NEWS RELEASE

January 5, 2001. 9:30 AM EST.

A RAPROACHMENT BETWEEN HISTORY AND BIOLOGY?

BOSTON. The history of attempts to employ biology to advance the study of history has been stormy. Many historians were attracted to social Darwinism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ever since that doctrine and the racism, sexism, and xenophobia that went with it were discredited in the mid-twentieth century, historians have generally recoiled from any suggestion that biology might have something useful to say to them.

On Friday, January 5, a major session at the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association in Boston will reopen this long-closed subject and explore the possibilities of finding a common ground between evolutionary biology and the study of history. At the session, Biohistory: Can Biology Contribute to the Study of History?, Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson will present to the assembled historians arguments about what he sees as the important effects human traits molded by natural selection during the “deep history” of human evolution have on the events that historians seek to understand. Professor Wilson will draw on ideas in his book CONSILIENCE: THE UNITY OF KNOWLEDGE (Knopf, 1998). The other main panelist, historian Robert S. McElvaine of Millsaps College, author of the just-published book, EVE’S SEED: BIOLOGY, THE SEXES, AND THE COURSE OF HISTORY (McGraw-Hill, 2001), will discuss an approach he calls “biohistory.” The session will be chaired by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Carl N. Degler of Stanford, author of IN SEARCH OF HUMAN NATURE: THE DECLINE AND REVIVAL OF DARWINISM IN AMERICAN SOCIAL THOUGHT (Oxford, 1991). Professor Bobbi S. Low, biologist at the University of Michigan and author of WHY SEX MATTERS: A DARWINIAN LOOK AT HUMAN BEHAVIOR (Princeton, 2000), will comment.

The approach to utilizing biology to enhance our understanding of history that McElvaine advocates differs radically from social Darwinism. That creed held that we must model society after the uncaring brutality and intense competition of natural selection. Biohistory, as McElvaine sees it, means that “historians should begin to see the evolution of human nature as protohistory, the first history, the starting point for subsequent history.”

Professor McElvaine rejects the more extreme forms of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. What is missing from most of these analyses, he says, is history. It is important to realize, he maintains, that the ancestral environment in which humans evolved is not the only environment that molded us. As he sees it, history consists of the interaction between the traits with which natural selection left us and the social and cultural environments in which we live and have lived. McElvaine believes that a fuller understanding of history can be achieved by bringing together a knowledge of the general biological bases of human behavior and the specific social and cultural analyses that historians have traditionally undertaken. “Darwinism,” McElvaine concludes, “is too important to be left only to the Darwinists (biologists and evolutionary psychologists). They need the insights of historians to mediate between evolutionary inheritance and modern behavior as much as historians need the insights of biologists to understand better the motivations behind the historical behavior we study.” {McElvaine’s Paper}

This is Professor Wilson’s first appearance before the nation’s historians, many of whom have sharply disagreed with his ideas in the past. It promises to be a lively and significant event.