My own guess is that the genetic bias is intense enough to cause a substantial division of labor even in the most free and egalitarian of future societies. Thus, even with identical education and equal access to all professions, men are likely to play a disproportionate role in political life, business and science. (New York Times, 10/12/75)

CAR agrees with the Sociobiology Study Group that "Wilson joins the long parade of biological determinists whose work has served to buttress the institutions of their society by exonerating them from responsibility for social problems." CAR has further declared, however, that Sociobiology is dangerously racist. Although Wilson has nothing explicitly to say about race in his book, consider for a moment what a sociobiological analysis would be like:

(1) In Boston a violently racist organization, ROAR, fights integration of schools and neighborhoods and organizes vigilante groups of "marshals" in the tradition of the Ku Klux Klan.

(2) From the 1950s to the 1970s the U.S. waged an unjust war in Indochina, killing over one million Indochinese and over 50,000 Americans.

(3) South Africa's U.S.-backed white minority ruthlessly enforces a system of apartheid, in which Blacks are confined to 13 per cent of the land, segregated, and exploited as cheap labor.

(4) The Nazis committed genocide against the Jews, attempted the territorial conquest of Europe, and launched a war in which 100 million people died.

Was the recent racist violence in Boston caused by genes for territoriality and xenophobia? Or is it the result of an organized hate campaign by self-serving Boston and national politicians? Is the history of the KKK and its resurgence on a California marine base an expression of these same genes?

Wilson asserts that in warfare "the spread of genes has always been of paramount importance." Did the U.S. wage war in Indochina in order to spread American genes? Did millions of Americans support the war at first because of "genes for conformity" or because it took time for the anti-war movement to expose the government's lies?

Is South African apartheid an expression of genes for competition, aggression and territoriality? Does Harvard choose to hold stock in companies which invest in South Africa in order to enhance its "reproductive fitness" or to increase its endowment?

Wilson asserts that "the summed Darwinian fitness of the tribe" is "the ultimate if unrecognized beneficiary of warfare" and speaks of "the true biological joy of warfare."

The Nazis attempted to indoctrinate Germans into precisely this view of territoriality and warfare. One leading Nazi biologist wrote:

... The task of biology teaching... can be fulfilled by an orientation toward the concept of the biotic community... The student must be led to the conception that Germany is his living space to which he is linked by the bond of blood...When this insight is applied to the human biotic community, when the future German racial comrade feels himself to be a link in the German biotic community, and when he is imbued with the idea of the blood relationship of all Germans, then class differences and class hatred cannot take acute forms, as was often the case in the past due to a misunderstanding of the actual bond which unites all estates together. (Paul Brohmer, "Biologie Unterricht and Volkische Erziehung," in Nazi Culture, edited by George L. Mosse, 1968, pp. 86-87.)

The explanations which Wilson's Sociobiology provides for racism, fascism, and war are unscientific at best and dangerous at worst. The inhuman acts carried out by racists in Germany, South Africa, and the U.S. have been answered by heroic anti-racist and anti-fascist resistance. Where there were Nazis, there were partisans; where there is apartheid, there is massive rebellion, where there has been the Klan, ROAR, and the war in Indochina there has been the civil rights movement, CAR, and the anti-war movement.

Sociobiology, by encouraging biological and genetic explanations for racism, war and genocide, exonerates and protects the groups and individuals who have carried out and benefited from these monstrous orimes. Proclaiming fascist-like behavior as part of the "human biogram," it can only regard anti-fascist behavior as an "exception" which confirms a universal human nature. What an insult to tens of millions of people!

Unlike the more narrowly focused doctrines of Jensen and Herrnstein, Wilson's Sociobiology serves a much broader function of promoting biological and hereditary thinking throughout the academic world. For example, Allan Mazur, reviewing Sociobiology in the American Journal of Sociology, frankly states: "Wilson, with his brilliant scholarly reputation and Harvard credentials, has both the visibility and credibility to legitimate the biological approach to sociology. For me that is his major contribution."