My Life in the Human Nature Wars

MY LIFE IN THE HUMAN NATURE WARS1 LIONEL TIGER* For venturing to explore the role of biology in our social lives, I have had more than my share of interesting moments. In addition to slander and calumny—depressingly standard fare in the academy today—I have received bomb threats at lectures in Vancouver and Montreal and the promise of a "kneecapping" at the New School for Social Research in New York. I have been the object of a demonstration of angry male transvestites at the Royal Institution in London, and I have seen one of the books I coauthored , The ImperialAnimal, compared to Mein Kampf!??? in a day's work, you might say, though some 35 years' is closer to the truth. If the toll exacted by my career has occasionally been steep, it has been well worth the price to be able to participate in the most consequential intellectual debate of our time, a debate that goes back at least to Charles Darwin and the mid-19th-century publication of his magnificent and scandal-provoking theory of natural selection. The main antagonists then were scientists and clerics. The former thought Darwin's theory explained a great deal about nature and possibly even human nature. The latter considered it a rebuke to stories of divine creation as well as a potential threat to their power to define reality. But in recent years, the argument over the influence of biology on human society has been far more raucous within science itself, particularly within the social sciences. The evolving "biosocial" view that I have helped pioneer poses a direct challenge to some of the premises of 20th-century social science—and by extension, the cherished beliefs of many intellectuals and reformers. Foremost among these is the assumption that human beings and their institutions have largely transcended the biological constraints that govern the animal world, and, accordingly, that humans are all but free to make the worlds they choose. I had not originally set out for such contentious territory. In fact, I took only the most conventional (that is, biology-free) courses toward my first *Anthropology Department, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08903. 'Reprinted from The Wilson Quarterly, Vol xx, No. 1 with permission of the author. 00315982 /98/41 04-1075$01.00 468 Lionel Tiger ¦ Human Nature Wars two degrees at McGiIl University in Montreal, where I had been born and raised in the Jewish quarter immortalized by Mordecai Richler's novels. Perhaps the closest I came to biology in my childhood were the featured herring in my father's small grocery. Their immodest aroma joined with the waxing and waning of items in the produce section to alert me to the facts of seasonality and the reality of genuine physical decay. The one biology course McGiIl demanded I take, complete with ritual dissection of frog limbs and organs, confirmed my lack of interest in nonhuman life forms. At the time (the late 1950s), my energies were far more strongly directed toward student journalism and the local literary and political scenes, which included such figures of later fame as Leonard Cohen and Pierre Trudeau. After completing my master's degree at McGiIl with a thesis on the links between scientists and administrators in a research institute, I enrolled at the London School of Economics and turned to doctoral work on decolonization in Africa, a process I had witnessed earlier on a summer fellowship to Ghana and Nigeria. The focus of my research in 1960—the colonial service of Ghana as it became the newly independent nation's civil service—came with a bonus: it allowed me to study the colorful Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first president and a seminal figure in postcolonial African history. What I specifically wanted to determine was whether Max Weber's theory of the "routinization of charisma"—the process by which the almost magical power of the great leader is subtly but decisively transformed into the mechanisms of bureaucratic authority—applied to the political realities of newly independent Ghana. My research led me to a phrase in Weber's work that presumably reflected his desire to see sociology become an authoritative science. It is at the same...