‘Higher Superstition’: An Exchange
February 21, 2008 8:39 am Darwinian Analyses of Society and CultureAmong the polemical lions of The New York Review, a few are by now (if truth be known) quite gone in the teeth. Richard Lewontin is one of the dentally challenged. Consider, for illustration, his obiter dictum on Higher Superstition, and thereby on us, its authors [NYR, October 22]. It and we are mocked as “naive” and “obtuse” for having dared to suggest that natural science is concerned with, and responsive to, the real world. (Advanced social thinkers, presumably, know better.) “Naive” and “obtuse” are odd charges coming from one who has for so long trodden the tortuous road of orthodox Marxism.
Nevertheless he must be serious in these derogations. Whether there is a real world or not, Lewontin does not doubt his own ability to know how things really are. And he has railed elsewhere against Higher Superstition, particularly in a review, a few years back, for the journal Configurations. He derided us there for choosing easy targets, for dealing with writers so foolish and insignificant as to be not worth refuting. We were also denounced for embracing the unspeakable—sociobiology.
Lewontin must have failed to notice, however, that a number of those simpletons and obscurities not worth refuting were members of the Configurations editorial board, or prominent fellow contributors to its pages. Presumably they didn’t notice, either. Even stranger was his failure to notice that Higher Superstition had nothing to say about sociobiology, favorable or otherwise. The only reference to it was in an endnote, added in proof, remarking that Andrew Ross (later to be a source of innocent merriment in connection with the Sokal hoax) is eager to defame E.O. Wilson in connection with sociobiology, but has nothing at all to say about Wilson’s powerful advocacy in aid of biodiversity and other ecological causes with which Ross likes to associate himself.