RKUL: Time Well Spent, 1/1/2026
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Darkness in El Dorado
11 min read
Linked in the article (7 min read)
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Sociobiology
13 min read
The article extensively discusses Ullica Segerstråle's 'Defenders of the Truth' about the sociobiology debate involving E.O. Wilson, Lewontin, and Gould. Understanding the scientific framework and controversy around sociobiology would provide essential context for readers unfamiliar with this pivotal scientific dispute of the 1970s-80s.
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Dual inheritance theory
11 min read
The article discusses Joe Henrich's work on cultural evolution and explicitly mentions gene-culture co-evolution as a framework for understanding how evolutionary forces shape cultural variation. This scientific concept bridges evolutionary biology and anthropology, directly relevant to Henrich's 'The Secret of Our Success' highlighted in the piece.
Your time is finite. The world is awash in slop to help you squander it. Here are my latest picks for spending it well instead. Feel free to add more in the comments.
Books, what else?
With the turn of a new year, many find themselves seized by the need to commit to some ambitious plan or another. And as any year-round gym-goer knows, these resolutions have a way of being decidedly front-loaded for the majority of their makers. Which, is perhaps all the more argument for either keeping them modest or starting straight in on the best of them. Either way, if it’s reading material or edification you’re after, I’ve got you. You can sprint through the following books while the New Year spirit is still upon you and know you’ve spent the first days of the dawning year well. Or read one every couple months and you’ll have guaranteed yourself some excellent company all year long. These titles have stood up to repeat reading for me, but if none are new (or calling to you again), perhaps you will prefer a previous New Year’s post where I recommended an entire year’s reading list if you were to commit to precisely 20 pages a day for 365 days.
First, a fitting book for this Substack: at the intersection of science, history and politics, Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond. This work grew out of Ullica Segerstråle’s dissertation, and it is at once a very broad and fine-grained description and analysis of the debate around sociobiology that began in the early 1970s and continued through the 1980s. The central players are E. O. Wilson, Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, but the bit players read like a who’s who in evolutionary biology and adjacent fields; John Maynard Smith, W. D. Hamilton, Richard Dawkins, George Price and Noam Chomsky all make appearances. Segerstråle, a sociologist by training, employs an ethnographic method, sitting in on meetings of the two camps, the pro-sociobiologists led by Wilson and the anti-sociobiologists led by Lewontin and Gould. The events recounted in Defenders of the Truth date back about 50 years now. Many of the principals have died. But, you can’t help but discern very similar dynamics to those currently seen in academia’s “woke” period, when groups of
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