After over almost a year's reflection and review and after analyzing the reaction to the new wave of books this fall on sociobiology, particularly E.O. Wilson's On Human Nature, the Sociobiology Study group of the Boston Chapter of Science for the People has decided on a new course of action. We find there is a...
Category - Sociobiology
The very fact of the AAAS sponsoring this symposium on the "controversy" is an indication of the success we have had in making the claims of the sociobiologists controversial. What caught many of us in Science for the People by surprise at the AAAS meetings was the extent of the spreading negative reaction to...
In the past few years much energy and enthusiasm has been directed towards the supposedly new idea of extending the comparative study of animal social systems to human social systems. However, we of the Sociobiology Study Group see this movement as the latest reappearance of a much older doctrine of biological...
As the birth control clinic movement mushroomed around the country, conflict raged about how and by whom the clinics should be controlled. Margaret Sanger still resisted relinquishing personal control of her New York clinic to the medical profession. No doubt part of her resistance came from a desire to control things...
In the middle of May, as students at Harvard Medical School were preparing for their exams, as many medical schools around the country were completing their admissions decisions, as President Ford spoke of "alternatives to busing," Bernard D. Davis, a Professor at Harvard Medical School, stirred up a storm the impact...
Recently, Science for the People groups in Boston and Ann Arbor have formed to analyze and combat this latest appearance of biological determinism. The Boston group prepared a critique which was published in the New York Review of Books (Nov. 13, 1974) and both groups are preparing articles for popular and academic...
In a similar fashion, the theories put forth by the sociobiologists and their predecessors help to support maintenance of the status quo and to convince people that revolutionary changes in social relationships (e.g. class structure and sex roles) are impossible. One way we see this done is by the rapid incorporation...
A feminist perspective would not hail new technological developments as "liberating" because it would realize that the oppression of women is not the result of biology but of the social constructs around it. In this respect, it is paradoxical that the excesses of an impersonal technology developed by males in a sexist...
Jensen, Herrnstein and others have claimed that people's IQ is highly inherited and plays a large part in determining their "success" in later life. In this section of the magazine we show the fallacies of all these arguments. "IQ and Class Structure" demonstrates that IQ is not a cause of success and that it is...
In spite of the depravity of the ideas they spread (or because of it) the followers of Jansenism have had full access to the public media. Both Shockley and Herrenstein have appeared on nationwide T.V. and their theories have been given repeated exposure in the press. Originally published in magazines for the...