The charge that Wilson is a racist or misogynist is of course utterly unfounded to the contrary, he is the quintessential liberal humanist. In an excellent review and critique of Wilson’s evolutionary ethics, Whitley Kaufman maintains that While many have raised such concerns, and while Wilson does promote a form of eugenics, it is not framed in terms of Nazi racist categories. For Wilson, it is bound up with his aim to promote the “Modern Synthesis” involving sociobiology, which he defines as “the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior.”Īs one might suspect, many have feared that Wilson’s program opened the door to the eugenics policies of the Nazis, since the book first appeared in print in 1975.
Wilson states, “Scientists and humanists should consider together the possibility that the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized.” Wilson is certainly not the first to recommend this move. In the concluding chapter of Sociobiology: A New Synthesis, Harvard University’s Edward O.
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