A guided tour of the living cell

Abstract

about Cyril Burt and the evils of early educational streaming, linking this irrelevancy to sociobiology by innuendo rather than by explicit argument. He concludes by appropriating the goals of justice, equality, and freedom to himself and imputing to sociobiologists mistakes [that] threaten to stifle the aspirations of millions (p. 435). Nothing in between justifies these slurs. Kitcher's agenda is fundamentally political. He is convinced that sociobiologists (especially Wilson, Barash, and van den Berghe) are reactionary apologists for an unjust status quo, and he trots out as damning evidence a few of their musings to the effect that radical social experiments can have unanticipated negative effects. But even if I grant Kitcher the presumption that sociobiologists' beliefs in an evolved human nature incline them to conservatism (though my experience denies it), he offers no justification for his tone of moral superiority. He is contemptuous, for example, of the suggestion that Homo sapiens has evolved a sexually differentiated psychology, equating the hypothesis with efforts to maintain male superiority, but he offers neither reasons to doubt it nor reasons to believe the hypothesis any more dangerous than his own. Policy makers who believe that the sexes are