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...
Tag - sociobiology
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...
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...
We have inherited from bourgeois society a science whose structure presupposes that man exists inherently as a passive object of external natural laws that science must discover but over which man has no ultimate control. A revolutionary movement that intends to liberate man's repressed desires will need to overcome...