Who Speaks for Science? A Conversation with Erika Lorraine Milam
Race, Gender, and Violence in Evolutionary History
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Introduction
Erika Lorraine Milam is the Charles C. and Emily R. Gillispie Professor in the History of Science at Princeton University; her book, Creatures of Cain: The Hunt for Human Nature in Cold War America, was the winner of the Suzanne J. Levinson Prize, History of Science Society, and shortlisted for the Pickstone Prize, British Society for the History of Science.
As the Director of the Meanings of Science Project, I was thrilled to get the chance to sit down with Professor Milam and discuss how the story of evolution and human nature change in post-World War II America, its connection to an evolutionary narrative of aggression and violence, and how the way we practice science is inseparable from our narratives of race, gender, and class. This is part one of our conversation.
Samuel Loncar
I’d like to begin with a framing question that is central to the Meanings of Science Project—a question based on the fact that there are incredible divides between the public understanding of science, the understandings of science in the natural scientific community (broadly speaking), and the understanding of science from professional scholars who study science, particularly historians of science. As a historian of science, what do you see the role of the historian of science to be for the scientific community itself? Do you think the scientific community itself is, in some sense, limited by its failure to appreciate its own history?
Erika Milam
I wouldn’t say science is limited by a lack of historical engagement. The scientific community is, of course, focused on the creation of new knowledge and is future-oriented. When the process of science works well, it creates brilliant research and a font of publications that reflect the intellectual and practical concerns of scientists at the moment. However, I do think there are structural issues with science, that arise from the unstated assumptions about who has the authority to receive credit for new ideas and the purported objectivity of the social infrastructures that allocate such credit, whether in publications, grants, or tenure. I think that the social studies of science—whether history, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, etc.— all of these disciplines help to elucidate how such infrastructures form and continue to function, and can therefore contribute to a more inclusive scientific system and “better” knowledge. What does that practically mean? As in, what would make science “better”? Does that mean that more people get to participate? Does it mean that scientific publications come out even more quickly? I do believe interdisciplinary conversations—such as those you postulate between scientists and historians—are crucial to being able to answer these questions.
As a historian, I am forever impressed with the rate at which scientists produce new papers. It certainly outpaces that of historians, who are (by comparison) notoriously slow—you can tell in this moment that I am lamenting my own capacity for fast-writing. The slowness also has an advantage, however; it means we have more time to try out our ideas before publication.
There is a second issue embedded in your question, too: how do we think about what science is in the first place?
One possibility to turn to the social studies of biology in the 1980’s as a moment where the three communities you mentioned—the public understanding of science, the natural scientific communities, and the social studies of science—are all participating in a shared conversation about the nature of evolutionary theory and its social implications: popular science writers, scientific journalists, biologists writing about their own field (plus philosophers and historians of biology) in an era when the status of evolution as a science was debated in courtrooms and in public conversations about grade-school classrooms in the United States. It is understandable that the public was invested in this conversation, that biologists were invested, and that people who study the production of scientific knowledge were also invested. These three different communities were together seeking answers to questions about the appropriate role of science in understanding what it means to be human, and how societies function in light of how they answer that question. That was a very powerful nexus! The synergy between these three perspectives has become even more powerful in recent decades.
Samuel Loncar
So, in the context of your expertise, in the example of the 1980’s, do you think that part of what your work shows is that the historical fate of any scientific vision of human nature requires attending to the political and social concerns of its context?
As you mentioned, these three different perspectives all see increased broadcasting and converge in the 80’s—so, do you think that there is a purely scientific answer (meaning, at the exclusion of social or political scientia) to the question, what is evolutionary theory?
Erika Milam
No.
Samuel Loncar
Your response is wonderful.
I’m sure you saw a few years back that Michael Ruse, the philosopher and historian of science, wrote a book, Darwinism as Religion, that’s the type of book that probably couldn’t have come out in the 80’s. Of course, Mary Midgley was working that theme for a long time, but many people didn’t (or don’t) know her work. But that struck me, and in connection with your book, all of these debates concern people—isn’t that part of the problem? Who gets to speak for science? That’s one of the things that I think is powerful about your work.
If the theory of evolution is not only a scientific question, then could you help us understand that?
Erika Milam
I suspect that most public concern over evolutionary theory can be summarized by the question: “What does it mean to be human?” And I think any satisfying answer can never be purely scientific.
There are always moral and social connotations to the answers. One way of thinking about this is through the lens of who counts when scholars talk about we, as a species, as a subject of evolutionary inquiry; there are questions of race, of sexuality, of class, etc. that get built into models for thinking about a universal human nature.
Evolution is a simple idea. Given an interbreeding population of individuals where there is variation in heritable traits, that population will change over time according to any environmental factor that differentially alters the rate of survival to reproduction of the individuals that comprise it.
When evolution is expressed this way, then, the moral and social connotations of what it means to be human don’t seem to pertain. Evolutionary theory in scientific perspective is far grander than just humanity. The above also explains how the rich biodiversity of the earth came to exist.
And yet, the social connotations of what this theory has come to mean in society have outstripped the capacity of any individual scientist to control the legacy of the ideas about which they write.
Samuel Loncar
That’s the framework of the book. You start with showing that in the 1950’s and 60’s, after World War II, there was, broadly speaking, a very optimistic view of human nature and therefore of the evolutionary narrative.
But then by the time we get to the 70s—where the book focuses on a triumvirate of these very stereotyped, masculine characters who advance an aggressive, violent view of human nature based on evolutionary science—you get (within only 20 years) a completely different view about what human nature is, and therefore a change in theory.
I realize that is the whole book, but that’s such an interesting fact to bring to the public, so I want to stress it—within a 20 year period, we see a dramatic change in the perception of what evolutionary theory is, including a quick movement, starting in the 50’s and 60’s to the construction of something like social Darwinism, to distinguish it from the eugenics-supporting use of Darwinism that, at the time, was simply viewed as scientific in the earlier part of the twentieth century.
So, what happened? What happened to evolutionary theory as the views of human nature became more pessimistic?
Erika Milam
Yes, that is the book!
One of the difficulties I had with writing Creatures of Cain—this is a slightly roundabout way of answering your question, but I promise, I will get there—is to say that this was the exact problem that confronted me when I was researching the legacy of the Man: A Course of Study pedagogical program (MACOS) for educating elementary school children about what it meant to be human.
The program was conceptualized and led by a group of scientists and educators based at Harvard University, who were keen to introduce young students to the process of thinking like a scientist, using the question of human nature as their main case study. They hoped to encourage the students to additionally reflect on the implications of this knowledge in their own lives and communities. This was intended for first graders in its original conception. The program designers conveyed an optimistic, progressive vision of human evolution, based on the idea that humans are a wonderful species that through cooperation to learn more about the world managed to tame nature, made vast technological discoveries, and together crafted a beautiful future in which everyone could live together in harmony. It was this lovely vision, which emerged from a synergy of evolutionary theory and cultural anthropology, that they hoped would help these young students think about their own future in society.
And then it runs into phenomenal political backlash by the mid-1970’s. That political pushback comes in the form of a Congressional review of the National Science Foundation. MACOS was a tool through which conservative politicians sought to extend their oversight of federal spending on what they saw as useless research, although in this case they believed the program to be morally dangerous. I was fascinated by how these two visions of the same program could be so different—on the one hand, a program to guide students towards as optimistic future, and on the other hand, a program that contributed to secular humanism, exacerbated students’ loss of faith in society and family, and promoted violence as essential to what it meant to be human.
This stark dichotomy between the two perspectives started me on this book in the first place. At first I had difficulty understanding how both perspectives arose, and one of the reasons that the book has the structure that it does, is that I struggled to find a single answer to your question: How did this happen?
I found part of an answer in the history of educational programs, another part in the history of colloquial scientific books addressed to both a general public and professional scientists, and a third part of an answer in the shared conversation in the translation of colloquial scientific conversations into Hollywood blockbusters, like Straw Dogs by Sam Peckinpah. (He pulled a lot on the theories that Robert Ardrey had been writing about, for example.)
And so, I think of Creatures of Cain as shaped like a football, an American football, or rugby ball, if you prefer. Everything starts in the 1950’s. Then it expands outward over the course of the 1960’s and into the early 1970’s—each causal thread tracing a seam in the ball—and then these threads meet again on the other side, with the debates over sociobiology in the second half of the 1970’s. There’s the shape, and the shape of the narrative reflects my answer to your question, which is that in order to understand how intellectual conversations about anything change, we actually have to look at all of these threads together. If you only look at the scientific literature, you only get one kind of answer. By adding in all of these other dimensions, we come to a much richer understanding of how it is that the answers to what we think we know, as a society, change over time. That is what I found most fascinating.
Samuel Loncar
It is absolutely fascinating. You mentioned MACOS—I was struck by your narrative of this story because it is, I thought, an incredible drama. But I didn’t realize it was the origin of your whole project—it is an incredible fractal encapsulation of the entire complexity and richness of your book and its story.
On the one hand, the academics’ good intentions—something I’m very sympathetic to as an academic and an editor trying to bring academic work to the public—to try to bring the insights of anthropology, a deeper cultural understanding, to children. But then, by the time it gets to the classroom, it’s passed through so many aspects of reality that it’s out of the academics’ control. This is related to the concept you introduced in the book, where you talk about this colloquial style (you don’t want to say “popular science,” which I thought was very interesting), but you refer to a way of writing in which experts are writing in accessible language and also to people like Ardrey, a playwright originally, who are becoming to the public indistinguishable from a type of expert and being associated with other respected scientists like Lorenz, who would later win the Nobel.
Can you help us understand why you see this colloquial writing emerge? Do you think it’s distinctive to that period, to the fact that people want a scientific understanding of what human nature is?
You don’t mention this directly, but you did make me wonder if you think it might be broadly related to the decline of religion. The same time period where you discuss the optimistic view of nature, is when Protestant liberals thought that things were on a great upward trajectory for their own religion, which David Hollinger writes about. But by the time you get to the 70’s, you get this general cultural pessimism, and I wonder: Is this turn towards a popular way of writing about science partly a way in which science is, very distinctively, taking the one place in which everyone in the society can share a conversation, discussing things that traditionally we would have talked about under the rubric of religion?
Erika Milam
That’s a tricky question. So first, let me talk a little bit about the origins of colloquial science and where I see that happening.
There is a long tradition, of course, of writing for lay audiences about science, both by people who are scientifically trained and those who are trained in other fields—and both of those have existed for a long time, right? This isn’t something that’s new, all of a sudden, in the 1950’s or 1960’s.
But there are significant structural changes to the publishing industry that happened during and after World War Two. One of them is really the rise of what Melinda Gormley and other people who have written about this time period refer to as the “intellectual paperback.” Publishers are reprinting older scientific classics—Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species gets reprinted a lot before and after the 1959 centenary of its publication. The new availability of paperbacks coincides with a rise, too, in scientists writing in a colloquial voice about their own scientific ideas. Such books are received as original contributions to scientific theory and are also intended to be accessible to non-scientists. They assume a very broad range of readers! But this begins to shift.
By the time you have someone who is a very well-known “popular” evolutionary writer, like Stephen Jay Gould in the 1980’s, he conceptualizes his own writing as taking place in two different voices. One of them is a popular voice for non-scientists; the other, his scientific articles that he writes and publishes for his peers. And this split in voice is something that would have been quite surprising to someone like Theodosius Dobzhansky or Julian Huxley, who was writing in the 1950’s, about scientific ideas that they wanted to communicate, both to non-scientists, and to their professional colleagues, with the same publications.
What I call “colloquial science” books were reviewed in leading scientific journals of the time. They were the basis of scientific conversations at universities; they’re read by graduate students as part of their training, etc. I wanted a concept that could capture this—for lack of a better word, I’m going to throw a complete anachronism in here—crossover market between the reading public and contemporary academics.
I think there’s something very familiar to historians about this. Many historians today are very interested in being able to write academic books that are accessible to a large audience and might also be relevant in their readers’ lives. We continue to believe that a single volume can perform both of these functions. Yet in science, we now have the impression, much more so, that that single shared market no longer exists for scientists. That there is a split. So colloquial science is a phrase I coined to capture this sense of how science publishing worked differently in the 1950’s and 60’s than it did later in the century.
Speaking of a shared market, then, let me return to your question of the role of religion.
I don’t want to say that there is a replacement of a shared religious sensibility with a shared scientific one. I’m skeptical of that framing for a couple of reasons. One is that there’s a lot of religious diversity in the United States. Even if questions like, What does it mean to be human? How did we get that way? How can we become more so? (the three questions that Jerome Bruner poses as the core of Man: A Course of Study)—even if those were seen as being best answered by religious authorities, there was no shared universal religious authority in the U.S., of course, that could have addressed them.
There’s not a shared scientific answer to those questions either. Who within the scientific community would be best posed to answer them? Would that have been anthropologists, who specialized in the study of humans? Would it have been scientists who studied animal behavior, who might be able to best address the question of humans as animals, and the shared biological nature that would be different from a shared culture? Or sociologists? There are so many competing answers for this set of questions, scientifically, that I think you end up with one nexus and another nexus.
One of the things that I find fascinating is that these large moral questions—and I do think they are moral, not just scientific questions—mean people start to look to science, whether it’s anthropology or animal behavior, or evolutionary biology, as being able to provide some answers. Whether those are complete answers, I don’t know.
The 1960’s, 70’s, and 80’s, are also a moment of religious revivalism, of young people exploring India’s traditions and seeking gurus and a very public turn to producing alternatives to mainstream media, for example, within the evangelical Christian communities, within a variety of religious communities, within the U.S.—so I stall on the question of how these are related, because I see such complexity on both sides.
Samuel Loncar
I did frame it broadly, and your appreciation of that complexity, in your answer, I think, is incredibly helpful.
Your own title, Creatures of Cain—I am struck by the fact that it seems like everything at this point is becoming very embattled. Liberal Protestants are losing their religious hold. People like Niebuhr, their day as spokespersons is ending. The influence of these establishment religious voices seems to be receding at roughly the same time that you’re charting the emergence chronologically of the colloquial science.
You said that we can’t answer a question like “What is evolution?” only with science. It’s not a purely scientific question. Then it raises, I think, the general framework that the book is engaging, at least implicitly in its metaphors, and that is: What is the role of science vis-à-vis religion? For example, earlier you mentioned the pushback to these courses; part of it is the attempt by religious conservatives to get secular humanism framed legally as a religion is exactly so that they can then use the establishment clause.
Do you see any particular role of science as an authority, which is a role that goes way beyond science as a source of specialist knowledge?
Once scientists present themselves as capable of answering with authority this general question: What is a human?—which of course we all are interested in, and I’m very interested in—then they position themselves as authorities on answering a question that isn’t strictly a scientific question. It’s traditionally a philosophical question, or in the context of a broadly Western culture that’s in the process of massive change in every sense—it was traditionally a question that was answered by a person’s Jewish or Christian background.
Erika Milam
Yes, and I think that there’s a couple of things here. The book is titled Creatures of Cain in part because Robert Ardrey used the analogy of Cain and Abel as a metaphor for thinking about the role of violence in humanity’s evolutionary past. There is a direct appropriation of religious language and narratives in the colloquial scientific conversation about evolution in this time period, not by everybody, but certainly it is there. On the more positive side, as a contrast, Loren Eiseley uses awe and wonder in his books to inspire an appreciation of humans as remarkable evolutionary creations. Second, questions of human nature are seen as religious, moral, ethical questions. They’re also seen as the jurisdiction of the social sciences.
So let’s go back to this nexus of the public understanding of science, the natural scientific community, and the professional scholars who study science. These three communities have sort of different bugbears, you might say. Within the general public understanding of science, there has been a tendency, I think, to frame such issues as science versus religion.
For the natural scientific community, some evolutionary theorists saw themselves as trying to rescue a question like, What does it mean to be human? from those soft, unreliable social sciences that could not (they believed) provide concrete answers. And I would count history as one of these disciplines and, of course, disagree vehemently with the idea that historians cannot provide helpful answers for thinking through these questions. That’s a separate problem.
But, for example, evolutionary, anthropological thinkers like Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox saw their main interlocutors as other natural scientists, and attempted to change the discipline of anthropology away from cultural to biological methods in order to be able to answer questions like this. So there’s a tension within the field of anthropology there, too.
Then, for the academic scholars who study science and scientific cultures, there’s a different set of questions about the limits of scientific expertise, of scientists’ capacity to provide satisfying answers to questions that contain inherent assumptions about group or individual identity, for example—this, of course, explodes in the 1980’s and 1990’s as the Science Wars. Academics trained in different fields debated the social construction of science: What is scientific truth, and how should social scientists best address these questions in relation to natural scientists? That became a huge difficulty as well. So, there are three different axes of debate that are mobilized, all in a shifting intellectual landscape, that I am unpacking in this “colloquial science” nexus that characterized American scientific publishing in the third quarter of the twentieth century.
Part Two forthcoming
Erika Lorraine Milam is the Charles C. and Emily R. Gillispie Professor of the History of Science at Princeton University. Her work explores how and why scientists and public audiences have used studies of animal behavior to understand human behavior, from sex to aggression. She has published two books, Creatures of Cain: The Hunt for Human Nature in Cold War America (Princeton University Press, 2019) and Looking for a Few Good Males: Female Choice in Evolutionary Biology (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), as well as co-edited two major projects, with Suman Seth, Descent of Darwin: Race, Sex, and Human Nature (BJHS Themes 6, 2021) and with Robert A. Nye, Scientific Masculinities (Osiris 30, 2015).
Samuel Loncar, Ph.D. (Yale) is a philosopher and writer, the Editor-in-Chief of the Marginalia Review of Books, the Founder and Director of the Institute for the Meanings of Science, the Architect and Co-founder of The Writing College, and the host of Becoming Human: A Show for a Species in Crisis, featuring his work as a teacher and interviewer. He has taught at Yale University and as consultant speaker, he has worked with clients like the United Nations, Oliver Wyman, and Red Bull Arts. His book, Becoming Human: Philosophy as Science and Religion from Plato to Posthumanism is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. Tweets @samuelloncar
