Although science may claim to be objective, scientists cannot avoid the
influence of their own values on their research. In The State of
Nature, Gregg Mitman examines the relationship between issues in early
twentieth-century American society and the sciences of evolution and
ecology to reveal how explicit social and political concerns influenced
the scientific agenda of biologists at the University of Chicago and
throughout the United States during the first half of this century.
Reacting against the view of nature red in tooth and claw, ecologists
and behavioral biologists such as Warder Clyde Allee, Alfred Emerson,
and their colleagues developed research programs they hoped would
validate and promote an image of human society as essentially
cooperative rather than competitive. Mitman argues that Allee's
religious training and pacifist convictions shaped his pioneering
studies of animal communities in a way that could be generalized to
denounce the view that war is in our genes.