (New York Times Magazine, 10/12/75)
But isn’t that exactly what we see in egalitarian Nordic countries? That the more freedom we have the less equality we find up having in the professions?
I know, I know, we aren’t really allowed to ask these questions. We are just supposed to click our tongues and condemn, condemn, condemn.
But these big brained scientists make possible the sorts of science that makes the later engineering possible. Over my lifetime I suspect we shall learn that Wilson, not Dawkins, is right about group selection.
An altruistic world may not fit with the prevailing moments of our selfish age but I suspect it’s still true. It’s sacrifice of the fittest not survival of the fittest then — assuming the occasion calls for it. Every parent knows this to be true.
The New York Times understood the issues presented in 1975.
I remember exactly where I was when the human genome project was decoded and the way in which my father knew how important that it might be. “Charlie, pay attention,” he said as we were working on my grandmother’s house. “The world just changed.”
And so did mine. I have tried to profit from my father’s prophecies and Wilson’s insights. I am an investor in numerous genetics companies and my father is now a retiree but we shared a love of science and of courageous minds willing to go both the distance and endure the punishments of their lessers. These were and are my heroes. And over the years I’m proud to say that I’ve followed, as best as I can, in their footsteps or by climbing up on their shoulders to see a bit further or go a bit further with the new tools their insights made possible.
Wilson’s book Biophilia formed the basis for my views that we need to sequence all living things. We must preserve life.
A scientist never rests in peace. Nor does he ever really rest. His ideas live on beyond him. There is no extinction for him but a kind of deathless death that goes on.