Old letters from and to EO Wilson were donated to the Library of Congress after his death, and now historians are digging into them. To say that what they reveal about the distinguished environmentalists views on race is disappointing is an understatement. It seems he was frequently and quietly supporting the ideas of horrible racists like Philippe Rushton and others. It seems that the criticism of Wilson’s racism, which had the “scientific” racists up in arms recently was not misplaced. What a way to poison your own legacy!
There is a battery of letters from Wilson endorsing racists and racism. He seemed to think that a black-white difference in IQ was sufficient to justify blaming it on heredity, when defending Rushton.
Wilson’s letter continues, “To be sure, you and Professor Cain have found fault with Professor Rushton’s writings on race, but some noted specialists in human genetics and cognitive psychology have judged them to be sound and significant.” Wilson asks Vanderwolf to consider a poll that “found that a large minority of specialists of human genetics and testing believe in a partial hereditary basis for black-white average IQ differences.” Further, Wilson states that the National Association of Scholars (a right-wing advocacy group) is soon to publish an analysis “concluding that academic freedom is the issue in this case and that Rushton’s academic freedom is threatened.” The National Association of Scholars remains actively involved today in fighting affirmative action in higher education admissions and against the teaching of critical race theory.
Wow. That sounds familiar. Not allowing racists to publish bad science is an attack on academic freedom! The people who oppose these racist ideas are Leftist McCarthyites.
Wilson’s aforementioned July 1990 letter to Professor Vanderwolf, while ultimately inconsequential, calls attention to a message of support for Rushton from the National Association of Scholars through their publication Academic Questions. What Wilson does not mention is that Wilson himself solicited support for Rushton from the National Association of Scholars in a letter to its founder Stephen Balch on November 6, 1989 (box 143 folder 10). On December 5, 1989, Wilson writes to Rushton, copying Balch, with the following message: “I am very heartened by the response of the National Association of Scholars (Academic Questions) to your case… Much as they like, your [Rushton’s] critics simply will not be able to convict you of racism, and there will come a day when the more honest among them will rue the day they joined this leftward revival of McCarthyism.”
The only reason Wilson was less vocal about his racism while he was alive was that he was a bit chickenshit about his beliefs, and he was afraid of two fellow Harvard professors.
In Wilson’s September 1987 letter declining to sponsor this paper, he states, “You have my support in many ways, but for me to sponsor an article on racial differences in the PNAS would be counterproductive for both of us.” He recounts an incident of being attacked for his views and continues, “I have a couple of colleagues here, Gould and Lewontin, who would use any excuse to raise the charge again. So I’m the wrong person to sponsor the article, although I’d be glad to referee it for another, less vulnerable member of the National Academy.”
How was he vulnerable?
There is no reason for a tenured Harvard professor to fear the criticisms of other professors — all they could have possibly done was scathingly expose the fallacies in his arguments, and maybe turn the attention of the media against him. If he had any confidence in his racist ideas, he should have been willing to discuss them. You know, that free speech thing. He preferred to keep his endorsements on the down-low, though, perhaps because his understanding of genetics was actually not particularly impressive.
I remember the big battles between Gould/Lewontin and Wilson, though, and to be honest, I thought they were a bit much. I liked Ed Wilson’s support for the environment, I didn’t know how deeply his racism ran, and Gould and Lewontin seemed a bit…mean. But now that I am seeing the inside story, it’s clear that they weren’t mean enough. Dump more buckets of water on Wilson’s head!
While Wilson was cautious to rarely mention race publicly, Davis clearly had no such reservations. Davis was a professor at Harvard Medical School who was an outspoken opponent of affirmative action, particularly when it came to Black students earning admission to Harvard. Wilson’s papers reveal a close relationship with Davis (Box 50, 2 folders, Box 51, 6 folders), finding common ground and supporting each other against criticism leveled by Richard Lewontin.
Davis frequently had Wilson’s back, especially throughout Wilson’s most high-profile controversy: the debate with Lewontin and Gould, who were outspoken and relentless critics of Wilson’s Human Sociobiology. By Wilson’s own account in the previously quoted September 1987 letter to Rushton, the two Harvard colleagues and critics had a chilling effect on his ability to support Rushton’s race science. One might wonder whether Wilson would have been far bolder, like Davis, without constant pressure from scientists like Lewontin and Gould.
This feud is well documented and has been the subject of much discussion about the nature of politics and ideology among scientists. But for Davis and Wilson, the “correct side” of the debate was obvious. In a letter to Davis (box 51, folder 5), Wilson provided some commentary about their “favorite anti-racists of the Left.” Wilson pontificated that arguing for equity among groups of people was ideologically similar to racism, adding the evocative phrase “my way of putting it would be that anti-racism is the last refuge of scoundrels.”
AAAAAARGH. What an asshole. I won’t be polite about Wilson in the future.
While EO Wilson has just taken a nose dive in my esteem, I can at least see that two of my heroes, Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, have substantially risen in my appreciation.
Wilson should have stuck with ants, and if he was concerned about his posthumous reputation, he should have had all of his papers burned. They’re damning. I guess he was so racist he didn’t realize how racist his letters were!
According to Bill Maher, scientists can’t be racist. I’m sure if this gets enough attention, he’ll chime in about academic censorship or some such nonsense.
I do wonder why people are so motivated to defend their idols indefensible views. It’s not like you can’t continue to admire their work without defending their legacy. If, in some point in the future, it turns out David Attenborough held some awful views, I’d feel no need to defend the man’s legacy just so I can watch his programmes without guilt.
AAAARRGHH!
Never have idols.
Ditto on Lewontin and Gould.
And holy shit – anti-racism is as bad as racism? Did Wilson have a red MAGA cap in his closet?
A poll! Well, that was evidence…that a large minority of them had racist attitudes. Shocker.
:)
From the article:
LOL.
Nope. Not science in the 19th century, not science in 1990, not science now. Even when it is treated as science, even when these hacks hold professorships, even when they become rightwing gurus with a cultlike following, it remains the same laughable trash it’s always been. You read something like The History of Whiteness and it’s hard to believe people spent their lives working on this pseudoscientific idiocy, often held in high regard, while others toiled away at real science.
Great.
It’s astonishing how convinced so many people are of this self-image. Men saying women are inferior, white imperialists and slavers saying black people and native people are inferior, straight people saying gay people are inferior, cis people saying trans people are inferior, rich people saying poor people are inferior, humans saying other animals are inferior – all so very brave and fresh and taboo-breaking. (The “release of tensions” bit is new…)
Not so! They might have made him feel uncomfortable in the Faculty Club dining room. (I once attended a poetry reading at the Harvard Faculty Club. It sure made me feel uncomfortable. It was at the wrong end of Mass. Ave., for starters.)
I feel the same about Lewontin. I used to read him and agree with a lot of his arguments but thought he took some of them a bit far and that he was a little too scathing. Now I think he was so scathing because he knew what his opposing colleagues really thought while the rest of us only saw the mealy watered-down statements they made public.
“The battle continues, and I am now committed to carrying it to a victory, i.e., allowing genetic and evolutionary perspectives on race to be treated as normal science.” This would be an exemplary statement if it reflected the actual evidence-based genetic and evolutionary perspectives on race: that race is almost entirely a social construct and the small number of distinct evolutionary differences like adult lactose tolerance and sickle cell production are completely irrelevant to matters of intelligence and character.
Scott Thompson did a bit about Rushton as his Buddy Cole character on the Kids in the Hall TV series, which shows you how much press Rushton got at the time in Canada. It was largely negative press, but still press attention.
Racists generally don’t, I think. They don’t see themselves as racist and they do find ways of justifying what racism they think they see. Which, generally, is an iceberg’s very tippity top tip in a blizzard.
People always tend to se the best in themselves and the worst in others especially others that disagree with them – can relate to that personally, to my shame.
Make that “rationalising” or “excusing” instead of “justifying” if that’s better word-choice~wise?
Plus expanding sentence for clarity :
(They) Racists don’t see themselves as racist and they do find ways of justifying what racism they think they see in themselves and society more broadly.
/ Cap’n Obvs?
… a large minority of specialists of human genetics and testing believe in a partial hereditary basis for black-white average IQ differences.
I don’t even qualify as an amateur in genetics, so I’m hoping somebody here can set me straight about my apparent misunderstanding. Statements such as this imply that many “specialists in human genetics” consider Blacks as a consistently distinguishable subpopulation (however they might define “race” in social terms).
Yet everything I’ve read about human genetics and evolution has it that humans arose in Africa, that the outmigrations from there involved pretty small fractions from the northeastern fringes, and that geneticists find much wider variation in even limited samples of African subpopulations than in all the rest of the human globe combined.
How then can anyone familiar with Human Genome 101 find “Blacks” suitable as subjects for such sweeping generalizations?
Years ago, 1983 to be precise, I did a University course at Carlton University in Ottawa involving a detailed analysis and reading of E.O. Wilson’s book On Human Nature. To say the least the class found the book to be problematic has we dissected it chapter by chapter.
Since it’s publication the book has achieved some sort of status among Randoids, some Conservatives etc. From what I can remember the book didn’t seem to contain much if any overt Racism but it did contain a lot of just so stories. My own paper for the course involved looking at E.O. Wilson’s use of the “Protein Hypothesis” to explain Aztec Human sacrifice and cannibalism. (Ideas E.O. Wilson got from an Anthropologist named Harmer. The idea was also used by Anthropologist Marvin Harris.)
Needless to say the idea fell apart quite easily upon any sort of analysis. Frankly the book was full of such dubious material, including the still used idea of explaining Homosexuality by Kin Selection, and on and on.
I didn’t get the impression at the time that E.O. Wilson had Racist notions, just that his careful Scientific mind went all la la when moving from Ants to Humans, hence the embrace of just so stories and the Philosophy of Hobbes. Sadly it appears that E. O. Wilson had behind all this some truly dubious, disgusting notions about Human beings but was too cowardly to openly state them. Why? Well because he might be criticized? How unfair! (Snark)
For a bit more, see “Unfounded attack on the late E.O. Wilson” at Panda’s Thumb, and this time do read the comments (which undercut that “unfounded” accusation more than a little).
PZ said:I guess he was so racist he didn’t realize how racist his letters were!
I am triple recessive on the melanin front, it is a deficit in eyes, hair and skin for me. Racists are so dead certain that they must be right at all times all the time forever that they assume that just because of the way that I look that I naturally must must must agree with them and talk to me as if I do. They are so certain of this that if I say things that directly contradict them they think I still agree with them but am saying these things just to ‘be polite’ or ‘be good’. From their eyes it is an incompetent demurral.
Dude might very well have been aware of how racist he was, might not have been. Woudn’t be the first moron I have encountered from Harvard.
Do not be confused by this.