Princeton University
Department of History
Prof. Angela N.H. Creager
HIS 396: History of Biology
Reading Response QuestionsWeek 11, Precepts April 21-23, 1998
Email: creager@phoenix.princeton.edu or manfredl@princeton.edu
Reminder: Send an e-mail response to your preceptor addressing these or other aspects of the readings.
Note for Week 11: I'm not including questions for the Lewontin selections, which are quite clear (and very insightful). FYI, Lewontin was one of Wilson's most vocal critics in the 1970s.
Week 11
Dawkins, The Selfish Gene 1° source
"Why Are People?"p. 1 What problem does Dawkins take as central?
p. 2 What fault does Dawkins find with Lorenz's explanation of aggression? What is Dawkins' unit of selection? What two units does he in fact conflate?
p. 2 With what analogy does Dawkins begin explaining his argument? Are there problems with this image?
p. 3 What does Dawkins claim his book is not about? Can he escape the perception by readers of implying that "whatever is, is right"?
pp. 5-6 What are Darwin's exemplars of selfish behavior? altruistic behavior?
p. 9 What does Dawkins hold responsible for the popularity of group-selectionist or species-selectionist arguments?"The Replicators"
p. 14 What is Dawkins' account of the origin of life?
p. 20 Where are the "replicators" now? With what does Dawkins credit them?Wilson, "The Molecular Wars," from his autobiography Naturalist 1° source
p. 219 How does E. O. Wilson describe Watson? What was the basic rift in biology at Harvard in the 1950s and 1960s?
p. 225 According to Wilson, how did biology change c. 1960? What was the effect in terms of the subject material of biologists?
p. 230 What specialists were eliminated from biology departments in the 1960s? What was the effect of this loss of knowledge, in Wilson's view?
p. 232 What inspired Wilson's desire to revolutionize "evolutionary biology" in the 1970s?Albury, "Politics and Rhetoric in the Sociobiology Debate" 2° source
p. 520 How may sociobiology be defined, from the perspective of various biological subdisciplines and problems?
p. 521 How does sociobiology part from Lorenz's ethology? What is the key problem of sociobiology? What tools do its practitioners bring to bear on the problem? What do sociobiologists assume about human traits such as aggression, male dominance, homosexuality, and xenophobia?
p. 523 What was the Sociobiology Study Group's principle criticism of Sociobiology?
p. 525 What normative criticisms did they offer? How did Wilson defend his theory?
pp. 530-31 In what sense was politics actually excluded from the debates over sociobiology, according to Albury? What would it have meant to take actual politics into account?Haraway, ""The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of Self in Immune Systems Discourse" 2° source
p. 204 What does Haraway mean when she says that "Scientific discourses are 'lumpy'"? What is Haraway's thesis in this article?
pp. 206-7 How has immune systems discourse changed from the 1960s to the 1980s?
p. 208 How have conceptions of the body changed since 1800?
pp. 209-10 How does Haraway's chart relate biology of the 1970s-80s to themes we have been following in the life sciences of the late 19th and pre-World War II 20th century?
p. 216 What problems does sociobiology raise for the biological concept of the "individual"?
p. 217 How does Dawkins, and sociobiology more generally, theorize the world as one vast arms race? Who is competing? What is the large [human] body?
p. 218 How do the genetics of the immune system partially subvert the notion of genetic determinism or selfhood?
pp. 218-19 How does Jerne's network theory of the immune system undermine or complexify a hard-and-fast distinction between self and other, or internal and external?
p. 220 In what respect does Dawkins display a postmodern sensibility of sociobiology in contrast to E. O. Wilson's sociobiological vision?
p. 224 What is the illusion at the heart of the common images of immune system as battlefield?
