The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 250

it To me it's off the wall to think you could have any behavior without some genetic base' Sarah Blaffer Hrdy 1 By Georgia Litwack "TT midst a barrage of claims and denuncia- tions that has marked the birth of sociobiology, the gentle, temperate voice of Sarah Blaffer Hrdy is sweet to the ear. This new scientific discipline, sociobiology, is the study of the biological basis of social behavior. Its chief spokesman is Harvard professor Edward O. Wilson, whose blockbuster on the subject, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Harvard University Press, 1975) caused angry reaction reminiscent of the 1925 Scopes trial in Tennessee. Sociobiologists maintain that the behavior of all creatures, including man, is the product of an interplay between genes and environment.

They therefore enrage those who say cultural factors alone can shape our destinies. "Barroom generalities" and "one more fad" are some of the milder epithets leveled at Wilson; others are "racist," "elitist" and "sexist." It is the latest round in an old and bitter Georgia Litwack profiled the Boston Symphony Orchestra's Doriot Anthony Dwyer in the February 25 issue of New England. fight over the question, which has greater force, Nature or Nurture? But this time the light is overlaid with ethical, moral, philosophical and religious questions. I Irdy (the name is pronounced her-dee) is neither as visible nor as vocal as many of her colleagues who have closed ranks on both sides of the issue. Nonetheless, Wilson describes her as "comparable to the best" field observers and endowed with "a formidable combination of abilities and talents." It is her extensive research into family life among the sacred Hanuman langur monkeys of India that has brought widespread attention to her work.

Her book on the subject, The Langurs of Abu: Female and Male Strategies of Reproduction (Harvard University Press, 1977) was described bv zoologist George Schaller as "the best book on primates I have read." to learn what we really are and not just what we hope we are." Entomologist Edward O. Wilson Sociobiology as a clearly defined field is in its infancy. Confusion is rampant. Critics raise the specter of diabolical scientists manipulating genes, of an anti-ethic that destroys free will, of hope abandoned for betterment of human condition. The storm rages in the pages of learned journals and diverse publications from Business Week to House and Garden.

It marches across T-shirts proclaiming the passion of the leading radical left within American science "Science for the People!" Meanwhile, Hrdy continues her prodigious reading and copious writing and gears up for more field work with what one writer characterizes as "a healthy sense of the fallibility of all scientific theory." She was born in Houston in 1946, the daughter of a socialite and an oilman. She broke with the family tradition of a Wellesley education by graduating summa cum laude from Radcliffe in 1969. She got her PhD from Harvard in 1975. A Phi Beta Kappa, she is now a research fellow at Harvard's Peabody Museum. Harvard is the world's foremost center for the study of pure sociobiology theory.

Her husband, Daniel B. Hrdy (M.D., Harvard Medical School, 1976) who has collaborated with her on a portion of her research and publication on langur behavior, is presently a research fellow in the department of microbiology at the Harvard Medical School. He is studying the evolution of viruses. The Hrdys have a one-year-old daughter, Katrinka. They live in Cambridge.

As an undergraduate in anthropology and pri-matology, Sarah Hrdy was intrigued when one of her professors casually mentioned a puzzling phenomenon concerning a group of sacred monkeys turn to page 8 i 4 A it 0 -g 1 V' TJl SSk fl, A 11 HI-Ml' Sara Blatter Hrdy in her At Abu, Dr. Daniel Hrdy offers peanuts to lure langurs onto weighing device suspended from a banyan tree..