“Mutual Incomprehension and Red Herrings“: Strategies of Disciplinary Competition in the Sociobiology Debate

Much has been written about how Sociobiology pitted two camps of biologists against each other on moral, political and scientific grounds in 1975: The Sociobiologists, led by E.O. Wilson, hoped to build a new discipline and encountered vocal critics, many like Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould with a Marxist background, attacking them as genetic determinists and naive reductionists. This conflict within biology, as well as the accompanying media coverage, has drawn most of the attention and the controversy surrounding Sociobiology is still commonly seen as a mere expression of the political tensions of the 1970s.

However, this exchange is only the beginning of a much broader academic debate that continued into
the 1980s and even 1990s. With passages such as „It may not be too much to say that sociology and the other social sciences, as well as the humanities, are the last branches of biology, waiting to be included in the Modern Synthesis“, Wilson’s book questioned the validity of existing disciplinary boundaries. Therefore, the controversy should not only be seen as the result of a political conflict, but also as a competition between disciplines about where the borders of their territories are to be drawn.

It is almost impossible to keep track of the flurry of publications regarding Sociobiology: the edited
volumes, conference proceedings, monographs, and articles fill tens of thousands of pages. Many of
them not only debate the possibilities and limitations of evolutionary explanations for human social behavior, but they also contain what Thomas Gieryn termed boundary-work: They aim to convince the reader of the validity and legitimacy of a given discipline or to discredit the approaches and results generated by a disciplinary competitor. By tracing these publications and their reception in reviews, we can ascertain different strategies of disciplinary competition.

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