Word: wilson
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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These and other claims by proponents of sociobiology have made it one of the most inflammatory doctrines ta emerge from the campuses in decades. Since 1975, when Harvard Zoologist Edward Wilson's mammoth 700-page book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis brought the new science to public attention, the controversy has spread beyond Harvard?where it originated?dividing faculty departments and disrupting academic conventions. Angry opponents denounce "soso biology" as reactionary political doctrine disguised as science. Their fear: it may be used to show that some races are inferior, that male dominance over women is natural and that social progress...
...Edward Wilson has been picketed, and at Harvard, the left-wing Committee Against Racism has called sociobiology "dangerously racist." The committee also charged that the new science would give comfort to the supporters of Psychologist Arthur Jensen, a leading proponent of another controversial theory: that racial differences in IQs have a genetic basis. Wilson angrily called that attack "slander," and even Lewontin came to his defense, conceding that "sociobiology is not a racist doctrine." But he added, "Any kind of genetic determinism can and does feed other kinds, including the belief that some races are superior to others...
Some philosophers and theologians have been dismayed by the theory. So was one young man who had won a Carnegie Gold Medal for saving a drowning victim; he wrote Wilson a troubled letter. Recalls Wilson: "He found it difficult to grasp the notion that somehow his act was preordained through genes. I convinced him that the impulse and emotion behind his rational choice, though genetically determined, in no way detracted from the rationality and value of his altruistic...
...crimes and has then gone to testify in court. He once helped pursue four youths who had jumped a man in Riverside Park, and was commended by the grand jury for his assistance. For the cover story, Warner spent a night in Harlem, accompanying New York Homicide Detective Jim Wilson on his beat...
...death and I was dead, and I started to call the Lord. I was thinking to myself, 'What a nightmare, oh, what a nightmare!' " A nightmare shared by innumerable others who cannot count on the basic minimum of a supposedly civilized society: personal safety. Says Jim Wilson, a black homicide detective in Harlem: "Anybody should be able to go out on the streets any time he wants...