6) whether either of these is feasible and what price would have to be paid to achieve them. John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice (1971), argues for an egalitarian society, while Robert Nozik, in Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974), opts for a minimal state. 5) from two fat books by modern philosophers who reach quite different conclusions from their own unproved assumptions about human nature. The man who knows ant nature and who has given the theoretical underpinnings for natures of all descriptions, is as qualified as anyone alive to say something about human nature and how it is a product of evolution. 1977) the second, and On Human Nature (Harvard, 1978, 209pp., $12.50), a broadly speculative work, the third. The Insect Societies (1971) was the first, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975), reviewed in Instauration (Sept. He has written three books on the subject as well as a host of technical articles. Only in the past decade did advances in ecology and genetics make it possible to combine the three into what is called sociobiology, the study of the behavior of groups as well as of individuals.Įdward Osborne Wilson is the principle pioneer of this new discipline. Ethology, however, deals largely with the physiology and behavior of individual organisms. It took a couple of generations for Karl von Frisch to look at insects again, for the early ethnologists to look at other species, and for the physical anthropologists to explore once again human nature specifically (pun intended). This doctrine of relativism emerged around the same time as Darwinism, and both a tribe’s mores and the giraffe’s long neck were seen as adaptive or pragmatic.Īll of this represents intellectual advance, though relativism has degenerated into leftist dogmatism.

Morality was taken from the hands of philosophers with their moral absolutes and reduced to the status of the relative mores of particular tribes. When the cultural anthropologists of the last century started observing obscure tribes, they found such an impressive range of human societies and human conduct that behavior and morals seemed altogether arbitrary. But however flexibly we can arrange human societies, we just cannot live like ants. ANYONE WHO HAS SEEN an anthill should conclude that there is such a thing as ant nature and that it is different from human nature.

Edward osborne wilson on human nature