Word: determinists
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Wilson's book, though mainly about nonhuman animals, made enough such pronouncements to get him vilified as a "biological determinist" and a menace to society. While he was speaking at a scientific conference, a protester called him "all wet" and dumped water...
Critics have called Wilson a reductionist, a determinist and worse. He answers his detractors as if they were tenured Neanderthals, stunted by ideology and ignorant of the molecular and cellular events responsible for the genetic evolution of human nature. Freudians, Marxists and literary deconstructionists all fail to meet Wilson's rigorous standards of proof. His advice to the politicians of diversity: "For best results, cultivate individuals, not groups...
...this determinist bleakness, where is the lamplight of hope? In a union of the workers against the bosses? Dream on. The miners endure such harsh lives that when they start a strike, they must brutalize the workers who oppose it. The workers have lost the victim's halo; now their hands will be soiled by blood as well as coal dust...
Money talks if nobody squawks. An economic determinist would not be surprised that the victors were the candidates with a built-in fund-raising advantage. But in hindsight it is striking that the overstuffed larders of Bush and Dukakis never became campaign issues. The Vice President, in fact, only narrowly edged Dole and Robertson in the greenback derby; the difference was that Bush husbanded his cash far more effectively. Dukakis cleverly deployed a ; bogus PAC-man issue to keep his underfunded rivals on the defensive. Political-action-committee funding may be a problem in congressional races...
...often studied by biochemists and psychobiologists, the authors arrive at the central grist for their mill: sociobiology. In fact, at times, Not in Our Genes seems like a diatribe against Lewtontin's ideological opponent Edward O. Wilson. Quoting Wilson repeatedly. Lewontin points to the entomologist as the prototypical biological determinist...