Word: synthesise
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E.O. WILSON has been on the defensive lately. Just the other da when I called him to ask about his "Sociobiology: The New Synthesis" he didn't seem to want to talk--until I mentioned that I meant to draw some similarities between his work and Herbert Spencer's turn...
To start I told him that the book seems to me to be a sophisticated update of Herbert Spencer's antiquated Synthetic Philosophy, published in six volumes between 1862 and 1893. Both Spencer and Wilson combine the study of social structures and existing evolutionary theory on their syntheses. Spencer and...
The other day Wilson said that he did not know that much about Spencer, but he cautioned against a comparison of Spencer's unscientific synthesis with his heavily-researched synthesis of Sociobiology. Spencer, Wilson says, had a much narrower base of study, while Sociobiology is the recent work of thousands...
WILSON'S SYNTHESIS has itself run into opposition, some of it from within the Harvard faculty. His detractors say that culture and not biology is the chief determinant for human behavior and type Wilson's Sociobiology as simply the latest manifestation of the Spencerian notion. An explanation for the persistence...
But if Sociobiology is accepted outside the biology labs in social science, as Spencerian logic was, and if the government sees fit to write off present social inequalities as extensions of genetic determinance, all of Wilson's afterthoughts about political neutrality won't change minds. Late apologetics will not serve...