Word: biologist
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Sociobiologists?whose growing ranks include some 250 biologists, zoologists and social scientists?argue that without consideration of biology, the study of human culture makes no sense. Indeed, sociobiology has significant implications for most areas of human concern?from education to relations between the sexes. Says Harvard Physicist Gerald Holton: "It's a breathtaking ambition . . . as if Sigmund Freud had set out to subsume all of Darwin, Joyce, Einstein, Whitehead and Lenin." Robert Trivers, a Harvard biologist and leading sociobiology theorist, makes a bold prediction: "Sooner or later, political science, law, economics, psychology, psychiatry and anthropology will all be branches...
...make. University of Chicago Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins dismisses sociobiology as "genetic capitalism"?an attempt to defend the current structures of Western society as natural and inevitable. Jerome Schneewind, a philosopher at Manhattan's Hunter College, calls it "mushy metaphor . . . a souped-up version of Hobbes." Harvard Evolutionary Biologist Richard Lewontin is earthier; he thinks sociobiology is "bullshit...
Opponents of sociobiology were heartened this spring when Harvard failed to give tenure to Biologist Trivers, though denying that his work in sociobiology was the reason. It was a surprising move that Trivers interpreted as an invitation to leave the university?which he plans to do. Still he insists: "I don't think they will be successful in stopping me or slowing down the work. It has spread too far, to too many people, and to far too many studies." Indeed, sociobiology is establishing itself as part of the scientific spectrum. In June, for example, academics from around the nation...
Many recent theorists?such as Nobel-prizewinning Ethologist Konrad Lorenz and Scots Biologist V.C. Wynne-Edwards?have focused on the group or species as the primary unit of selection. Darwin wrote that it was the individual organism. But Sociobiologists believe it is the genes themselves that conduct the life-or-death evolutionary struggle. This gene-based view of life is compatible with a finding made independently by researchers in a widely divergent branch of science. Rutgers Biochemist George Pieczenik has discovered patterns in DNA coding that he sees as evidence of selection occurring at the molecular level (TIME, April...
...days when practically all Harvard students were white, male and wealthy. One of Wald's friends says the decade that Wald longs for most is the 1960s, when science concentrators and students in general were more concerned with social issues than with their medical school applications. A biologist, teacher and social activist, Wald has distinguished himself by setting trends in each of these areas. Although he is retiring from Harvard this June, Wald will continue his scientific work and political activism...