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.
Frank Parsons, Human Engineer, 1894
Now they swarm in large colonies, safe inside gigantic, lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by remote control. They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.
Richard Damkins, Sociobiologist, 1976
Part of remaking ourselves as socialist-feminist human beings is remaking the sciences which construct the category of 'nature' and empower its definitions in technology. Science is about knowledge and power. In our time, natural science defines the human being's place in nature and history and provides the instruments of domination of the body and the community. By constructing the category nature, natural science imposes limits on history and self-formation. So science is part of the struggle over the nature of our lives. I would like to investigate how the field of modern biology constructs theories about the body and community as capitalist and patriarchal machine and market: the machine for production, the market for exchange, and both machine and market for reproduction. I would like to explore biology as an aspect of the reproduction of capitalist social relations, dealing with the imperative of biological reproduction. That is, I want to show how sociobiology is the science of capitalist reproduction.
All items in the left-hand list are appropriate 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 fulfilment of the 'person'. All 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 appeals are to alleviation of stress and other signs of human obsolescence.
Between the First World War and the present, biology has been transformed from a science centred on the organism, understood in functionalist terms, to a science studying automated technological devices, understood in terms of cybernetic systems. Organic form, with its hierarchical and physiological co-operation and competition based on 'natural' domination and division of labour, gave way to systems theory with its control schemes based on communications networks and a logical technology in which human beings become potentially outmoded symbol-using devices. Life science moved from physiology to systems theory, from scientific medicine to investment management, from Taylorite scientific management and human engineering of the person to modern ergonomics and population control, from psychobiology to sociobiology.
This fundamental change in life science did not occur in a historical vacuum; it accompanied changes in the nature and technology of power, within a continuing dynamic of capitalist reproduction. This chapter sketches those changes in an effort to investigate the historical connection between the content of science and its social context. The larger question informing this critique is how to develop a socialist-feminist life science.1
Because science is part of the process of realizing and elaborating our own nature, of constituting the category of nature in the first place, our responsibility for a feminist and socialist science is complex. We are far from understanding precisely what our biology might be, but we are beginning to know that its promise is rooted in our actual lives, that we have the science we make historically. As Marx showed for the science of wealth, our reappropriation of knowledge is a revolutionary reappropriation of a means by which we produce and reproduce our lives. We must be interested in this task.
This chapter compares and contrasts the biologies of Robert Mearns Yerkes and E.O. Wilson to show the transformation of biology from a science of sexual organisms to one of reproducing genetic assemblages. Throughout I focus on the machine and market as organizing ideas in life science. Table I outlines the categories of comparison. It is important to note that this chapter does not claim that Yerkes and Wilson singly built intellectual systems with conscious relations to the needs of patriarchal capital; rather it examines them as representing important formations, so as to give an idea where to continue a critical reading of classical biology in the process of formulating another biology.2
Yerkes was committed to development of personality sciences based on the model of physiology and scientific medicine.3 As the goal of scientific management in industry in that period was the microcontrol of individual workers, establishment of co-operative hierarchies, and clear separation of control functions from manual work, Yerkes' psychobiology was founded on the individual organism and hierarchies of intelligence and adaptivity that were appropriate to the creation of rationally managed, modern societies. He built a complex evolutionary picture of the relation of sex and mind, raw material and engineering, instinct and rational control, that was appropriate to a genuinely usable capitalist science.
But by the end of his career around 1940, Yerkes' science was already outmoded. It was being replaced by a different engineering perspective, based not on physiology, but on the physical sciences' analysis of information and energy in statistical assemblages.4 The physiology of sexual organisms gave way to biochemistry, structural analysis, and molecular genetics of information machines: integrons, replicators, self-assembling biological subsystems such as viruses and cell organelles and populations - the new books of nature to be read by mathematics. It is not an accident that modern genetics is pursued as a linguistic science, with attention to signs, punctuation, syntax, semiotics, machine read-out, directional information flow, codons, transcription, and so on (Jacob, 1974; Watson, 1976). The social goal of the new life science was clearly statistical control of the mass through sophisticated communications systems. Similarly, the damping and control of variation, prediction of large-scale pattern, and development of optimization techniques in every kind of system became a basic strategy of social institutions. Further, everything has become a system. The search has been for evolutionary stable strategies for maximizing profit. In life science, sociobiology is a mature fruit of this approach; it is genuinely a new synthesis that makes many distinctions between natural and social science outmoded.5
Robert Mearns Yerkes (1876-1956), in a lifetime of committed work in psychobiological research and science promotion and management, established the first comprehensive permanent laboratory for the study of anthropoid apes as models for human beings. Between 1924 and 1942, through Yale University and the Rockefeller Foundation, Yerkes assembled the funding, animals, researchers, buildings, maintenance staff, and publications which have made it possible to breed, rear, and study chimpanzees in captivity. He also made the first field studies of wild primate behaviour possible (Hilgard, 1965). On a wider level, Yerkes worked to establish the utility of primates for interpreting the place of human beings in scientifically managed corporate capitalism - called nature. His investigations in mental and sexual psychobiology included designing tests for all aspects of mental functions in organisms ranging from daphnia and dancing mice to psychopaths, soldiers, and corporate managers. Yerkes also examined natural dominance and co-operation in the evolutionary interrelation of sexual instinct and rational mind.6 This work was a central part of his explicit project of scientific engineering as a proper replacement for the irrationalities of received culture.7
Yerkes had no interest in rationalizing conservative social forms. Science has constructed nature as a category facilitating redesign of natural objects, including society. Yerkes saw nature and society in managed capitalist terms. Nature was a problem in test design. Adaptivity meant solving the problem of the rational control of nature on the level of individual organisms and their social analogues - families, labour groups, and other superorganisms.8 The scientific frameworks for interpreting primate behaviour and biology have changed radically since the early years of Yerkes' work before the First World War. Knowledge of primates has corresponded to general developments in biology, psychology, and sociology, as well as to political conflict. The ways arguments have been constructed for relating primate science to human needs have also changed. But a constant dimension of primate studies has been the naturalization of human history; that is, making human nature the raw material rather than the product of history. Engineering is the guiding logic of life science in the twentieth century.
Human engineering sought to construct a control hierarchy, modelled on the individual organism with the nervous system on top. This organismic model facilitated the conception of society as a harmonious, balanced whole with proper distribution of function. The interrelations of nervous and reproductive systems, the two main integrative mechanisms of the organism, provided a microcosm of life, including social life (superorganism). The principal scientific goal was a biological theory of co-operation based on management hierarchies. What had to be managed were organic life, instinct, sex. At the top of the organism-pyramid was mind, permitting altruism to mitigate the excesses of competition. Psychobiology, as sociobiology later, was faced with rationalizing altruism in a competitive world - without threatening the basic structure of domination.
It has always been a feature of our plan for the use of the chimpanzee 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.
Robert Yerkes, Chimpanzees, A Laboratory Colony
By the 1930s, human engineering in the form of personnel management integrated the methods of the physical, biological, and social sciences in order to produce harmony, team work, adjustment. The structure of co-operation involved the entire complex division of labour and authority in capitalist production and reproduction. Co-operation most certainly included rational organization of hand and head, of subordination and dominance, of instinct and mind. Motivation of co-operation was a management problem (Mayo, 1933; Baritz, i960; Bravermann, 1974).
It was also a biomedical problem, necessitating detailed physiological knowledge of the 'irrationalities', which could become pathological - instinct, personality, and culture. These three were closely tied to organic sex, and led to the proliferation of scientific disciplines such as endocrinology, gender-differentiated personality studies, Freudian psychotherapy, anthropology based on personality and culture, eugenic doctrines of race hygiene, and sexual counselling through the birth control movement.9 Despite controversies among all these approaches, they shared a grounding in organic functionalism based on sexuality. Engineering meant rational placement and modification of human raw material - in the common interest of organism, family, culture, society, and industry. Human engineering was a kind of medical encouragement of natural homoeostatic mechanisms of intelligent integration. The life sciences which studied organic capacity and variation from a physiological viewpoint provided the scientific underpinnings for the application of human engineering. Yerkes helped build those sciences.
Yerkes received his PhD at Harvard in 1902. Before the First World War, his research in Cambridge and Boston concerned the sensory psychophysiology and mental capacity of a wide range of organisms. Sensory physiology was intimately related to modes of 'adaptivity', or learning, in both individual and evolutionary frameworks. Early in his career Yerkes was interested in extending his work to primates, and envisaged a comprehensive primate research station which would include physiology, learning, and social behaviour. Yerkes worked within the framework of comparative psychology, which studied evolution of animal behaviour as a chain of being, a series of increasingly complex physiological organizations, best shown in growth of intelligence. Having defined intelligence as problem-solving behaviour, Yerkes relied on the construction of testing apparatus for comparing learning strategies of different species and individuals within species. The relation to a hierarchically conceived physiology as the model for this psychology cannot be overstressed. As scientific medicine was based on experimental physiology, so too psychological therapies relied on experimental psychology (Yerkes, 1913, 1921).
In studying adaptivity of primates, Yerkes (1927b, 1928) developed the notion of three stages of complexity, which he actually called monkeying, aping, and thinking. His pre-war ideational studies of the orangutan Julius and of patients in the Boston Psychopathetic Hospital were part of the development of tests applicable to all sorts of problems of organic inventory. The First World War supplied an opportunity for demonstrating the utility of this psychophysiological natural science. Yerkes is well known for helping devise the intelligence tests for conscripts; these test results were frequently used for immigration restriction and other racist purposes during and after the war. It is less well known that Yerkes designed his tests under the auspices of the army surgeon general and conceived the work as part of the medical management of society (Kevles, 1968; Ann Arbor Science for the People, 1977, pp. 21-57; Cravens, 1978, pp. 80-5, 181-8).
After the war, Yerkes remained in Washington, DC, forming an economic and political base for his lifelong goal of a primate research station. From 1919 until accepting a professorship in Yaie University's new Institute of Psychology in 1924, he worked within the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences.
Two committees formed under the auspices of the National Research Council (NRC) are relevant to the themes of this chapter: the Committee on Scientific Aspects of Human Migration (CSAHM) and the Committee for Research on Problems of Sex (CRPS). Yerkes was chairman of both, the CSAHM from 1922 to 1924 and the CRPS from 1922 to 1947. Both committees were set up to study human variability for purposes of rational social management policy. Neither committee worked from a population perspective, but rather from a physiological model of organic capacity, variation, and health. Widespread population genetic and ecology approaches to demography and to sexuality only emerged after the Second World War and were related to the elaboration of communications technology and information sciences.
The Committee for Research on Problems of Sex grew out of efforts 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 counselling, eugenics, venereal disease, divorce, and birth control.10 The NRC committee was part of an effort to relate medical-physiological research to social issues. The committee sponsored work in four categories, not including direct action agencies:11 (I) 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 assumptions stand out in the records of the sex committee. First, social practice had to be based on basic research conducted and controlled by independent 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 repression. Quite the opposite: the committee in large measure played a liberalizing role.12 It was committed to facilitating rational social engineering. Animal 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 Institute 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 Committee on Scientific Aspects of Human Migration.13 These men brought with them a commitment to the scientific management of race, sex, and class, based on sciences of heredity, drives, learning, and environment, all in a biomedical 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 (Bingham, 1928).
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 correspondence were full of the relevance of the project to human social and psychological issues.14 No other goal could justify the large expense of using chimpanzees as research animals. The resulting Yale Laboratories of Primate Biology existed in three parts: (x) special laboratories for short-term work in New Haven needing special apparatus, with close co-operation with John Fulton's Department of Physiology in the Medical School; (2) a breeding colony of thirty to forty 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 provide base line information on the natural social physiology of the organisms.15 Research centred on the idea of evolution, and all but ignored the idea of populations. Animal behaviour was not a genetic science in Yerkes' and his contemporaries' hands. Or rather, the comparative psychologists used the word genetic always in the sense of the genesis of individual capacities. All this would change with the post-Second World War synthesis of ethology, neural biology, and population genetics and ecology. Figure 2 shows the picture of life science that Yerkes knew around 1930.
FIGURE 2 LIFE SCIENCES AGE OF BIOLOGY (unifying science and ideology)
The life sciences focused on organisms, personalities, and cultures, around 1930. Both sides of the figure are rooted in organismic, functionalist doctrines; both involve differentiated roles for basic and applied sciences, modelled on experimental medicine.
People associated with the primate laboratories at Yale maintained 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 personality 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 colour or IQ. The second idea was co-operation - from homoeostatic mechanisms at all levels, to deliberate modification of dominance in the interests of higher organization, to everyday rules for running the laboratory. Co-operation and dominance were closely connected on an organic level as forms of integration.
A choice opportunity presented itself for the experimental investigation of dominance in the context of family-centred experimental sociology. The experiment tested co-ordination of sexual drive, status hunger, masculine and feminine personality types, and evolutionary transformation to higher forms of social control. This study carried noteworthy implications for counselling and human social services by relating drive and personality to social order.
In the course of tests for delayed response and representational processes, as part of the study of the phylogeny of language, Yerkes observed that sexual periodicity and dominance-subordination appeared to influence which animal of a caged pair would come to the food chute to be examined. Yerkes (1939) then conducted competitive food experiments on four kinds of caged companions: mates, two mature females, mature with immature females, and two immature females. Pieces of banana were presented one at a time in a series of ten through a chute in the cage. Along with other information, the observer recorded which animal of the pair would take the piece. Results were correlated with sexual status of the females in terms of dominance-subordination and response by 'right or privilege'. Right or privilege meant that in the period of maximum genital swelling of the female, that is, when the female was on heat, the ordinarily dominant male granted her the privilege of taking the banana, although dominance itself was not seen to reverse. Yet the female acted as if by right. Yerkes recognized various problems with the data: for example, observations were made in only one case for an entire cycle, and variation of the response pattern virtually swamped the postulated regularities. Tests of statistical significance were not reported. In female pairs, sexual swelling affected performance on the food priority test, but the animal offering sexual favours would be either the previously 'dominant' or previously 'subordinate' chimp. The sexual market among females was disorderly. Even among 'mates', it seemed presence or absence of prior 'friendship' greatly affected the results. But Yerkes spent most of the paper describing in detail a pair which showed clear substitution of right and privilege for dominance. The tone was simultaneously tentative and expectant that these observations were the beginning of very important studies. Yerkes' experimental social physiology, which explored the sexual market as fundamental to the origin of human cultural co-operation in the institution of marriage (and marriage's 'pathological' form - prostitution) has a long history (Herschberger, 1948, pp. 5-14).
Dominance as a drive was not sex specific, in Yerkes' opinion. It was the organism's basic hunger for social status. 'Assuming that dominance is hereditary and that inheritance is independent of sex, men and women might be expected to become creative leaders with approximately equal frequency' (Yerkes, 1939, pp. 133-4). Culture accounted for actual observed predominance of male leaders. But the association of 'leadership' and biological dominance was considered natural. Yerkes was liberal-to-moderate on the sex role controversies of the day and made clear his opinion that human females should have greater 'opportunity' than allowed by tradition. The issue here is not whether Yerkes or other spokespeople for comparative psychobiology were or were not liberals in their own time, but the logic of naturalization of the issues in terms of hierarchy from instincts to rational control, through personality and associated educational and medical therapies. With the weakening of religion, comparative life science became the new bedrock for value decisions, the more evolutionarily adaptive ground for judgement. With respect to the division of labour in the family, which was the model for the division of labour in all of society, the logic of naturalization provided a cornerstone of historical explanation based on reproduction. The dynamic was management, not repression.
To make the above point concrete, let us follow Yerkes through his analysis of the implications of the interweaving of sex hungers with dominance drives. First, Yerkes put the entire investigation of sex drive and dominance—subordination explicitly in the context of pressing contemporary debates. Yerkes assumed that feminism was equivalent to the proposition that males and females were biologically 'equal'; that is to say, he assumed that the concept of rights in political philosophy was properly rooted in natural economy. On 'scientific grounds', Yerkes firmly rejected the proposition that males were mentally superior, or, for that matter, naturally dominant. Males and females had the same psychological (ideation) and drive (motivation) structure. But as a consequence of hormonal structures there were differences in expression of drives. The result was personality. Life science required a physical marker for the internal state. Yerkes' work articulated the relation of psychobiology to contemporary biology and physiology of sex, the first two categories of the Committee for Research on Problems of Sex's promotional programme. If the division of labour in society could be correlated with the differences in drive expression, then the feminists of Yerkes' time were misguided (Yerkes, 1943, p. 69).
'Many clear-cut sex contrasts appear in the varied and complex expressions of dominance and subordination, leadership and control, aggression and defense. To these,' Yerkes (1943, p. 71) wrote, 'as uniquely important in the further description of masculinity and femininity, attention is especially invited.' In the context of discussing differentiated techniques of social control adopted by males and females, Yerkes described biologically determined differences in drive expression. The existence of chimpanzee differences in 'techniques of social control' suggested that human modes were also psychobiologically legitimated and inevitable.
In a word, the masculine behavior is predominandy self-distracting; the feminine, primarily favor-currying and priority-seeking ... 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, chameleon-like, a creature of multiple personality, is clear from our observations. (Yerkes, 1943, p. 83)
Yerkes based these 'observations' on the experimental sociology of the food chute test. He did not leave the lesson for the limits of cultural formation of personality, and therefore of possible social change, to the imagination:
I am impressed by the contrasted attitudes and activities revealed by the competitive food situation, and I offer them as evidence that male and female chimpanzees differ as definitely and significantly in behavioral traits as in physique. I am not convinced that by reversal of cultural influences the pictures characteristic of masculinity and femininity can be reversed. (Yerkes, 1943, p. 85)
This opinion should be evaluated in light of Yerkes' extraordinary belief in human malleability and perfectibility through engineering. 'Personality differences' should be managed, not foolishly denied.
Yerkes believed the personality studies using anthropoid material were especially favourable because of the absence of social taboos and personal inhibitions.
Therefore, I submit that such observational items as appear in this report, and in related studies of the psychology of sex in the anthropoid apes, should have exceptional value for those who concern themselves with problems of social behavior, and, especially at this juncture, for those psychopathologists who are intent on appraising, perfecting, and using psychoanalytical methods of observation and interpretation. (Yerkes, 1939. p- 130)
Though less differentiated than in the human species, personality 'clearly' existed among chimpanzees 'as the unit of social organization'. Personality meant the functional whole, 'the product of integration of all the psychobiological traits and capacities of the organism'. In a normal personality, inherited characteristics and basic organic drives were integrated with the conscious self. In sum, personality was an absolutely central scientific object for life and human science. To have a masculine or feminine personality was not a minor matter; on its proper development hinged the adjustment and happiness of the individual and the body politic. Yerkes did not want to underestimate diversity and variability. Comparative science was designed precisely to deal scientifically with variability. For drives as central as sex and dominance and for expressions as consequential as masculinity and femininity, nurture of personality was a matter for responsible scientific service. The possibility of prescription of social role on rational grounds was at stake. If drives and personality could be measured early, proper treatment could be initiated. Yerkes was cautious, but hopeful.
If in man dominance as personality trait is highly correlated positively with leadership, as it evidently is in chimpanzee; if it is a condition of or markedly favorable to individual initiative, inquiringness, inventiveness, and creativeness; and if, further, it should prove to be reliably measurable during childhood, it may very well come to possess conspicuous value as indicator of vocational aptitudes and social usefulness and therefore also as the basis for differential educational treatment and occupational choice. Even marital advice might be affected by it, for congeniality or social fitness may depend appreciably upon similarity or the reverse in dominance as personality trait of mates or companions. (Yerkes, 1939, p. 133).
It is significant that the culture concept depended on personality in the anthropology of the 1930s. We have moved with Yerkes from instinct, through personality, to culture, to human engineering. Scientists themselves interwove sex, mind, and society in a vocation of scientific service establishing a promising new life science of comparative primate psychobiology, reaching from learning through motivation to experimental sociology. Primatology served as a mediator between life and human sciences in a critical period of reformulation of the doctrines of nature and culture. Yerkes ordered his life in the belief this science would serve to foster a higher state of individual and social consciousness, the ideological goal of liberal humanism.
Before developing the second major section of this chapter, sociobiology, it is worth returning from Yerkes' mature positions in the late 1930s on drive and personality in primates as models for humans, to his involvement in the early 1920s with industrial personnel research.
In his capacity as temporary chairman at the 1920 annual meeting of the Personnel Research Federation, Yerkes developed themes which permeated his work for human engineering. He began with a call to 'look confidently to disinterested research to guide our race to a wise solution' of the problem of whether 'the industrial system and its products [shall] be treated as ends or means to human welfare' (Yerkes, 1922, p. 56). He saw personnel research, the study of the human factor of production, as the key discipline of the new era. 'There is every reason to believe that human engineering will shortly take its place among the important forms of practical endeavor' (p. 57). Yerkes believed that industrial systems had evolved from slavery, to the wage system, to the present system based on co-operation 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 co-operation to replace class strife between labour and maladaptive, evolutionarily out-moded laissez-faire capitalism. Yerkes and his liberal peers advocated studying traits of the body, mind, spirit, and character in order to fit 'the person' perfecly 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 opportunities for human service and responsibility' (Yerkes, 1922, p. 58).
By Yerkes' logic, equality was 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 counselling 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 concept of personality which tied physiology, medicine, psychology, anthropology, 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 scientific reduction by objective methods - like intelligence testing, motivational 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, '[I]ndustry 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 connection with placement, vocational choice, and guidance' (Yerkes, 1922, p. 60).
Although the person should be the object of scientific management - an essential structure of domination in the science of co-operation - the ideology of self-expression was also intrinsic to Yerkes' exposition. 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 human adaptive evolution. To be socially useful the drive had to be a kind of organic instinct compatible with the biological evolution of co-operation that was at last finding adequate industrial development. Yerkes logically collapsed the scientific object of personality into the spiritual value of the person: 'It now remains for personnel research to effect a still more significant and beneficial revolution or reformation [than the invention of machines] by making available adequate knowledge of man in all his essential aspects and relations, and by bringing into clear relief the supreme value of the person' (1922, p. 63). In rationalizing the market exchange of marriage and the productive machine of industry, comparative psychobiology took its place among the life and human sciences theorizing nature and humanity according to the logic of capitalist patriarchy.
Sex is an antisocial force in evolution . . . When sexual reproduction is introduced, members of the group become genetically dissimilar . . . The inevitable result is a conflict of interest . . . The outcomes of these conflicts of interest are tension and strict limits on the extent of altruism and the division of labor.
E.O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis
Organic engineering based on the person is not the dominant form of life science in the late twentieth century. It can even be argued that biology has ceased to exist and that the organism has been replaced by cybernetic systems, which have radically changed the connections of physical, life, and the human sciences.16 Such claims are made by sociobiologists, and I think they have a strong case. How did it happen? What is the result, especially for the relations of sex, mind, and profit? This chapter can explore only a fraction of the revolution in biology that has resulted in molecular biology, population genetics and ecology of ecosystems, and sociobiology. By the mid-1930s,, Yerkes' psychobiology, as well as the research programmes of many of his peers, was in trouble at the Rockefeller Foundation. Warren Weaver, the new head of the Division of Natural Sciences, had quite a different vision of the future of biology and of engineering as a life science. Weaver was both an instrument and a sign of much larger forces.17 By the early 1960s, the communications revolution was established in power; its effects can be followed in biology in four revealing, collective, authoritative texts, culminating in a well-published, state-of-the-art introductory biology text by E. O. Wilson and his colleagues.18 The themes of machine and market in the constitution of capitalist life science recur in the work of Wilson (born 1929, PhD from Harvard 1955) and his many peers. Sociobiology is a communications science, with a logic of control appropriate to the historical conditions of post-Second World War capitalism.
The communications revolution changed the strategy of control from organism to system, from eugenics to population management, from personnel management to organization structures (sociotechnical systems and ergonomics) based on operations research (Lilienfeld, 1978, ch. 4). A communications revolution means a re-theorizing of natural objects as technological devices properly understood in terms of mechanisms of production, transfer, and storage of information. Changes in the technology of actual communications systems provided part of the material foundation of fundamental scientific reformulations. War and problems of military management encouraged new developments in science. Operations research began with the Second World War and efforts to co-ordinate radar devices and information about enemy position in a total or systems way, which conceived of the human operator and the physical machinery as the unified object of analysis. Statistical models were increasingly applied to problems of simulation and prediction for making key decisions. After the war, the explosive development of electronics industries and communications technology was increasingly tied to strategies of social and military planning to devise and manage stable systems organized around several axes of variation. 19 Knowledge about range of variation and interaction effects among classes of variables replaced concern for individual states. The computer, a communications machine, both effected and symbolized new strategies of control.
Let us grant that communication means control - but for what? And does that particular goal really allow the labelling of whole scientific structures as capitalist in any deep way? Without suggesting a final answer to the second question, let us look at the first. Complex stable configurations, stable evolutionary strategies, were essential to realization of profit in immensely complex economic and political circumstances. The problem which systems theory addressed was the maintenance and maximization of profit in crisis-ridden post-Second World War capitalism. The range of intermediate structures between extraction of surplus value and realization of profit required a whole set of discourses and technologies that constituted the communications revolution.
No natural or human science has been unaffected by these technical and theoretical transformations. Precisely how each scientific discourse relates to these historical changes is a matter for detailed study; it is certain the connections will not often be direct or simple20But it is a striking fact that the formal theory of nature embodied in sociobiology is structurally like advanced capitalist theories of investment management, control systems for labour, and insurance practices based on population disciplines. Furthermore, sociobiology, like all modern biologies, studies a control machine as its central object. Nature is structured as a series of interlocking cybernetic systems, which are theorized as communications problems. Nature has been systematically constituted in terms of the capitalist machine and market. Let us look first at the market.
The market is best approached in terms of the history of the concept of natural selection. Contemporaries realized that a Darwinian natural economy, the competitive struggle of all against all for profit, suggested troubling parallels to political economy. Darwin himself realized his debt to Thomas Malthus; scarcity was the motor of nature as well as of history (Malthus, 1798, pp. 26-30, 73-5, 98). Biological populations increased at a rate that guaranteed permanent scarcity, as well as permanent technical improvement in the means of production. Progress and scarcity were the twin forces in capitalist development.21 Reproduction of biological organisms seemed the basic process in both nature and history, and reproduction was inherently competitive. Scarcity seemed inevitably linked to a natural process, and not to a historical limiting form of appropriation of the product of human production. Reproduction, not production, seemed the proper focus for a natural science of society. Similarly, as Marx noted, bourgeois political economists focused on equal and competitive exchange in the market, while obscuring the relations of domination in production. Those relations were enforced by particular mechanisms (including technology) which were designed to transfer the locus of control away from the worker. All of this is familiar. From this point of view, sociobiology is merely an extension and development of the theory of natural selection.
Sociobiology (Wilson, 1975, p. 10) is a biological understanding of groups - societies and populations. As for all capitalist science, the fundamental problem needing explanation is the combination of individuals for the common good. From a starting point of atomic individualism, reproduced in Darwin's theory of natural selection, altruism needed explanation; it seemed an irrationality for a consistent theory of selection. Altruism in sociobiology is defined as 'self-destructive behavior performed for the benefit of others' (Wilson, 1975, p. 578). How could individuals profit in the long run, if they wasted time and courted danger in self-destructive generosity? The problem seemed particularly acute in the most advanced natural societies - social insects and non-human primates, not to mention human orders. Sociobiology's solution is the quantitatively sophisticated extension of natural selection and population genetics, producing the notion of 'inclusive fitness: the sum of an individual's own fitness plus all its influence on fitness in its relatives other than direct descendants; hence the total effect of kin selection with reference to an individual' (Wilson, 1975, p. 586).
The ideas related to inclusive fitness - kin selection, sexual selection, parental investment - permitted a refocusing of an old argument; that is to say, at what level can selection occur (Wynne-Edwards, 1962; Trivers, 1971, 1972)? In particular, can the social group be the locus of selection? If so, is the group a kind of superorganism, physiologically as well as genetically analogous to an individual? The answer for sociobiology is no.22 Or rather, those suggestions no longer make sense. The genetic calculus of sociobiology concerns maximization strategies of genes and combinations of genes. AH sorts of phenomenal orders are possible, from asexual individuals to cast-structured insect societies with only one reproductive pair, to rolediversified societies with many reproducing members. None of these orders is the central object of concern. That noumenal object is the gene, called by Richard Dawkins the 'replicator', within the gene pool. Sociobiology analyses all behaviour in terms of the ultimate level of explanation, the genetic market place.
Bodies and societies are only the replicators' strategies for maximizing their own reproductive profit. Apparent co-operation of individuals may be a perfectly rational strategy, if long-term cost-benefit analyses are made at the level of the genes. Such analyses call for the development and application of mathematical tools directly related to political economy and the technical demands made by that science. The novel dimension in late twentieth-century political and natural economy is the shared problem of understanding very complex forms of combination, which obscure the competitive bedrock of capitalism with phenomena like altruism and liberal corporate responsibility in transnational enterprises.
In 'nature' profit is measured in the currency of genes, and reproduction or replication is the natural imperative. But reproduction is not sex. In fact, sex is a dangerous modern innovation, one so challenging to older logics of individual profit-making as to require considerable attention. Like any other capitalist system, natural replication systems are compelled to make radical innovations all the time, or be outclassed by the dynamic competition. Sex is such an advance. Societies can be rationalized by probing the consequences of individual advantage and inclusive fitness, but the most highly integrated societies, the insects, minimize the disruptive effects of sex. Sex is a constraint on the formation of societies because sexually reproducing individuals are not identical genetically. They therefore compete with different investment strategies (Wilson, 1975, p. 314 ff).
So why risk dangerous investment strategies? Because they speed innovation - the rapid production of new genotypes which can respond to environmental changes or other contingencies. Such diversification maximizes the chances of long-term success. Through speedy production of new genotypes, not primarily dependent on mutation, reproducers secure a competitive advantage. Naturally, sociobiology argues, there will be some circumstances in which the dangers of sexual competition outweigh the advantages of rapid diversification. Sociobiology aims at a quantitative assessment of appropriate strategies. If sex ceases to provide an edge, it will have to go. But any society with most of its members engaging in sexual reproduction cannot hope for real peace. The best to be anticipated is a harmonious management of competing investment strategies, in such a way that the system as a whole (natural evolution) is preserved.
A consequence of this analysis of sex is the attention given to competing interests of males and females in reproduction. Some of the best work on parental investment strategies has been done on birds, allowing an understanding of such issues as clutch size and male and female differences in behaviour (especially readiness to mate).23 The claim has been made that sociobiology establishes the ultimate equality of males and females by showing that they compete equally - if by different strategies - in the only game that counts, amassing genetic profit. The different strategies are a function of the different energetic commitment to reproduction that the sexes make. Mates must regard each other as means of capital accumulation not reliably under control. The sex which commits huge energy resources to incubating and nurturing will develop coy behaviour and adopt a sceptical stance towards errant mates. These fundamental behaviours would almost certainly be genetically mandated and constrained (Dawkins, 1976).
In advertising Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's book on langur behaviour, in which she emphasized competitive reproductive strategies of males and females, Harvard University Press referred to that kind of natural history as feminist (Ford, 1976; Hrdy, 1977). It would be hard to find a more market-limited rationale for feminist political theory. Much of the application of sociobiology to human beings centres around sexual competition (Weinrich, 1977).
But let us leave the market, despite its wealth of unexplicated topics, and look at sociobiology's theorizing of nature as a communications or control machine. Again, I focus not on the application of sociobiology to human life, but on the fundamental concepts of the science. The genes must make stable mediating devices; that is, they must produce machines embodying evolutionary stable strategies, just as capital requires capitalist institutions. Without mechanisms for transmission and replication, the genes are like hoarded money. The market demands a technology of production consistent with its own imperatives. Here we leave the realm of competition and exchange and enter the factories of life. What kind of mediating machines do the genes inform? Naturally, cybernetic systems.
Sociobiology studies two fundamental sorts of systems: populations and societies. Both are studied in terms of boundaries of information and energy flow. Information and energy are different faces of a common coin, a realization made possible by thermodynamics and information sciences. Populations are measured in terms of boundaries of gene flow over time; genes are materializations of information. Sociobiology studies societies in terms of zones of communication and exchange of information (Wilson, 1971, p. 224 ff; 1975, ch. 1). Individuals are systems common to sociobiology and other areas of life science. Individuals also are studied as part of structured flows of information and energy, interacting with other individuals; higher levels of order (societies, populations) result. Individuals are intermediate structures constructed, or rather instructed, by the genes.
What the genes really make are behaving machines. Thus behaviour becomes a central concern of sociobiology. Behaviour is the evolutionary pacemaker; it determines the rate of system change by its capacity to track and respond to variables. Dawkins, in his chapter 'The Gene Machine', discusses behaviour in terms of motion timed and controlled by a biological computer whose least element is the neurone (Dawkins, 1976, pp. 49-70). Genes are like programs for chess-playing computers; that is, genes build brains, effector organs, and sensory channels. Brains are processing devices with logical programs. Terms like 'imagination' (all mentalistic language) refer to forms of simulation made possible by advanced brains. The task of brains is the prediction of interlocking system contingencies, including the environment, and control of rate of motion. The system goal is maximization of genetic profit, necessitating the structuring of specific forms of control. Speed and capacity of processing are the basic parameters of the brain as control device.
Wilson (1975, ch. 7) calls social behaviour a tracking device for changes in the environment. He elaborates the concept of multi-level, hierarchically designed tracking systems. Relating the appropriate tracking mechanisms to the appropriate time scale, he works 'down' from levels of evolutionary adaptation (including morphogenetic changes and a hierarchy of organismic 'responses', from instinct-reflex systems to generalized learning systems) to individual adaptations (including learning, socialization, and play). Nothing is as silly as arguing about nature and nurture. The question is which level of tracking device one is considering.
The important point to keep in mind is that such phenomena as the hormonal mediation of behavior, ontogenetic development of behavior, and motivation ... are really only sets of adaptations keyed to environmental change of different durations. They are not fundamental properties of organisms around which the species must shape its biology ... The phenomena cannot be generally explained by searching for limiting features in the adrenal cortex, vertebrate mid-brain, or other controlling organs, for the reason that these organs have themselves evolved to serve the requirements of special multiple tracking systems posessed by particular species. (Wilson, 1975, p. 145)
So, physiology is subordinate to another level of analysis, that of operations research directed at biological tracking devices much more sensitive than radar. This approach to behaviour, adaptation, and the brain, in operations terms analogous to those studied in the Second World War, stands in sharp contrast to Yerkes' psychobiological doctrines of mind, brain, and society. Biological inventory and personnel management have been superseded. The distance is large between persons or superorganisms (the mind co-ordinates sexual instinct to produce co-operation) on the one hand, and multiple tracking systems (with mind as the strategy of genes) on the other hand.
Communications theory is closely related to the sociobiological treatment of behaviour. From operations research to information sciences is a short step. Communication is sending and receiving meaningful signals, resulting in changed probabilities of behaviour. According to Wilson (1975, p. 201) a task of his science is to construct 'zoosemiotics'; that is, the study of general properties of communication. 24 Basic to that task is an analysis of modes of communication, which necessitates attention to sensory channels, whether auditory, tactile, acoustical, or chemical.
It is therefore legitimate to analyze advantages and disadvantages of the several sensory modalities as though they were competing in an open marketplace for the privilege of carrying messages. Put another, more familiar way, we can reasonably hypothesize that species evolve toward the mix of sensory cues that maximizes either energetic or informational efficiency, or both. (Wilson, 1975, p. 231)
It is in this context that we should consider one of Wilson's most important research contributions to sociobiology: a study of insect chemical communication mediated by pheromones. Pheromones are chemical substances, usually glandular in origin. 'One individual releases the material as a signal and another responds after tasting or smelling it' (1975, p. 591). Social insects make extensive use of this mode. In about 1958, Wilson (1962; 1971, chs 12-14) adapted a mathematical technique to measure the amount of information transmitted by the fire ant odour trails and to compare it with the amount transmitted by the waggle dance of the honey bee. The general project was the translation of behaviour of all sorts into bits which could be treated by conventional information theory relating energy, capacity, noise, ambiguity, and so on. Wilson's goal was to understand communication as part of hierarchically graded evolutionary stable strategies, differentiated by time scale and material modality, in the interest of genetic fitness or maximization of genetic profit.
Territoriality and dominance systems are modes of communication which maintain stable configurations over intermediate time spans (Wilson, 1975, chs 12-13). Aggression, a form of competition, is basically a type of communication which must be analysed in terms of functional content and energetic efficiency. In principle, if found wanting by the evolutionary engineer, aggression, like sex, is dispensable. This is very unlikely; but outmoded expressions of aggression should be expected, providing models for social and psychological therapy in human orders. Obsolescence is a central theme in the biology of automated technological devices. The contrast with Yerkes' organismic psychobiology culminating in the person is evident. For a sociobiologist, dominance is not a trait, nor even an individual organismic predisposition, but a system property. The type of engineering intervention appropriate to sociobiology is systems analysis and design, not clinical diagnosis based on an analogy to physiology and scientific medicine. But both forms of engineering argue for a special role for the scientific expert in designing history (systems) on the human level.
The point of systems design is optimization. Optimization does not mean perfection, A system has to be good enough to survive under given conditions. Nature can be lazy, and seems to have abandoned a natural theological project of adaptive perfection. Yerkes sought to find perfection in adaptivity, but not the sociobiologists. Optimization does not mean maximum productive efficiency at all times. Insects in optimized societies can be lazy as well as industrious; it has been precisely measured. Crucial to system optimization are the mass effects of many variables, not perfection of the individual worker ant. So, Taylorite scientific management is inappropriate as an analogue to modern scientific study of the natural economy.
In the early 1960s, Wilson drew on the systems science of ergonomics that had been developed in human sociology of capitalist production.25 Ergonomics is the quantitative study of the distribution of work, performance, and efficiency; it must take account of the history of systems because that history results in limits on available materials and in other constraints. In natural systems, those constraints would likely be built into the genetic programmes. Existing systems of production in both natural and political economy are compromises; the engineer determines the best choice of possible trajectories, with no apologies to the utopian activist. Wilson applied ergonomic analysis to the problem of number, type, and timing of production of various castes in insect societies, in order 'to analyze optimality'. Such an analysis should reveal when and how many sexually reproducing forms will be found under particular environmental conditions for a given species.
First, consider the concept of cost in colony reproduction ... The mature colony, on reaching its predetermined size, can be expected to contain caste ratios that approximate the optimal mix. This mix is simply the ratio of castes that can achieve the maximum rate of production of virgin queens and males while the colony is at or near its maximum size. It is helpful to think of a colony of social insects as operating somewhat like a factory constructed inside a fortress . . . [the] colony must send foragers out to gather food while converting the secured food inside the nest into virgin queens and males as rapidly and efficiently as possible. The rate of production of the sexual forms is an important, but not an exclusive, component of colony fitness. (Wilson, 1971, p. 342)
It would be hard to find a clearer example of an analysis of biological objects in terms of the systems sciences rooted in military combat, competitive sexuality, and capitalist production. Wilson's science of sociobiology no longer sees sex in terms of the problem of personality and personnel sciences applied to family, education, and industry. Yerkes' terms of reference have no place in the new biology of optimized communications systems assessed by a design engineer. The disquieting aspect of all this is that sociobiologists can and have correctly predicted insect caste distributions with these analyses.
Wilson concluded the chapter in Sociobiology on origins and evolution of communications by drawing attention to the central aspect of biology as an engineering science; that is, a science that studies systems design, with an eye to human-mediated improvement of potentially outmoded natural control systems, 'If the theory of natural selection is really correct, an evolving species can be metaphorized as a communications engineer who tries to assemble as perfect a transmission device as the materials at hand permit' (1975, p. 240). Phylogenetic constraints on the evolution of natural systems could, in the human case, be studied and perhaps redesigned. There would, however, be limits to design, limits crucial from a human political perspective that denies a natural necessity for hierarchical control systems and other modes of domination, for example, socialist-feminism.
The theoretical view of nature underlying genetic engineering and bioethics as a kind of quality control industry appears clearly in sociobiology. On Human Nature emphasizes constraints and deeply established trajectories, but there is no logical, much less moral, barrier to a full engineering approach to outmoded systems.26 In that sense, the status quo rationalizations of the book, though extensive and explicitly sexist, racist, and classist, are on the surface. The foundation of sociobiology is a capitalist and
patriarchal analysis of nature, which requires domination, but is very innovative about its forms. The limits to engineering redesign in sociobiology are set by the capitalist dynamic of private appropriation of value and the consequent need for a precise teleology of domination. The fundamental sexism is less in rationalization of sex roles as genetically predisposed, than in the basic engineering logic of 'human' domination of 'nature'. The humanism of sociobiology, which Wilson correctly cites in his defence, is precisely the core of his science's sexism.27 In addition of course, sociobiological reasoning applied to human societies easily glides into facile naturalization of job segregation, dominance hierarchies, racial chauvinism, and the 'necessity' of domination in sexually based societies to control the nastier aspects of genetic competition. But, ironically, sociobiology is probably less tied to explicit sexism and racism than psychobiology and other organic functionalist biologies were. Sociobiology is a radical engineering science which can readily cleanse its objects of obsolescent flaws in natural design. The deities of the organic body are not sacred to the new designers of evolutionary stable strategies. It is no wonder that Wilson (1978, p. 209) ends On Human Nature with a rejection of Pandora and an appeal to renew worship of Prometheus, the titan who symbolizes human liberation through domination. In Greek, Prometheus means forethought, an optimal result for a communications science.
Nature is, above all, profligate . . . [Its schemes] are the brainchild of a deranged manic-depressive with limitless capital. Extravagance. Nature will try anything once. That is what the form of the insect says. No form is too gruesome, no behavior too grotesque. If you're dealing with organic compounds, then let them combine. If it works, if it quickens, set it clacking in the grass; there's always room for one more; you ain't so handsome yourself. This is a spendthrift economy; though nothing is lost, all is spent.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
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 been progressive. The computer is not just a machine built according to laws of domination related to labour 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 appropriation 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 process 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, impotent and ignorant. Abundance matters. In fact, abundance is essential to the full discovery and historical possibility of human nature. It matters whether we make ourselves in plenty or in unfulfilled need, including 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 competition. 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 appropriation 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 command-control systems fundamental to patriarchy. To the extent that these practices inform our theorizing of 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.