Maggie's Farm

"Biological facts do not entail moral facts."
Richard Dawkins, 'The Selfish Gene'

Jeremy Stangroom on Dawkins and sociobiology:

Richard Dawkins’s ideas, and those of other sociobiologists, then, provoke extreme reactions and misunderstanding because their critics believe them to be in conflict with the moral and political commitments that they hold. This fact stands independently of any considerations about the merit of the kind of science that Dawkins, and his colleagues, are doing. Of course, it is not unusual for ideology to affect the judgements that people make about scientific theories, and where these theories have implications for understanding human beings it is especially commonplace.[5] But what it has meant in the case of sociobiology is that the public space for the debate about evolutionary ideas has become polluted by the hyperbole that almost inevitably occurs when the politically engaged feel their baseline commitments to be under threat.

However, for those people who prefer their science to be driven by a desire to uncover the fundamental nature of things, and not by a desire to find spurious support for political and moral values, there is still some hope. For, according to Edward O. Wilson, the controversy surrounding sociobiology is essentially over. ‘The contrarians are ageing,’ he told Ed Douglas, in a recent Guardian interview. ‘No young scientists are joining. They are not handing on the torch but passing it around a smaller and smaller circle.
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