Daniel Clement Dennett III is an American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science.
Edward Osborne WilsonFRS was an American biologist, naturalist, ecologist, and entomologist known for developing the field of sociobiology.
Stephen Jay Gould was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was one of the most influential and widely read authors of popular science of his generation. Gould spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In 1996, Gould was hired as the Vincent Astor Visiting research professor of biology at New York University, after which he divided his time teaching between there and Harvard.
Sociobiology is a field of biology that aims to examine and explain social behavior in terms of evolution. It draws from disciplines including psychology, ethology, anthropology, evolution, zoology, archaeology, and population genetics. Within the study of human societies, sociobiology is closely allied to evolutionary anthropology, human behavioral ecology, evolutionary psychology, and sociology.
The Mismeasure of Man is a 1981 book by paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. The book is both a history and critique of the statistical methods and cultural motivations underlying biological determinism, the belief that "the social and economic differences between human groups—primarily races, classes, and sexes—arise from inherited, inborn distinctions and that society, in this sense, is an accurate reflection of biology".
Biological determinism, also known as genetic determinism, is the belief that human behaviour is directly controlled by an individual's genes or some component of their physiology, generally at the expense of the role of the environment, whether in embryonic development or in learning. Genetic reductionism is a similar concept, but it is distinct from genetic determinism in that the former refers to the level of understanding, while the latter refers to the supposedly causal role of genes. Biological determinism has been associated with movements in science and society including eugenics, scientific racism, and the debates around the heritability of IQ, the basis of sexual orientation, and sociobiology.
Richard Charles Lewontin was an American evolutionary biologist, mathematician, geneticist, and social commentator. A leader in developing the mathematical basis of population genetics and evolutionary theory, he applied of techniques from molecular biology, such as gel electrophoresis, to questions of genetic variation and evolution.
Steven Peter Russell Rose is an English neuroscientist, author, and social commentator. He is emeritus professor of biology and neurobiology at the Open University and Gresham College, London.
Sociobiology: The New Synthesis is a book by the biologist E. O. Wilson. It helped start the sociobiology debate, one of the great scientific controversies in biology of the 20th century and part of the wider debate about evolutionary psychology and the modern synthesis of evolutionary biology. Wilson popularized the term "sociobiology" as an attempt to explain the evolutionary mechanics behind social behaviour such as altruism, aggression, and the nurturing of the young. It formed a position within the long-running nature versus nurture debate. The fundamental principle guiding sociobiology is that an organism's evolutionary success is measured by the extent to which its genes are represented in the next generation.
Simon Conway Morris is an English palaeontologist, evolutionary biologist, and astrobiologist known for his study of the fossils of the Burgess Shale and the Cambrian explosion. The results of these discoveries were celebrated in Stephen Jay Gould's 1989 book Wonderful Life. Conway Morris's own book on the subject, The Crucible of Creation (1998), however, is critical of Gould's presentation and interpretation.
Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature is a 1984 book by the evolutionary geneticist Richard Lewontin, the neurobiologist Steven Rose, and the psychologist Leon Kamin, in which the authors criticize sociobiology and genetic determinism and advocate a socialist society. Its themes include the relationship between biology and society, the nature versus nurture debate, and the intersection of science and ideology.
Richard Levins was a marxist biologist, a population geneticist, biomathematician, mathematical ecologist, and philosopher of science who researched diversity in human populations. Until his death, Levins was a university professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a long-time political activist. He was best known for his work on evolution and complexity in changing environments and on metapopulations.
Science for the People (SftP) is an organization that emerged from the antiwar culture of the United States in the late 1960s. Since 2014 it has experienced a revival focusing primarily on the dual nature of science. The organization advocates for a scientific establishment that is not isolated from society, rather one that uses scientific discoveries to advocate for and advance social justice and critically approach science as a social endeavor.
Charles J. Lumsden is a Canadian biologist in the Department of Medicine and Institute of Medical Science, University of Toronto. He has been an early proponent of sociobiology, looking to our genetic nature to supplement culture in describing what makes us human. He wrote two influential books in collaboration with Edward O. Wilson Genes, Mind and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process. and Promethean Fire: Reflections on the Origin of Mind. Part of his interests lies in the mathematical and philosophical bases of physical theory in biology, and the origins of creativity. He has also co-edited biology textbooks, notably Physical Theory in Biology: Foundations and Explorations 1997.
On Human Nature is a book by the biologist E. O. Wilson, in which the author attempts to explain human nature and society through sociobiology. Wilson argues that evolution has left its traces on characteristics such as generosity, self-sacrifice, worship and the use of sex for pleasure, and proposes a sociobiological explanation of homosexuality.
Carola Blitzman Eisenberg was an Argentine-American psychiatrist who became the first woman to hold the position of dean of students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1978 to 1990, she was the dean of student affairs at Harvard Medical School (HMS). She has for a long time been lecturer in the newly renamed Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at HMS. She was also both a founding member of Physicians for Human Rights and an honorary psychiatrist with the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, a longstanding position there.
John A. Dupré is a British philosopher of science. He is the director of Egenis, the Centre for the Study of Life Sciences, and professor of philosophy at the University of Exeter. Dupré's chief work area lies in philosophy of biology, philosophy of the social sciences, and general philosophy of science. Dupré, together with Nancy Cartwright, Ian Hacking, Patrick Suppes and Peter Galison, are often grouped together as the "Stanford School" of philosophy of science. In 2023, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
The International Committee Against Racism was the "mass organization" of the Progressive Labor Party in the United States. It was founded in 1973 once it had become clear that the Worker Student Alliance section of the Students for a Democratic Society could not sustain itself and that a new group with a more long-term vision not focused on students was going to be needed. Anti-racism was chosen as the focus for that new group.
This outline is provided as an overview of, and topical guide to Harvard University:
The Evolution of Human Sexuality is a 1979 book about human sexuality by the anthropologist Donald Symons, in which the author discusses topics such as human sexual anatomy, ovulation, orgasm, homosexuality, sexual promiscuity, and rape, attempting to show how evolutionary concepts can be applied to humans. Symons argues that the female orgasm is not an adaptive trait and that women have the capacity for it only because orgasm is adaptive for men, and that differences between the sexual behavior of male and female homosexuals help to show underlying differences between male and female sexuality. In his view, homosexual men tend to be sexually promiscuous because of the tendency of men in general to desire sex with a large number of partners, a tendency that in heterosexual men is usually restrained by women's typical lack of interest in promiscuous sex. Symons also argues that rape can be explained in evolutionary terms and feminist claims that it is not sexually motivated are incorrect.
