Word: zoologists
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Despite such candid admissions, an air of optimism seems to pervade the encyclopedia. The editors believe that "a decade hence many of the problems mentioned in these pages will have been solved." Zoologist H.S. Micklem states that most of "the missing pieces in the jigsaw" of immunology will soon be discovered. The other contributing scientists, too, appear to echo Coleridge's declaration that encyclopedias represent a faith in "the progress of the future...
Desmond Morris, British zoologist and author of the new book Manwatching, a Field Guide to Human Behavior: "People will walk by an old man sitting on a park bench, but stare intently at a painter's portrait of an old man sitting on a park bench because it has the visual authority of a frame around it. To me, looking at people can be as fascinating as looking at a great work...
These and other claims by proponents of sociobiology have made it one of the most inflammatory doctrines ta emerge from the campuses in decades. Since 1975, when Harvard Zoologist Edward Wilson's mammoth 700-page book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis brought the new science to public attention, the controversy has spread beyond Harvard?where it originated?dividing faculty departments and disrupting academic conventions. Angry opponents denounce "soso biology" as reactionary political doctrine disguised as science. Their fear: it may be used to show that some races are inferior, that male dominance over women is natural and that social progress...
Sociobiologists believe that self-deception is also a product of evolution, simply because a cheater can give a more convincing display of honesty if he lies to himself as well as to his neighbor. Says Zoologist Richard Alexander of the University of Michigan: "Selection has probably worked against the understanding of such selfish motivation becoming a part of human consciousness." Adds Trivers: "The conventional view that natural selection favors nervous systems which produce ever more accurate images of the world must be a very naive view of mental evolution...
Excited by his new interest, Trivers borrowed money and went back to Harvard as a special student in biology, gaining his Ph.D. and a faculty appointment in 1972. Zoologist Ernest Williams, one of his teachers, describes him as a brash, brilliant student who turned in papers with slashing attacks on well-known biologists, some of whom have not forgotten?or forgiven. Brashness is still part of Trivers' character. He derided an anthropologist (who, incidentally, admires his work) as too old to understand the implications of sociobiology. The anthropologist was then...