Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Donna Haraway
Life can be moulded into any conceivable form. Draw up
your specifications for a dog, or a man. . . and if you
will give me control of the environment, and time
enough, I will clothe your dreams in flesh and blood. . .
A sensible industrial system will seek to put men, as well
as timber, stone, and iron, in the places for which their
natures fit them, and to polish them for efficient service
with at least as much care as is bestowed upon clocks,
electric dynamos, or locomotives.
REVIEW20 SPRING/SUMMER
RADICALHISTORY 1979 PAGES206-237
THE BIOLOGICAL ENTERPRISE 207
TABLE 3
All items in the left-hand list are appropriatre to a bioscience of organisms, in which
the model of scientific intervention is medical and clinical. The nature of analysis is
organic functionalism, and ideological appeals are to the fulfillment of the "person." All
of the items in the right-hand list are appropriate to an engineering science of automated
technological devices, in which the model of scientific intervention is technical and
systematic." The nature of analysis is technological functionalism, and ideological ap-
peals are to alleviation of stress and other signs of human obsolescence.
psychobiology sociobiology
human engineering communication control
organism cybernetic machine
physiology systems theory
intelligence informat ion
person gene
personality sciences population genetics and ecology
sex and mind genes and survival machines
instinct and engineering constraints and choice or
redesign of trajectories
time-motion studies ergonomics
human relations management socio-technical systems management
adaptivit y optimization
eugenics for race hygiene sexual investment strategies
for genetic profit
nervous system for integration sensory channels and processing
centers for environmental tracking
endocrine system for integration chemical communication for
environmental tracking
homeostasis feed back and other control
system mechanisms
superorganism population
It has always been a feature of our plan for the use of the chim-
panzee as an experimental animal to shape it intelligently to
specification instead of trying to preserve its natural characteristics.
We have believed it important to convert the animal into as nearly
ideal a subject for biological research as is practicable. And with this
intent has been associated the hope that eventual success might
serve as an effective demonstration of the possibility of re-creating
man himself in the image of a generally acceptable ideal.'*
Chimpanzees, A Laboratory Colony 1943
formation sciences.
The Committee for Research in Problems of Sex grew out of ef-
forts by the New York City Bureau of Social Hygiene to establish a
structure of pure research for enlightened social policy on matters
such as sex education, family counseling, eugenics, venereal disease,
divorce, and birth The NRC committee was part of an ef-
fort to relate medical-physiological research to social issues, The com-
mittee sponsored work in four categories, not including direct action
agencies:24 (1)biology of sex (systematic, genetic, and physiological
aspects); (2) physiology of reproduction; (3) infrahuman
psychobiology of sex; and (4) human psychobiology of sex, including
anthropological and social-psychological approaches. Two assump-
tions stand out in the records of the sex committee. First, social prac-
tice had to be based on basic research conducted and controlled by in-
dependent specialists; the parent philanthropy had no direct say about
funding once the committee was established. Second, the sex instinct
was perceived to underlie the whole pyramid of life and human
sciences and to be the key to understanding culture and personality.
The CRPS did not conceive of science as rationalizing sexual repres-
sion. Quite the opposite:25 the committee in large measure played a
liberalizing role. It was committed to facilitating rational social
engineering. Animals models for human organic capacity and variation
allowed human engineering to be an experimental natural science. In
that sense, Yerkes built his primate laboratory as a pilot plant for
human engineering.
In consultation with a powerful old friend and colleague, Yale
University President James Rowland Angell, Yerkes planned the In-
stitute of Psychology at Yale as the home for his primate research. The
Institute housed a range of graduate research on general problems of
adaptation; its staff was made up of former members of the Commit-
tee on Scientific Aspects of Human Migration.26These men brought
with them a commitment to the scientific management of race, sex,
and class, based on sciences of heredity, drives, learning, and environ-
ment, all in a bio-medical context grounded in physiology. In 1924,
Yerkes moved to New Haven. His early facilities consisted of his farm
in New Hampshire and a converted old building at Yale, where four
young chimpanzees grew up in full view of modern science. Their
psychosexual and ideational development were the primary concerns.
Mind and sex were a natural pair.27
In 1929, Yerkes achieved his dream, a $500,000 grant from the
Rockefeller Foundation for a permanent, large research facility on
great apes. Grant proposals and Foundation correspondance were full
of the relevance of the project to human social and psychological
214 RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW
issues.28No other goal could justify the large expense of using chim-
panzees as research animals. The resulting Yale Laboratories of
Primate Biology existed in three parts: (1)special laboratories for
short term work in New Haven needing special apparatus, with close
cooperation with John Fulton's Department of Physiology in the
Medical (2) a breeding colony of 30 to 40 animals in Orange
Park, Florida, where long term sexual and ideational psychobiological
observation and experimentation would be possible; and (3) special
provision for studies of wild primates in their natural habitat, to pro-
vide base line information on the natural social physiology of the
organisms. Research centered on the idea of evolution, and all but ig-
nored the idea of populations. Animal behavior was not a genetic
science in Yerkes' and his contemporaries' hands. Or rather, the com-
parative psychologists used the word genetic always in the sense of the
genesis of individual capacities. All this would change with the post
World War I1 synthesis of ethology, neural biology, and population
genetics and ecology. Table 2 shows the picture of life science that
Yerkes knew around 1930.
People associated with the primate laboratories at Yale main-
tained two organizing ideas rooted in organismic physiology. The first
was domination, which included brain region dominance, dominance
in competitive interactions between individuals, dominance as a per-
sonality trait related to leadership, and dominance hierarchies as
social structure. Dominance was perceived as inherent to individual
organisms; it was probably inheritable, just like eye color or IQ. The
second central cooperation-from homeostatic mechanisms at all
levels, to deliberate modification of -dominance in the interests of
higher organization, to everyday rules for running the laboratory.30
Cooperation and dominance were closely connected on an organic
level as forms of integration.
A choice opportunity presented itself for the experimental in-
vestigation of dominance in the context of familycentered experimen-
tal sociology. The experiment tested coordination of sexual drive,
status hunger, masculine and feminine personality types, and evolu-
tionary transformation to higher forms of social control. This study
carried noteworthy implications for counseling and human social ser-
vices by relating drive and personality to social order.
Table 2. The life sciences focused on organisms, personalities, and cultures, around
1930. Both sides of the diagram are rooted in organismic, functionalist doctrines; both
involve differentiated roles for basic and applied sciences, modelled on experimental
medicine.
T H E BIOLOGICAL ENTERPRISE 215
LIFE SCIENCES
AGE OF BIOLOGY
(unifying science and ideology)
- -
Psychology
organic
drives
Physiology reflexes v) Anthropology
0
(experimental) genes a
hormones F
5a
Evolution animal : human P Sociology
b
(comparative) (personality )
85 Mental and Social
Environmental Sciences
Hygiene
Psychobiology
- -
experimental medicine experimental sociology
reproductive system family
nervous system social group
health management
adjustment
HUMAN ENGINEERING
PSYCHIATRY
(unifying technologies)
216 RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW
To the observer the male seems often to be trying hard to blot out
awareness of his subordination; the female, by contrast, to be
hopefully trying to induce the male to give place to her at the chute.
. . . As for the females, wiles, trickery, or deceitful cunning, which
are conspicuous by their absence in the male list, are favorite
resources. But even more so are sexual allure and varied forms of
solicitation. . . . That the female is, cameleon-like a creature of
multiple personality, is clear from our observation^.^^
that human engineering will shortly take its place among the impor-
tant forms of practical e n d e a v ~ r . ' 'Yerkes
~~ believed that industrial
systems had evolved from slavery, to the wage system, to the present
system based on cooperation and that only now could the value of the
person be realized. Because personnel research took the person as the
proper unit of production, that discipline led the way to the scientific
nurture of intelligent cooperation to replace class strife between labor
and maladaptive, evolutionarily out-moded Inissez-fuire capitalism.
Yerkes and his liberal peers advocated studying traits of the body,
mind, spirit, and character in order to fit "the person" perfectly into
the proper place in industry. Equality clearly did not mean organic
sameness; therefore it must mean that "in the United States of
America, within limits set by age, sex, and race, persons are equal
under the law and may claim as their right as citizens like oppor-
tunities for human service and responsibility .'r42
By Yerkes' logic, equality was (almost)everyone's right to occupy
one's natural place determined by disinterested science. Differences
were the essential subject for the new science. Personnel research
would provide reliable information for the employment manager and
proper vocational counseling for the "person ." The "vocations"
themselves were regarded as neutral products of industrial progress so
that the problem was simply one of human inventory in a democracy.
The unit of analysis was the person, transformed by the scientific con-
cept of personality which tied physiology, medicine, psychology, an-
thropology, and sociology into the service of management, Further,
"the person," and "personality," retained a strong anti-materialist
meaning at the same time that the associated ideology permitted scien-
tific reduction by objective methods-like intelligence testing, motiva-
tional research, and sexual psychobiology. The wedding of
philosophical idealism and natural science produced well-behaved
modern children in the factory and the home. In short, "[ilndustry
now has abundant opportunity to develop suitable methods of
measuring persons with respect to qualities of character, mind, and
body, and to make this information immediately available in connec-
tion with placement , vocational choice, and guidance ."a3
Although the person should be the object of scientific manage-
ment-an essential structure of domination in the science of coopera-
tion-the ideology of self expression was also intrinsic to Yerkes' ex-
position. The harmony of self and social management hinged on
capitalist doctrines of personality. Satisfaction of basic instincts,
themselves known through science, was the essence of self expression
in this model. Science, not class conflict, could provide for further
THE BIOLOGICAL ENTERPRISE 221
Nature is, above all, profligate. . . [Its schemes] are the brainchild
of a deranged tnanicdepressive with limitless capital. Extravagence.
Nature will try anything once. That is what the form of the insect
says. No form is too gruesome, no behavior too grotesque. If youre
dealing with organic compounds, then let them combine. If is
works, if it quickens, set it clacking in the grass; theres always
room for one more; you aint so handsome yourself. This is a spend-
thrift economy; though nothing is lost, all is spent.
Annie Dillard, Natural Philosopher, 197479
We have seen two varieties of biology as an engineering science in
relation to the knowledge and practices of patriarchal capitalism.
There has been no clear distinction between objective science and
abusive ideology because the relations of knowledge and historical
determinants require more complex concepts. In an important sense,
science, like capital, has beenprogressive. The computer is not just a
machine built according to laws of domination related to labor and
war. Communications sciences, including sociobiology, are human
achievements in interaction with the world. But the construction of a
natural economy according to capitalist relations, and its appropria-
tion for purposes of reproducing domination, is deep. It is at the level
of fundamental theory and practice, not at the level of good guys and
bad guys.
A socialist-feminist science will have to be developed in the pro-
cess of constructing different lives in interaction with the world. Only
material struggle can end the logic of domination. Marx insisted that
one must not leap too fast, or one will end in a fantastic utopia, impo-
tent and ignorant. Abundance matters. In fact, abundance is essential
to the full discovery and historical possibility of human nature. It mat-
ters whether we make ourselves in plenty or in unfulfilled need, in-
cluding need for genuine knowledge and meaning. But natural
history -and its offspring, the biological sciences-has been a
discipline based on scarcity. Nature, including human nature, has
been theorized and constructed on the basis of scarcity and competi-
tion. Moreover, our nature has been theorized and developed through
the construction of life science in and for capitalism and patriarchy.
That is part of the maintenance of scarcity in the specific form of ap-
propriation of abundance for private and not common good. It is also
part of the maintenance of domination in the form of escalating logics
and technologies of commandcontrol systems fundamental to
patriarchy. To the extent that these practices inform our theorizing of
THE BIOLOGICAL ENTERPRISE 233
nature, we are still ignorant and must engage in the practice of science.
It is a matter for struggle. I do not know what life science would be
like if the historical structure of our lives minimized domination. I do
know that the history of biology convinces me that basic knowledge
would reflect and reproduce the new world, just as it has participated
in maintaining an old one. 0
Notes
I would like to thank members of the Baltimore Science for the People for helpful
discussion of the ideas of this essay.
1. Frank Parsons, Our Country's Need, or the Development o f a Scientific In-
dustrialism, cited in David Noble, America by Design (NY: Knopf, 1977), 295 n. Par-
sons lived from 1854 to 1908.
2. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (NY: Oxford, 1976), 21.
3. Useful work on ideological issues has been done by members of Science for the
People, but they have tended to exempt from analysis the history and structure of the
science of biology, citing mainly illicit extensions into political or social areas. A pam-
phlet of articles on sociobiology is available for $2.50 from Science for the People, 897
Main Street, Cambridge, M A 02739. See also A n n Arbor Science f o r the People,
Biology as a Social Weapon (Minneapolis: Burgess, 1977; Barbara Chasin,
Sociobiology: A Sexist Synthesis, Science for the People 9 (1977), 27-31. A defense of
continuing autonomy of social sciences is made by Marshall Sahlins, The Use and
Abuse of Biology (Ann Arbor: U. Michigan Press, 1976) and, with attention to the
history of animal behavior studies, Sherwood L. Washburn, "Human behavior and the
behavior of other animals," American Psychologist 33 (1978), 405-18.
4. More theoretical analysis has been undertaken by Radical Science Journal in
London. RSJ is assembling a comprehensive, annotated bibliography relevant to
development of a revolutionary politics of science. Order from Radical Science Journal,
9 Poland St., London W 1. Nancy Hartsock, "Social Science and Political Action:
Notes Toward a Marxist Alternative," Johns Hopkins University, Political Science
Department, provides the best discussion of the question of "objectivity" from a
socialist-feminist perspective.
5. My method is analogous to Mars's reading of classical political economy and
to the approach of Michel Foucault, in The Order of Things (NY: Random House,
1970) and Fancois Jacob in Logic of Life (NY: Pantheon, 1974).
6. R.M. Yerkes, Chimpanzees, A Laboratory Colony (New Haven: Yde Universi-
ty Press, 1943); id, "A program of anthropoid research," Amer. 1. Psych. 39 (1927):
181-99; id., "Yale Laboratories of Comparative PsychobioIogy," Comparative
Psychology Monographs 8 (1932), 1-33; and R.M. and A.W. Yerkes, The Great Apes
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929).
7. Robert Kohler, 'The management of science: The experience of Warren
Weaver and the Rockefeller Foundation Programme in Molecular Biology," Minerva
XIV (1976), 279-306. On the general role of foundations in science, see Stanley Cohen,
"Foundation officials and fellowships: Innovation in the patronage of science," Minerva
XIV (1976), 225-40 and Raymond Fosdick, The Story of the Rockefeller Foundation
(NY: Harper, 1952).
8. Francis Jacob, The Logic of Life, trans. Betty Spillman (NY: Pantheon, 1974);
J.D. Watson, The Molecular Biology of the Gene, 3rd ed. (Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin,
1976).
9. M.D. Mesarovic, ed., Systems Theory and Biology (NY: Springer-Verlag,
1968); Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General Systems Theory (NY: Brazillier, 1968); F.E.
Emery, ed., Systems Thinking (NY: Penguin, 1969); D.S. Pugh, ed., Organization
Theory (NY: Penguin, 1971); Robert Lilienfeld, The Rise of Systems Theory (NY:
Wiley, 1978).
234 RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW
10. The Selfish Gene, note 2; W.D. Hamilton, 'The genetical theory of social
behaviour, I, 11," J. Theoretical Biology 7 (1964),1-52.G.Evelyn Hutchinson, An In-
troduction to Population Ecology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978),provides
an elegant, readable explanation of history and basic ideas in systems-based ecology.
Some of the non-oppressive potential of such forms of thought are evident in his book.
See also R.H. Mac Arthur and E.O. Wilson, The Theory o f Zsland Biogeography
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967).
11. Basic texts in Sociobiology include D.P. Barash, Sociobiology and Behavior
(NY: Elsevier North Holland, 1977);E.O. Wilson, Insect Societies (Cambridge: Havard
University Press, 1971); idem, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Harvard Unversity
Press, 1975); idem, On Human Nature (Harvard University Press, 1978);G.E. Pugh,
The Biological Origins o f Human Values (NY: Basic, 1977); h e n UeVore, ed.,
Sociobiology and the Social Sciences (Chicago: Aldine, in press). Wilson provides the
best bibliographies for the biological literature's foundational papers. A good collection
is Arthur L. Caplan, The Sociobiology Debate (NY: Harper & Row, 1978).
12. Op. cit., note 6, 10-11. See Ernest R. Hilgard, "Robert Mearns Yerkes,"
Biographical Memoirs o f the National Academy of Sciences 38 (1965):384-425,and
Donna Haraway, "Sex, Primates, and Human Engineering: The Laboratory as Pilot
Plant, 1924-1942,"Paper presented to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
May, 1978.
13. C.R. Carpenter, "A field study of the behavior and social relations of howling
monkeys," Comp. Psych. Mong. 10 (no. 2, 1934), 1-168);Donna Haraway, "Animal
sociology and a natural economy of the body politic, Part 1, A political physiology of
dominance," Signs 4 (1978),21-35.
14. R.M.Yerkes, "Reaction of Entomostraca to Stimulation by Light, 11, Reactions
of Daphnia and Cypris," Amer. J. Physiol. 4 (1900),405-22;idem, The Dancing Mouse
(NY: Macmillan, 1907); with J.W. Bridges and R.S. Hardwick, A Point Scale for
Measuring Mental Ability (Baltimore: Warwick and York, 1915); Yerkes, 'The
measurement and utilization of brain power in the army," Science 44 (19191,221-26;
251-59;Yerkes, "Testament," unpublished autobiography, in the R.M. Yerkes Papers of
the library of the Yale Medical School.
15. The project was related to sex research on animals, "primitive" people, and
New Yorkers with marital problems. R.M. Yerkes, 'The significance of chimpanzee
culture for biological research," Haruey Lectures 31 (1935-36),57-73;papers of the
Committee for Research in Problems of Sex (CRPS), archives of the National Academy
of Sciences, NRC, Washington, D.C., especially grantee files on Clark Wissler
(1928-31); G.V. Hamilton, A Research in Marriage (NY: Boni, 1929);and CRPS folders
on Research Centers, Marital Research, 1923ff; Donna Haraway, "A Political
Physiology of the Primate Family: Monkeys and Apes in the 20th century Rationaliza-
tion of Sex," unpublished ms, 146 pp, 1978.
16. The organismsuperorganism problem may be followed in : W.M. Wheeler,
Essays in Philosophical Biology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1939); A.E.
Emerson, "Dynamic homeostasis, a unifying principle in organic, social, and ethical
evolution," Scientific Monthly 78 (1954),67-85;A.L. Kroeber, 'The super-organic,"
Amer. Anthropologist 19 (1917),163-213;Robert Redfield, ed., Levels of Integration in
Biological and Social Systems (Lancaster, PA: Jacques Cattell Press, 1942); E.O.
Wilson, Insect Societies, note 12, 282, 317-19,and Sociobiology, 383-86.
17. Leon Baritz, Servants of Power (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press,
2960); Elton Mayo, The Human Problems of Industrial Civilization (NY: Macmillan,
1933);Harry Bravermann, Labor and Monopoly Capital (NY: Monthly Review Press,
1974).
18. Archives of CRPS, esp. "Formulation of Program," 1922ff;S.B. Aberle and
G.W. Corner, Twenty-five Years of Sex Research, (Philadelphia: Sanders, 1953)
Margaret Mead, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (NY: Morrow,
1935);Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Women's Right (NY: Basic, 1978);C.C. Miles &
Lewis Terman, "Sex difference in the association of ideas," Amer. J. Psychology 41
(19291,165-206.
T H E BIOLOGICAL ENTERPRISE 235
An engineer looks at physiology, Science 340 (1963), 461-64; J.Y. Lettvin, H.R.
Maturana, W.S. McCulloch, W.H. Pitts, What the frogs eye tells the frogs brain,
Proc. Instit. Radio Engineers 47 (1959), 1940-51.
48. E.V. Cowdry, ed., Human Biology and Racial Welfare (NY: Hoeber, 1930);
Robert Redfield, ed., Levels of Integration in Biological and Social Systems (Lancaster,
PA: Cattell Pr, 1942); M.D., Mesarovic, ed., Systems Theory and Biology (NY:
Sringer-Verlag, 1968); E.O. Wilson, et a], Life on Earth, 2nd ed. Sunderland, MA:
Sinauer, 1978).
49. Rise of Systems Theory, chpt. 4.
50. Two works of fiction develop the consequences of the new systems approach
for human former-organisms. Thomas Pynchon, Gravitys Rainbow (NY: Bantam,
1974) and Marge Piercy, Women on the Edge of Time (NY: Knopf, 1976).
51. For texts essential to thesis, see: for molecular biology, F. Jacob, Logic o f Life;
for neural and behavioral sciences, Andras Angyal, Foundations of a Science o f Per-
sonality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1941), Emanuel Peterfreund and J.T.
Schwartz, lnformation, Systems, and Psychoanalysis (NY: McGraw-Hill, 1966), S.A.
Altmann, ed., Social Communication among Primates (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1967);
for ecology, E.P. Odum, The emergence of ecology as a new integrative discipline,
Science 295 (25 March, 1977), 1289-93, E.P. Odum, Fundamentals of Ecology
(Philadelphia: Saunders, 1955, 1959, 1971);Michael Farley, Formations et transforma-
tions de la synthese ecologique aux Etats-Unis, 1949-1971, (Masters essay presented to
LInstitut dHistoire et de Sociopolitique des Sciences, Universite de Montreal, 1977); fr
political science, H.D. Lasswell and Abraham Kaplan, Power and Society (New Haven:
Yale UP, 1950); Albert Somit, ed., Biology and Politics: Recent Explorations (Paris and
The Hague: Mouton, 1976, a publication of the International Social Science Council);
David Eastman, A Systems Analysis of Political Life (NY: Wiley, 1958); for ethics as
quality control, Van Rensselaer Potter, Bioethics, Bridge to the Future (Englewood
Cliffs, N.J. : Prentice-Hall, 1971); Manfred Stanley, The Technological Conscience (NY:
Free Press, 1978).
52. See Thomas Robert Malthus, A n Essay on the Principle of Population (NY:
Norton, 1976), 26-30, 73-75, 98.
53. R.M. Young, The historiographic and ideological contexts of the 19th century
debate on mans place in nature, in M. Teich and R.M. Young, eds., Changing
Perspectives in the History of Science (London: Heinemann, 1972). An anarchist
natural economy was proposed by Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid (NY: McClure,
1902). A pacifist version was suggested by W.C. Allee, The Social Life of Animals NY:
Norton, 1938). See Joseph Caron, Animal Cooperation in the Ecology of W.C. Allee,
paper delivered at the Joint Atlantic Seminar in the History of Biology, Montreal, April,
1977. A capitalist natural history is found in Michael T. Ghiselin, The Economy of
Nature and the Evolution of Sex (Berkeley and Los Angeles: California UP, 1974).
54. Sociobiology, 10.
. ibid.,578.
56. ibid. ,586.
57. V.C. Wynne-Edwards, Animal Dispersion in Relation to Social Behaviour
(Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1962); R.L. Trivers, The Evolution of Reciprocal
Altruism, Quart. Rev. Biol. 46 (1971), 35-57;idem, Parental Investment and Sexual
THE BIOLOGICAL ENTERPRISE 237
58. On the disappearance of superorganisms, see Insect Societies, ch. 16, esp.
317-19 and Sociobiology, 383-86.
59. Sociobiology, ch. 15, 314ff.
60. J.H. Crook, ed., Social Behavior in Birds and Mammals (NY: Academic Press,
1970); P.E. Ellis, ed., Social Organization of Animal Communities (Symposium of the
Zoological Society of London, vol. 14, 1965); (for extension to primates) J.H. Crook
and J.S. Gartlan, "Evolution of primate societies," 210 Nature (no. 5042, 1966)
1200-1203.
61. For a popular summary, see Selfish Gene, op. cit., note 2, ch. 9.
62. See, for example, Barbara Ford, "Murder and Mothering Among the Sacred
Monkeys," Science Digest, May 1976, 25-32. Sarah Blaffer Hardy, The Langurs of
Apus: Female and Male Strategies of Reproduction (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1977).
63. James D. Weinrich, "Human Sociobiology: Pair-bonding and Resource Pre-
dictability (effects of social class and race)," Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 2
(19771, 91-116, is a good example.
64. Sociobiology, ch. 1; Insect Societies, 224ff.
65. Selfish Gene, 49-70.
66. Sociobiology, ch. 7.
67. ibid.,145.
68. ibid. ,201. The principal linguist drawn upon by the sociobiologists is Thomas
A. Sebeok, who in turn builds on the language philosophy of Charles Monis. See T.A.
Sebeok, ed. Animal Communication: Techniques of Study and Results of Research
(Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1968), and C.W. Monis, Foundation of the Theory of Signs
(Chicago UP, 1938).
69. Sociobiology, 231.
70. ibid. ,591.
71. Insect Societies, ch. 12.14; E.O. Wilson, "Chemical communication among
workers of the fire ant, Solemopsis saevissima (Fr. Smith), Animal Behavior 10 (nos.
1-2, 1962), 134-64.
72. Sociobiology, ch. 12-13.
73. E.O. Wilson, 'The ergonomics of caste in social insects," Amer. Naturalist 102
(1968), 41-66; Insect Societies, ch. 18, esp. 342; id. 'The Social Biology of A n t s , "
Annual Review of Entomology 8 (1963), 345-368. The human sociology source Wilson
cites is K.F.H. Murrell, Ergonomics: Man in his Working Environment (London: Chap-
man and Hall, 1965).
74. Insect Societies, 342.
75. Sociobiology, 240.
76. Throughout On Human Nature, Wilson uses the Technological metaphors ot
the developmental geneticist, C.H. Waddington (The Strafegy of the Gene (London:
Allen and Unwin, 1957).
77. Transcending a critique of sexism as explicit justification of sex role differentia-
tion, a feminist theory of knowledge which addresses itself to the fundamental dualism
of 'man and nature,' mind and body, controllor and controlled, has begun to appear in
many disciplinary and practical contexts. See especially Nancy Hartsock, Sexuality and
Politics: The Baracks Community in Western Political Thought (in process); Annette
Bickel, Critique of Alfred Schmidt's The Concept of Nature in Marx, Johns Hopkins
University, Political Science Department, 1979); Sandra Harding, "What Causes
Gender Privilege and Class Privilege:" (paper presented at the 1978 meetings of the
American Philosophical Asociation); Carolyn Merchant, Nature and the Female in the
Scientific Revolution (forthcoming; the author is at the University of California,
Berkeley); and Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature (NY: Harper and Row, 1978). In a
non feminist context, the most important critique of humanism as a logic of domination
comes from MicheI Foucault, The Order of Things (NY: Random House, 1970).
78. On Human Nature, 209.
79. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (NY: Bantam, 1975), 66-67.