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Comment by pdonis | Hacker News Reader

While Wilson's extreme position on nature over nurture is certainly open to question, Gould is not a good source to be referencing (and the extreme position of nurture over nature you describe is at least as much open to question). Evolutionary biologists may be "divided" about Wilson, but they're pretty firmly negative about Gould's work in that field. See, for example, here:

http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Debate/CEP_Gould.html

Btw, Wilson was well aware that humans are not insects. He is the one who said of socialism for humans, "Great idea, wrong species".

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Gould said that one faction of evolutionary biologists were mostly wasting their time, it's not a surprise that they would be firmly negative about that.

The letter signers you posted say they are from the center for evolutionary psychology, departments of anthropology and psychology. This is the whole problem, they have one foot (if not both feet) outside of science and in social science.

> Gould said that one faction of evolutionary biologists were mostly wasting their time

Yes, he said that, but he said it in the context of giving descriptions of what those evolutionary biologists were doing that were completely disconnected from reality.

> The letter signers you posted

Are an anthropologist and a psychologist, yes. But the criticisms of Gould that they describe are by no means limited to those fields. The names they list in footnote 2, for example, are a roll call of major evolutionary biologists of the 20th century. Those people are not "outside of science"; they are right in the middle of the scientific field that Gould portrayed himself as an expert on, and they all say Gould's claims are nonsense.

Gould himself provides good reason to believe his ideas are nonsense. He began with the result he wanted, and then unsurprisingly got it.

  My original reasons for writing The Mismeasure of Man mixed the personal with the professional. I confess, first of all, to strong feelings on this particular issue. I grew up in a family with a tradition of participation in campaigns for social justice, and I was active, as a student, in the civil rights movement at a time of great excitement and success in the early 1960s. (p. 36)

Not surprisingly Wilson's comment of "Great idea, wrong species." was about communism for which it was very apt (communism doesn't scale for humans), not socialism. Socialism works well in more than a few very successful countries around the world.

> Not surprisingly Wilson's comment of "Great idea, wrong species." was about communism for which it was very apt (communism doesn't scale for humans), not socialism.

Wilson specifically used the term "socialism". The full quote is given here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._O._Wilson#The_Ants,_1990

The quote is,"Wilson said in reference to ants "Karl Marx was right, socialism works, it is just that he had the wrong species". Which seems a bit odd as Karl Marx was a communist and not a socialist, as far as I know. It's unlikely that Wilson was confused about this two terms so I expect it's just and honest mistake that's been continually repeated with out any one going back to the origininal sources.

> Which seems a bit odd as Karl Marx was a communist and not a socialist, as far as I know.

The two terms were more or less synonymous when Marx wrote. Later ideologues have attempted to differentiate them; whether or not they have succeeded is a matter of opinion.

"Karl Marx was right, socialism works, it is just that he had the wrong species"

It seems that what Marx called socialism is basically communism.

By 1888, Marxists employed socialism in place of communism as the latter had come to be considered an old-fashioned synonym for socialism. It was not until after the Bolshevik Revolution that socialism was appropriated by Vladimir Lenin to mean a stage between capitalism and communism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism

> It seems that what Marx called socialism is basically communism.

Many people (including me) would say that there isn't any meaningful difference between the two, whether we are talking about Marx's time or any time since. I don't know whether Wilson thought there was any meaningful difference between the two; as far as I know nobody asked him.

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