In the past ten years, a succession of highly publicized scientific works have purported to demonstrate that women's subordinate position in our society is due, in good part, to innate (genetic) differences between males and females, and not to external factors as claimed by the women's movement. These theories are...
Tag - sociobiology
During the 1960's—a time of great social unrest, questioning of basic American institutions, and a growing interest in socialism as an alternative—there appeared a spate of books on the theme that humans are only another species of ape. Konrad Lorenz, Robert Ardrey, Desmond Morris, Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox, as well...
The struggle between those who possess social power and those who do not, between "freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed" is a war fought with many and varied weapons. Of highest importance are ideas, weapons in an ideological warfare by...
Science for Humane Survival is in its eighth consecutive year at the University of Massachusetts' Boston Campus. Controversial from the start, it continues to trigger allergic reactions from various sensitized faculty members whenever it comes up for consideration at one or another college governance meetings...
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...
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...
I have been doing research in bacterial genetics for the last 12 years at Harvard Medical School and I am a member of Science for the People. Over the last couple of years, we have been discussing in our laboratory how the recombinant DNA technique could make certain of our experiments much easier to do. However, as a...
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...
In this issue, the familiar theme of the applications and development of science in our society is followed in two groups of articles. The first group deals with some of the dangerous ways in which scientific results can be loaded for and applied to increase the profit of big business, the exploitation of the working...
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...