Noam Chomsky
International Journal of Epidemiology, Volume 43, Issue 6, December 2014,
Page 1688, https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyu208
Published:
21 October 2014
The editors of the Times Book Review, mostly committed liberals no doubt, selected three books on science in their annual list of “Best Books” for 1994, all devoted to a single science. The choices were so obvious that there was little dispute, they report. “The science is, broadly, evolutionary biology or specifically, sociobiology, which, once it gets into your brain, can really spook you about genetics.” What “spooks you” is human sociobiology, not the study of complex molecules and ants, about which science actually has something to say.
One choice is a memoir by Edward Wilson, “one of the founders of sociobiology” with “his seminal 1975 book `Sociobiology'” – which has interesting material on simpler organisms, and ends with a few pages of speculations on human sociobiology. The field was actually founded 85 years earlier by the leading anarchist thinker Peter Kropotkin, also a natural scientist, in seminal work that led to his classic Mutual Aid: a Factor of Evolution, published in 1902. His studies criticized the conclusions on “struggle for existence” drawn by the noted Darwinian T.H. Huxley, who never responded publicly, though in private he wrote that Kropotkin's prominently-published work was “very interesting and important.” Kropotkin's Darwinian speculations about the possible role of cooperation in evolution, with their implications for anarchist social organization, remain about as solid a contribution to human sociobiology as exists today. But somehow this work has not entered “the canon”; one can hardly imagine why.
1 From Chomsky, N. Rollback, Z Magazine January–May, 1995. URL: http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199505–.htm [accessed 26.9.14]. Reprinted with permission.
© The Author 2014; all rights reserved. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association
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