1929-
Biologist

Genetics as Destiny.

E. O. Wilson's 1975 book Sociobiology vigorously contested the firm boundary between biology, on the one hand, and culture on the other. He proposed that traits like altruism and aggression, believed since the 1930s to be exclusively learned behaviors, were in fact the result of genetic predisposition. He extended the field of population biology and evolutionary theory to argue that many social behaviors, including human ones, are the result of a biological impulse lodged in one's genes. For example, even the altruistic sacrifice of one life for another increases the chances that genes from one's species will survive. Wilson writes that "In a Darwinist sense, the organism does not live for itself. Its primary function is not even to reproduce other organisms; it reproduces genes and serves as their temporary carrier." He popularized these views in his 1978 Pulitzer Prize—winning book...