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But the strongest argument against sociobiology is that it underrates the emergence of the human brain, consciousness and culture. Said Columbia Anthropologist Marvin Harris to an M.I.T. audience last year: "Sociobiologists tend to drastically underestimate the result to which human cultures represent an emergent novelty." His point: even simple organisms show great variation in behavior, but only the genes can pass it on. Among humans, learning can be passed on by culture, thus overwhelming the genetic contribution to behavior.
The fear of many of sociobiology's opponents is that it will prove nothing but leave a heavy political impact anyway. Sahlins fears it may disappear as a science but go on and on in the popular culture.
Indeed, few academic theories have spread so fast and with so little hard proof. Apart from the Hamilton-Trivers work on altruism, there has been little to impress the skeptics, and no hard evidence has been presented to show that genes influence human cultural behavior. The power of sociobiology comes from its astonishing promise to link the physical sciences with the human sciences and to bring all behavior from Drosophila to Homo sapiens under one great discipline.
What is more, sociobiology may have appeared at the right cultural moment. The 1970s have brought with them growing impatience and disillusionment over failed educational and environmental experiments designed to alter social behavior. The concept of social theorists that man is infinitely malleable and perfectible has fallen into disfavor. At such a time the emergence of a doctrine preaching that man is caught in history, able to exercise free will only within the limits set by his genes, may do very well indeed.