The Neighborhood Project by David Sloan Wilson

Author:David Sloan Wilson [WILSON, DAVID SLOAN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SCI027000
ISBN: 9780316175258
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2011-08-23T16:00:00+00:00

TONY HAD DONE AS MUCH AS a president of a society can do to expose his tribe to evolutionary theory. In addition to the symposium on prevention science from an evolutionary perspective that he organized for the day preceding the conference, he scheduled me as a keynote speaker during the conference. The symposium was attended by perhaps fifty people, including two program officers from major federal agencies that fund prevention-science research, who were there to see if this was a promising new direction. Some of the speakers were prevention scientists newly interested in evolution, while others were evolutionists like myself newly interested in prevention science. Everyone was a teacher and a student at the same time, which is the ideal climate for respectful and productive intellectual discourse. The audience was fascinated, but it was clear that most of them were encountering evolutionary theory in relation to their subject for the first time.

My talk at the symposium was on the Binghamton Neighborhood Project, then only two years old. I was as nervous as a music student giving my first recital. These guys were the pros. Compared with them, I felt like a baby just learning to stack blocks. Would they tell me to come back when I had grown up? Would they cluck approvingly like indulgent parents? Or did I actually have something to offer, right then and there, with my GIS maps and my way of reflecting on the information based on evolutionary theory? It seemed to me that I did have something to offer, especially the ambitious scope of studying all aspects of a human population the size of a city from a unified theoretical perspective, with an empirical infrastructure to match.

Everyone wanted to know what the two program officers thought about the symposium. Prevention science wouldn’t exist without federal support, and many prevention scientists get their salaries from grants in addition to research expenses. If their grants aren’t funded, they’re out of a job. How likely would it be for a grant proposal based on evolutionary theory to be funded by a federal agency such as the National Institute on Drug Abuse or the National Institute for Mental Health? One of the program officers replied that while the ideas were very interesting, her advice was to avoid using the word “evolution” in a grant proposal. It wasn’t that the reviewers of the proposal would be hostile to evolution; it would just be so foreign to them that they wouldn’t know what to do with it.

I was stunned. I might expect a member of a local school board in the Bible Belt to say something like this but not a program officer for a major federal scientific funding agency. The Ivory Archipelago was even less united than I thought.

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