Darwin's Progress.

Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (25th Anniversary Edition), by Edward O. Wilson (Harvard, 697 pp., $29.95)

Great fiction does not grow obsolete. Nor, in its own way, does great propaganda. In contrast, truly important scientific books render themselves obsolete by opening new fields for subsequent scholars to elaborate. Edward O. Wilson's 1975 landmark, Socio biology, which introduced neo-Darwinism to the public-and which has now been reissued to mark its 25th anniversary-is just such a book. Vast yet coherent, Socio biology demonstrated in rigorous detail how Darwinian selection molded the various ways in which all animals-from the lowly corals to the social insects to the highest primates-compete and cooperate with others of their own species.

Outraging the leftists who dominated academia, Wilson suggested numerous analogies between animal and human societies. While men have been drawing such parallels since long before Aesop, Wilson's command of natural history and the power of neo-Darwinian theory in unifying this vast body of knowledge lent credibility to his grand ambition to reduce social science to a branch of biology, just as, he argued, biology could ultimately be reduced to chemistry, and chemistry to physics.

Tom Wolfe has lauded Wilson as "a new Darwin," but that's somewhat overstating the case. Wilson is more the workaholic synthesist who brought to wide awareness the insights of even more original but lesser-known socio biologists like the manic-depressive Robert Trivers and the late English genius William D. Hamilton. It was Hamilton who launched the neo-Darwinian era in 1964 with his theory of "kin selection," which mathematically answered a question that had long nagged Dar win: Why do social creatures, whether ants or humans, tend to be nepotistic? Why do we sacrifice for our children, and even for our more distant relatives? Hamilton showed that acting altruistically toward your kin can be in your genes' interest even when it's not in your own. Richard Dawkins, another sociobiologist inspired by Hamilton, popularized this insight in his 1976 bestseller The Selfish Gene.

Only the last of Sociobiology's 26 chapters is devoted solely to human societies, yet the book blazed a trail that many others followed. In recent years, this genre has become wildly popular with readers of serious nonfiction books. Amazon.com lists 416 titles under "sociobiology" and 1,218 under "human evolution." While Wilson's archenemy, the Marxist media hound Stephen Jay Gould, has largely been reduced to negativity and obfuscation, many others have responded gallantly to Socio biology's challenge. Among the most enjoyable introductions to neo- Darwinism are The Third Chimpanzee, by the bracing Jared Diamond, and How the Mind Works, by the entertaining Steven Pinker. Matt Ridley's Thatch erite perspective adds rigor to The Red Queen and The Origins of Virtue. Robert Wright's neoliberal The Moral Animal is a good read, though he sometimes tries to make Darwinism sound like a beta release of Clintonism.

Despite the success of neo-Darwinism in answering some fundamental questions about human behavior and in attracting many of the best minds of our time, it has not been terribly popular with either Left or Right. While the Religious Right attacks Darwin's theory of what we evolved from, the Left clamps down on Darwin's theory of what we evolved to. The Left has long denounced sociobiological research for validating what conservatives have assumed all along: that human nature-with its sex differences and its stress on individual, family, and ethnic self- interest-is an innate heritage, not a blank slate that can be wiped clean by speech codes, sensitivity workshops, and reeducation camps.

Not that the Left hasn't tried: Stalin shipped his Darwinists to the Gulag. In the politically correct West, evolution-oriented scientists haven't been murdered. Yet Wilson had a bucket of ice water poured on his head, IQ scientist Arthur Jensen needed a bodyguard, the police investigated racial-difference scholar J. P. Rushton for six months, Edinburgh University fired IQ re searcher Chris Brand despite his 26 years of tenure, and a mob of protesters beat up Hans Eysenck, Britain's most prominent psychologist.

Wilson's orthodox Darwinian sociobiology made countless enemies in academia. Centrist anthropologists John Tooby and Leda Cosmides accordingly relaunched sociobiology under the neutral name of "evolutionary psychology." Pronouncing themselves the truest True Believers in equality, Tooby and Cos mides portrayed human nature as almost monolithically uniform and proclaimed that evolutionary psychology should study only human similarities.

But while egalitarianism served as a useful cover for infiltrating neo- Darwinism into academia, it proved a largely useless methodology for learning about humanity. Why? Because knowledge consists of contrasts. To learn much about human nature, we need to look for patterns of similarities and differences among humans. It is not surprising, then, that evolutionary psychology has become primarily the study of sex differences. Impressively-considering the stranglehold left-wing feminism has on academia-many of the leading scholars in the field are female. Evolutionary psychologists like Sarah Blaffer Hrdy often began as feminist avengers, seeking to demonstrate that the importance of females in Darwinian selection had been grossly underrated. They have succeeded-but in the process, their work on how women choose and manipulate mates has, ironically, undermined the feminist convention of women as the powerless victims of patriarchy. They have thus confirmed what conservatives, not to mention any guy struggling to get a date, have always known: Women exercise enormous informal power.

The biophobia of the politically pious originates in their dread of admitting the importance of human biodiversity. Old-fashioned leftists like Karl Marx hated evolutionary logic's implication that mankind is not perfectible. New-fangled "identity politics" leftists have been driven berserk by the Darwinian research that suggests that the race and gender distinctions they are so obsessed with may stem not purely from societal forces but also from innate differences among groups. Prince ton philosopher Peter Singer, however, has recently suggested that the Left should follow evolutionary psychology by abandoning feminist resentment in favor of (limited) biological realism. In Singer's new book, A Darwinian Left, he argues that leftists could use the insights of neo-Darwinism to "promote structures that foster cooperation rather than competition." The sophomoric Singer doesn't grasp that socio biological altruism is a two-edged sword: The most effective way to get males to cooperate with each other is to get them fired up about competing with somebody else. For example, black and white college-football players work together far better than the other students on campus precisely because if they don't, their opponents will crush them. Without competition to impose costs, people naturally discriminate in favor of their kin and race.

You might think that conservatives would give sociobiology a sympathetic hearing, if only because anything Stephen Jay Gould abhors can't be all bad. And, indeed, many right-wing heavy weights like James Q. Wilson (The Moral Sense), Francis Fukuyama (The Great Disruption), and Charles Murray ("Deeper into the Brain," NR, January 24) have increasingly built their worldviews on a Dar winian plinth. James Wilson's book is an ambitious attempt to ground human morality in the latest evolutionary research into bonding, attachment, and reciprocal altruism. Fukuyama draws on sociobiology to illuminate the all- important springs of social order. Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full is the Great Human Bio diversity Novel. Note how Wolfe carefully describes each character in terms of his muscle-to-fat ratio. (This is far less wacky than it sounds: Tes tosterone levels influence both muscularity and masculine personality traits like ag gressiveness.)

Yet many conservatives, wary of the atheistic motives of some of Darwin's followers, remain suspicious of socio biology. This anti- Darwinist tradition keeps conservatives from noticing that neo- Darwinian science is corroborating and extending much of the conservative worldview. After all, Darwin himself was crucially inspired by the free-market economics of Adam Smith. And as Pope John Paul II's recent endorsement of evolution demonstrated, the theory of natural selection is reasonably compatible with the Judeo-Christian tradition. The scientific school that bears Darwin's name has not demystified the cosmos. Rather, it has given us that much more to marvel at.