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Comment by cortesi | Hacker News Reader

Lewontin's reputation will be forever tarnished by his disgraceful treatment of E.O. Wilson, a dispute in which he was viciously unfair and in which Wilson has proved to be correct in every particular.

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The feud is alluded to in the article. The broad summary is that Wilson had the temerity to devote the final chapter of Sociobiology, a book that pretty much launched the field of evolutionary study of animal behaviour, to humans. Lewontin and Gould - among others - had ideological objections to this, resulting in a vicious personal persecution of Wilson that stretched over decades. This is all very well documented, but to appreciate the sheer unfairness of the way Lewontin prosecuted his vendetta you have to hunt down Wilson's accounts of the affair in books like "Naturalist". It's very hard to come away from it without having your opinion of both Lewontin and Gould soured.

This review of "Naturalist" in the NYTimes gives some flavor of events:

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/06/s...

The book itself is well worth reading - it's a wonderful scientific autobiography written by, for my money, the best science writer of the last century.

I was vaguely aware of the 'feud', was more curious about your judgment that "Wilson has proved to be correct in every particular" (because I don't think this is true). Is there a reason to believe that the objections by Lewontin and Gould were 'ideological'? Personally I care more about whether the criticisms were valid than what motivated them. Seems to me that Wilson's idea about the genetic origin of social behavior is quite speculative, and naive about the enormous complexity of both genetics and behavior. Wilson also remains a widely celebrated scientist, perhaps more so than Lewontin, so clearly the persecutions didn't amount to much (though I admit that I know little about how L and G treated W in private).

The sociobiology debate was a relatively high-profile and personal debate primarily between Wilson and Lewontin and their supporters. A good brief overview is given by John Nerst in his review of Segerstråle's "Defenders of the Truth: The Sociobiology Debate": https://everythingstudies.com/2021/06/23/rereading-defenders... Lewontin doesn't come out covered in glory.

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