White Guys In Science – E. O. Wilson

And one more

I first gave E. O. Wilson some extended thought when his book Consilience came out in 1999. When I was younger, I was intrigued by grand syntheses, which is what Consilience attempts to be. I don’t think I read it, though, just the summaries. The idea was, as I recall, that at some blessed time in the future all the sciences (all forms of knowledge?) would come together in one synthesis. If that’s wrong, don’t bother to explain to me what it really said. I don’t care.

My second thought was that of course something like this could be published only by a “grand old man.” Someone who had made his name in some part of science and then had gone on to pontificate about other things. Tiresome, but not the first time.

I follow a number of biologists on Twitter, including experts on insects and ants, Wilson’s favorite. They were inspired by him and are now trying to assess his legacy. Consilience wasn’t Wilson’s only attempt at a grand synthesis; he had earlier written on sociobiology, and that was where he got into trouble.

I was barely conscious of those arguments, and none of the participants had been role models for me. But sociobiology attempts to link biology to human social factors, and that can always go in ugly directions.

It easily slides over into a deterministic view of “races” and all that entails. It turns out, Wilson slid down that rabbit hole, encouraging a person who was explicitly making those connections, as shown by a study of his letters.

Nothing new here; the hegemony of white men in science bred all sorts of intolerances. I have not read anything about misogyny in Wilson’s career, but I haven’t heard about his encouraging women students either.

By 1999, neither racism nor sexism nor the puffing of poorly thought out generalities was unfamiliar to me, just tiring. Consilience was one more in that category and not damaging to my then-established career, but an annoying reminder of too much that had gone before.

Now comes another reminder. Three women have brought a lawsuit against Harvard University for the behavior of John Comaroff, a member of the Harvard anthropology department, for groping them and worse. Thirty-eight of Comaroff’s Harvard colleagues wrote a letter to the administration defending Comaroff. Some are now trying to walk that back. Dan Drezner has a good summary of the state of the case. The worst of it is that somehow Harvard obtained therapist’s notes from sessions with one of the women and shared them with Comaroff.

It’s disappointing that Joe Biden fell for the “great man” myth. It’s that myth that allows professors to grope students, for entrepreneurs like Lander to humiliate the people he works with, for a specialist like Wilson to support a racist, and, yes, for a liar like Elizabeth Holmes to run a racket dressed up like science.

Science is a collective effort. In the masculinist world that we are (slowly) leaving, it was convenient to produce a narrative of lone geniuses showering good upon humanity. As participation in science broadens, we are beginning to see that not only is that narrative incorrect, it has given permission to a wide range of bad behavior.

Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner