Sociobiology is also being aggressively promoted in such disciplines as anthropology (Wilson calls for an anthropological genetics), economics and psychology. A slick film, titled "Sociobiology: Doing What Comes Naturally," featuring interviews with Wilson and Harvard professors Devore and Trivers, both strong supporters of Sociobiology, is being widely shown to college and high school students.
Sociobiology threatens to revive in new forms an ideology which occupied a prominent position in U.S. colleges and universities from the betrayal of Reconstruction after the Civil War until World War II. Social Darwinism justified the class and racist inequalities of U.S. society as products of natural selection. During the period of vigorously expanding capitalism, Social Darwinism was invoked to justify the government's laissez-faire policy toward the robber barons. With the growth of a militant, immigrant-led working class movement, however, Social Darwinism was modified into an interventionist ideology of immigration restriction, eugenics, imperialism and anti-communism.
By the '20s and '30s, as German universities were becoming indoctrination centers for Nazism, many U.S. universities were teaching upper class youth about their own "superior genes." Throughout this period, Harvard frequently played a vanguard role in promoting this ideology.
Harvard President Eliot, immediately after his appointment in 1869, invited John Fiske to deliver a series of special lectures to promote Spencer's Social Darwinism. Just before World War I, Eliot, then president emeritus, helped found the eugenics-promoting Race Betterment Foundation as a member of its central committee.
Eliot's successor, President Lowell, imposed quotas for Jewish students at Harvard in the early 1920s. In 1927, he served on a special three-man panel which made the final determination that Sacco and Vanzetti be executed. In 1936, at Harvard's Tercentenary celebration, a group of Harvard alumni circulated a pamphlet showing how the arguments Lowell used in justifying Sacco and Vanzetti's executions were similar to those being used to promote fascist movements in Europe.
In recent years thousands of Harvard students and many faculty and staff have taken stands against Harvard's involvement with war and racism. They opposed ROTC programs and other forms of Harvard complicity with the war in Indochina. They opposed racist admissions, hiring and curriculum policies. The revival and spread of doctrines which can be used to encourage racism and preparation for war is potentially more dangerous than the issues which produced the conflicts of the 1960s.
Most Americans will not support government policies and actions which promote racism and war, unless much of the anti-racist and anti-war sentiment of the 1960s is undone through the influence of a new wave of academic and popular reactionary ideologies. By trying to counter the growing influence of sociobiology and similar doctrines in various academic disciplines, we not only preserve scientific integrity but our hopes for a future free of racism and war.
[Miriam D. Rosenthal, a research fellow in Nutrition at the School of Public Health, is a member of the Sociobiology Study Group. She is also active in the Committee Against Racism '[CAR], whose views are represented in this article.]