Marx Was Right...
...said Edward O Wilson. He added that except he had the wrong species - Marx was right about ants and wrong about people. This is a sharper critique than might be obvious, since we, or maybe I should say Wilson, knows a lot about the details of their biology that make ants good communists, and the vast differences that make humans unsuited.
This kind of critique, and the fact that he regarded Marxism as a religion rather than a serious scientific or philosophical idea, helped make him unpopular with his Harvard Marxist colleagues like Lewontin and Marx sympathizers like Gould.
What really outraged them, though, was Sociobiology, the idea of scientifically studying the genetic and evolutionary basis of societies, human and animal. This notion managed to be anathema both to the left and the right. To the left, because it undermined the theoretical rationale of Marxism, and to the right because it struck an equally deadly blow to more conventional religions. If society is neither instituted by gods nor ordained by the class struggle, but by the stochastic workings of evolution, what do religion or Marx have to say about it?
This kind of critique, and the fact that he regarded Marxism as a religion rather than a serious scientific or philosophical idea, helped make him unpopular with his Harvard Marxist colleagues like Lewontin and Marx sympathizers like Gould.
What really outraged them, though, was Sociobiology, the idea of scientifically studying the genetic and evolutionary basis of societies, human and animal. This notion managed to be anathema both to the left and the right. To the left, because it undermined the theoretical rationale of Marxism, and to the right because it struck an equally deadly blow to more conventional religions. If society is neither instituted by gods nor ordained by the class struggle, but by the stochastic workings of evolution, what do religion or Marx have to say about it?
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