On Human Nature

...in the end he tells the truth and slinks off to the airport bar...

...and their good sense...

...Until then, he has this problem: Liberals do not often read conservatives, and conservatives do not often read...

...Coyne sees the burst blood vessels around their noses and hears their wheezing...

...A Ford crony gathers the erstwhile Nixon speech-writers about him and essays the problem: Ford, he told-us very seriously, suffered something be called "swimmer's breath"....Further, ...Ford had trouble with long or unfamiliar words or phrases, tending to get them tangled in his tongue...

...pronounced "holo-.caust" as "holy coast...

...I am only concerned to set straight the all-important matter of the relation Wilson sees between our genes and our social ideals and hopes...

...Only within the past few years have ecology and genetics themselves become sophisticated and strong enough to provide such a foundation...

...When they narrate, and restrain their schoolmarm's urge to pontificate and explicate, they also often instruct...

...On the other hand, the Soviets placed missiles in Cuba (by Cate's own account) for somewhat limited offensive reasons...

...One obvious question comes to mind: Would the Soviets have backed down...

...The fact that they did so in Cuba doesn't give us much guidance with regard to Berlin, since their stake there was much higher...

...Each of these objections could have been answered in a more scholarly treatment of Soviet objectives in both Berlin and Cuba...

...But whatever the problem, it finally proved too much...

...focus on politics in all its depth and significance...

...His performance is not flawless...

...maintained a healthy strategic edge throughout both crises, it could bring overwhelming conventional power to bear only on Havana...

...It was that preeminent humanist, the late Lionel Trilling, who wrote, and is accordingly quoted by Wilson, that "there is a hard, irreducible, stubborn core of...

...Yet, as I say, Coyne may never gain the celebrity he deserves...

...Still, Coyne is no fool...

...There is not so much as an intimation in this book that genetics, or any other field of biology, will ever replace, or crowd out, the social and cultural disciplines...

...Such entities do not in fact exist...

...He begins with Nixon and he ends explaining weird phenomena like Jerry Brown and the Wonderboy...

...Unfortunately, stringing out horror stories from divided Germany is not sufficient to convince us that Western leaders acted unwisely in treating the wall as something of a sidelight to the larger issues of the Berlin crisis...

...Both determinisms offered explanation of a given phase of overt human behavior, or a cultural pattern, in terms of an alleged racial predisposition or some discrete, prepotent individual instinct...

...As it is, we a well-researched memoir of the Cold War which reminds us, often in poignant ways, of the human cost of Communism...

...And for him to gain readers, the reading audience in America will either have to shift to the right or the liberals will have to acquire the broad values of latiju-dinarianism-an acquisition most unlikely...

...Ul-bricht's own "economic miracle" of the last decade and a half was made possible only by the miles of concrete and barbed wire strung through the middle of Berlin...

...If they decide to like America, Coyne's fame will be assured...

...Realization of our genetic nature "does not vitiate the ideals of Western civilization...

...And for those wishing to meet a genuine Ford speechwriter, consider this: There was the would-be writer who briefly occupied Pat Buchanan's handsome old office...

...that advantage lay on the Soviet side in Central Europe...

...Yet Coyne also wants to convey the flavor of the era, and to offer us the pols as he saw them, drenched in sweat and democratic grandeur...

...As he talked to her he'd unzip his trousers, then make various careful readjustments: Perhaps it was just an unconscious habit...

...wall down would only have led to its being rebuilt several hundred yards behind the sector border...

...He is one of those friendly American voices that Orwell listened for...

...If, as Edward Wilson believes, political and economic systems of slavery, whether called slavery or Communism of the type that Russia currently suffers under, are incompatible with the genetic composition of Homo sapiens, we should be far more optimistic about the future on the basis of what we have learned about.genetics and the genetic basis of humfin behavior than we could possibly be by resting a hatred of slavery on the dogmas of either religion-aries or revolutionists...

...I do not mean to say that these writers...

...As he states in his new book, Fall in and cheer, he was not in sympathy with the 1960s " assault on traditional values...

...And from Wilson's book comes the folldw-ing statement: "[M]ost scientists have long recognized that it is a futile exercise to try to define discrete human races...

...and that as a last resort Ulbricht could have sealed East Berlin off entirely from the rest of East Germany...

...Ford's problems with words were to : become legendary, as when he mentioned the disease "sickle cell Armenia...

...to them politics |is gossip about power, and this awesome gossip they ponder most studiously.They write with cleverness and a swagger...

...Not that Coyiiejis a wowser-he is too full of fun forthat But Coyne frankly likes Americans, He likes their prejudices, their asininitifes...

...Far from making for restriction of Western ideals, the ceaseless flow and mix of genes, all within one great breeding system on earth, provide a solid, scientific basis of enlargement and diffusion of these ideals...

...The sad truth must be faced...

...The genetic constitution in each of us that required so many millions of years of evolution is not going to be rendered null and void by dedicating ourselves to the proposition that man is infinitely malleable through alterations of social environment and education...

...I stand ready to buy a dozen copies of his next book, in hopes of making up in sojne small way for the conservatives who never will buy enough of Coyne's books to make him celebrated...

...Yet it was clearly not Mr...

...Perhaps he had trouble keeping his shirt tucked in...

...At least," she sobbed, "Mr...

...Doublcday /. $8.95 R.Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...

...In American politics what else is there to report...

...And it is to the immense advances in genetics of bur century that most of the credit must go for relegating to the shades that baneful misconstruction of Darwinian natural selection...

...Fall in and Cheer John R.Coyne, Jr...

...Washington, D.C...

...It is emphatically not an attack upon any of the ideals of Western civilization-political and civil freedom, legal equality, justice, social reform, or any other...

...referred to the "great people of Israel" in a toast to Anwar Sadat...

...he conveys the essences of out pols merely by reporting on the surface of things...

...But surely the proper course for the U.S...

...He tries to explain what happened in American politics during those years...

...The evidence is strong," Wilson writes, ''that almost all differences between human societies are based on learning and social conditioning rather than heredity...

...these exegeses I am not grateful...

...To the great credit of cultural anthropology during the early decades of this century, such biological determinisms were driven from the field, and, except in the minds of a few eccentrics, have not returned...

...There could be ho sociobiology were there not the social as well as the biological...

...What Professor Wilson reminds us of, in the first place, is thai: as human beings we are still subject to the principles of natural selection, just as are) all other members of the organic kingdom In other words, all of those grand ideas which issued from Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx in the nineteenth century, and which lie behind the massive efforts of the past century and a half to'reconstruct society on one model or other...

...There was a meeting in which Coyne was apprised of Jerry's problems with the mother tongue...

...Nevertheless, they amuse, and while iirttifeir salad days they are eminences of the-first water, often showing up at significant dinner parties, on the talk shows, and in popular journalistic forums...

...that we would have faced the prospect of an unseemly and provocative game of leapfrog into East German territory...

...Names like Larry L. King, Marshall Frady, Joe McGinnis, and Timothyl Chnise stagger before my mind's eye, then jthey arc gone...

...At times he tries.to believe in these jackasses...

...What a geneticist sees in the world is not "races" and putative, prepotent "instincts," but rather gene pools of infinite variety all over the earth...

...With these breakthroughs, it has become possible for the first time in history to think seriously and effectively about a genuine sociobiology...

...Citing sociologist Orlando Patterson's comparative study of systems of slavery in human history, Wilson reminds us that the deepest reason for the failure in time of each of these abhorrent systems lies not in social gospel -always subject to vicissitudes-but in the genetic constitution of man...

...It is, as Wilson demonstrates in a succession of brilliant chapters, the incontestable principles of genetics that give us our surest, most certain, and lasting assurances that altruism, cooperation, freedom, social inventiveness, hope, and civilized morality are not only possible, but, in the long run, necessary to both the cultural advancement of man and the continuing benign flow of evolution...

...better...

...BOOK REVIEW On Human Nature Edward 0. Wilson / Harvard University Press / $.1-2.50 Robert Nisbet It is shocking that this extraordinary book has been dealt with as it has in a large number of reviews in the journals of the social sciences and also in some of the better intellectual quarterlies and monthlies...

...But this he is as far from as anyone could be...

...We are not compelled to believe in biological uniformity to affirm human freedom and dignity...," The greatest single accomplishment of modern genetics and ecology, and of the socio-biology that emanates from them, is the destruction once and for all of the theories of biological determinism...

...biological urgency, and biological necessity, and biological reason, that culture cannot reach and that reserves the right, which sooner or later it will exercise, to judge the culture and resist and revise it...

...There is nothing whatever of either racial or individual-biological determinism in Edward Wilson's book...

...The overwhelming majority of humanists and social scientists today are simply unable to follow the argument of a renowned socio-biologist even when he writes as lucidly as does Professor Wilson I am afraid Wilson is correct in his statement that the majority of articles written in even the best of our humanistic journals, conservative as well as liberal or radical, "read as if most of basic science had halted during the nineteenth century...

...would have been, not a technical maneuver of this sort, but a decision to bring the full weight of our strategic preponderance to bear by issuing a Cuba-style ultimatum: Remove all barriers to intersector traffic or else...

...This is an interesting and attractive argument...

...Such crucial assertions seem not, however, to be noticed by the reviewers who, unable to understand the simplest elements of genetics and molecular biology, conclude in advance that since Wilson is writing about social behavior from the viewpoint of modern biology, he must be a racial or instinctual determinist...

...For too many of us the mere word "sociobiology" conjures up visions of a biological determinism that was promulgated in the nineteenth century by the apostles of racism (Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, et a...

...Of all the scientific revolutions effected in this century, none, not even those in physics and chemistry, is greater than the . changes which have taken place in biology...

...But these writers do focus on politics as it is understood in...

...It is a laudable desire, and I am bound to believe that social scientists who resolutely turn their backs on the emerging discipline of sociobiology, and who continue to light candles before the icons of Marx and Comte, are shortly going to find themselves judged as Lysenkos...

...He was bad-mouthing Buchanan, as he liked to dp, and had- gone through the zipper routine...

...He was assigned a secretary, young and attractive, who had frequently filled in for the regular secretaries in various writers' offices, among them Buchanan's...

...What is truly new about socib.biology," writes...

...Sucli people frighten the literate...

...The outflow of manpower to the West through Berlin seriously threatened the stability of East Germany and, in the long run, of Moscow's Eastern European empire...

...introduced Elliot Richardson as "Elliot Roosevelt...

...All that Wilson desires is a creative fusion of what we have learned about man from modern genetics with what we have learned from history and the social sciences...

...John Coyne's name does not stagger forth...

...To be sure his writing has vigor, sauciness, and street-smart acuity, but, alas, he is conservative...

...I admire Professor Wilson's book immensely, agree with almost all of it, and yet-feel in no way constrained to part company with the sociology of Emile Durkheim, the author of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life...

...He should be flying around the country right now, observing the pols in action as they spray themselves in nauseating cologne, plant wet kisses on innocent babes, down surf 'n turf, annoy waitresses, and participate in all the wondrous revels that compose statecraft as practiced in the Great Republic...

...Wilson is as harsh on the old "social Darwinism" that once flourished in the West as any cultural anthropologist or sociologist is or can be...

...These fatuous doctrines were scarcely different from the once-current explanations of opium by reference to a "dormitive potency" or Japanese assimilation of Western skills by invocation of a racial trait of "imitativeness...

...one only wishes that Cate had made it in a more thoughtful way...

...show how social groups adapt to the environment by evolution...

...How much clearer can one be on that important proposition...

...praised the "ethnic of honest work" in New Hampshire...

...In this short review it is impossible even to outline, much less describe in any detail, the rich contents of Edward Wilson's book...

...on the one hand, and by the followers of instinct theory on the other: the kind of theory one found in, say, William Macdougall's best-selling Social Psychology of the early part of this century...

...This older writing tryout spent a good deal of time wandering around near her desk, where he engaged in a peculiar habit...

...Fall in and Cheer abounds with such anecdotes, all of which compose a gorgeous montage of American politics...

...The less explanation of them the...

...In Fall in and Cheer, Coyne recollects his years as a graduate student at Berkeley, and then as a speechwriter for Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon, and Gerald (Jerry) Ford...

...They do not, however, have much staying power, and after a book or two theyjretire to the gin mills or to secure berths pn some remote, albeit toney, college faculty...

...Buchanan was a gentleman...

...do not, and cannot, liberate human beings from .the laws of natural selection...

...It is amusing, eccentric, lacerating, accurate...

...Joe McGinnis' customers would find that astonishing, yet now that the Cambodians arid the North Vietnamese have shown their prosaic side, Joe's customers know not where to turn...

...Cate's intention to write a speculative and academic book of this sort...

...And the most impressive of these are in the areas of genetics and molecular biology...

...For one thing, he is of sounder mind than the aforementioned More importantly, the audience that buys McGinnis would not buy Coyne...

...Wilson, "is the way it has extracted the most important facts about social organization from their traditional matrix of ethology and psychology and reassembled them on a foundation of ecology and genetics studied at the population level in order to...

...Without readers he will always be on the short end of money and editors...

...Here he has performed a public service and deserves a drink on the house...

...That would Ue asking too much...

...Being friendly has its occasional costs...

...Yet I forgive him this sin...

...In America today there is a clutch of writers whose metier is a hybrid of reportage and fiction and whose focus is politics...

...His treatment of the Ford administration typifies his art...

...The girl burst into tears...

...Their presence on the island was a luxury of sorts, like owning a Porsche: desirable but not necessary to the day to-day business of running a tyranny...

...Moreover, though the U.S...