University of Minnesota

Date:
1980
Reference:
PP/CRI/E/1/28/8
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: University of Minnesota. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    6/17
    May 23, 1980 Members of the College of Biological Sciences Alumni Board c/o Mr. Glen Ward, President of the CBS Alumni Board Biochemistry Department University of Minnesota St. Paul, MN 55108 Dear Members of the CBS Alumni Board: We, the undersigned alumni of the College of Biological Sciences at the University of Minnesota are concerned about the May 31 program for the CBS Alumni Meeting. Specifically, we are concerned about the one-sided presentation of sociobiology. Cfie of the three talks, Avian Studies of Selfish Theory: An Evolutionary Look at the Nuclear Family, is on sociobiology, while the keynote address, Selfish DNA is keyed to Dawkins' unscientific tract The Selfish Gene (see Nature, April 17, 1980, p604, paragraph one). We assume that the Alumni symposium is intended to add to the continuing education of university biology majors. If so, the Alumni Society would presumably choose presentations that represent important scientific advances in the field, and/or which would add to the public awareness of the scientific aspects of widely discussed issues presented to the public in the name of science. The uncritical presentation of sociobiology does neither of these. Sociobiology posits that animal behavior, including human social behavior is the outcome of biological evolution and that the social roles and attitudes present in modern industrial societies are to a significant degree determined by genes. Sociobiology has been sensationalized in virtually every U. S. magazine from Time to Playboy . Thanks to this there is skyrocketing public misconception that scientific data exist that support the evolutionary selective value, and therefore the genetic origin, of present day human gender roles and social attitudes, including the explicitly sexist ones such as the double standards of sexual behavior. These misconceptions are the predictable outcome of the anthropomorphisms that are used by sociobiolgists to describe animal behavioral traits, e.g., altruism, selfishness, rape among ducks, prostitution among hummingbirds, chastity belts among acanthocephalan worms, punishment of promiscuous females by irate male mountain bluebirds, oral sex among cichid fishes, transvestivism in scorpian flies, etc.' Mock, the Society's speaker on the evolution of the nuclear family, writes of extramarital courtship and divorce insurance in herons ( Behaviour , 1979, 69, 57). Such grotesque anthropomorphisms would not be seriously noteworthy were it not for the fact that implications for social policy are made from them, as has been the case with previous biological deterministic theories such as Social Darwinism and IQ psychology. If, for example, the jobs and incomes, the degree of education and the amount of health care each person has is the result of his or her biological ability to compete, and not due to racism and sexism, then affirmative action programs are useless. The sociobiological mouthpiece, David Barash, for exanple, states straightforwardly that to fight racism and sexism is to buck human biology and that the price societies pay for such non-biological altruism is to lose the competitive advantage to other societies that do not fight racism and sexism (van den Berghe and Barash, Am. Anthropologist , 1977, 79, pp. 815-816 5 818 in the article titled Inclusive Fitness and Human Pimily Structure).
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