{"id":47796,"date":"2011-10-16T14:50:13","date_gmt":"2011-10-16T22:50:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=14192"},"modified":"2011-10-16T14:50:13","modified_gmt":"2011-10-16T22:50:13","slug":"e-o-wilson-in-the-atlantic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2011\/10\/16\/e-o-wilson-in-the-atlantic\/","title":{"rendered":"E. O. Wilson in The Atlantic"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Atlantic<\/i> has a huge profile of E. O. Wilson<\/a> up. The main course is his new book, The Social Conquest of Earth<\/a>. It seems to be an elaboration of some of the ideas in the infamous Martin Nowak<\/a> paper which resulted in a huge counter-response from biologists. But this part was kind of fun:<\/p>\n

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Wilson defined sociobiology for me as \u201cthe systematic study of the biological basis of all forms of social behavior in all organisms.\u201d Gould savagely mocked both Wilson\u2019s ideas and his supposed hubris in a 1986 essay titled \u201cCardboard Darwinism,\u201d in The New York Review of Books, for seeking \u201cto achieve the greatest reform in human thinking about human nature since Freud,\u201d and Wilson still clearly bears a grudge.<\/p>\n

\u201cI believe Gould was a charlatan,\u201d <\/b>he told me. \u201cI believe that he was \u2026 seeking reputation and credibility as a scientist and writer, and he did it consistently by distorting what other scientists were saying and devising arguments based upon that distortion.\u201d It is easy to imagine Wilson privately resenting Gould for another reason, as well\u2014namely, for choosing Freud as a point of comparison rather than his own idol, Darwin, whom he calls \u201cthe greatest man in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

If you read much of my stuff you know that I don’t think much of Gould, but I have to air stuff like this so that readers won’t keep citing the man as an authority. Though perhaps it is ironic that in the case of the evolution of sociality Wilson and Gould probably share more in common in their final conclusion than they do with the evolutionary mainstream.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Atlantic has a huge profile of E. O. Wilson up. The main course is his new book, The Social Conquest of Earth. It seems to be an elaboration of some of the ideas in the infamous Martin Nowak paper which resulted in a huge counter-response from biologists. But this part was kind of fun: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102,19,1435],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-e-o-wilson","category-history","category-stephen-jay-gould"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47796"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47796\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48648,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47796\/revisions\/48648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}