survival of the fittest.

In this sense, the sociobiological theory of human

nature puts on a mantle of universality and of utter fixity. After all, if 3
billion years of evolution have made us what we are, do we really think that
a hundred days of revolution will change us?
Sociobiologists take the first step, the claimed correct description of what is
universal in all human beings, more or less as every human nature theorist
has done it, by looking around to see what people in their society are like
and to some extent by telling their own life stories. Having looked inward at
themselves and outward at modern capitalist society for a description of
human nature, they then extend it a bit further by looking into the
anthropological record in order to assure us that those very same elements
that they find in twentieth-century North America and Britain are also, in
one form or another, displayed by the Stone Age people of New Guinea. For
some reason, they do not look much at the historical record of European
society, of which they seem to be quite ignorant, but perhaps they feel that if
New Guinea highlanders and Scottish highlanders show the same
characteristics today, then there cannot have been much change in 1,500
years of recorded history.
And what are these human universals that sociobiologists find? One can
hardly do better than look at the most influential, and in some sense,
founding document of sociobiological theory,
E. O. Wilson's Sociobiology: The New Synthesis.15 Professor Wilson tells us,
for example, that human beings are indoctrinable. He says, "Human beings
are absurdly easy to indoctrinate. They seek it. "16 They are characterized by
blind faith: "Man would rather believe than know. "17 That statement is, we
must note, found in what is called a scientific work, used as a textbook in
courses all over the world, filled with the mathematics of modern population
biology, crammed with observations and facts about the behavior of all
kinds of animals, based on what Time magazine has called the "iron laws of
nature. " But surely, "man would rather believe than know" is more in the
line of barroom wisdom, the sort of remark one makes to one's friend at the
local after work following a particularly frustrating attempt to persuade the
person in the next office that he ought to do things in a different way.
Among other aspects of human nature are said to be a universal spite and
family chauvinism. We are told that "human beings are keenly aware of