Illinois Institute of Technology social sciences professor wins prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship Award
Chicago, IL — April 19, 2002 —
Ullica Segerstrale, professor of social sciences at IIT, has been awarded one of the 184 Guggenheim Fellowship Awards for 2002. Guggenheim Fellows are appointed on the basis of distinguished achievement in their fields in the past and exceptional promise for the future. Segerstrale was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the category of biography for her work on a book about the life of theoretical biologist William D. Hamilton, widely regarded as the most important evolutionist of the 20th century. Hamilton was responsible for a paradigm shift in biology but did not get timely recognition, something that at one point drove him from his native England to the United States. “He was a typical misunderstood genius,” says Segerstrale.
Segerstrale plans to use the Fellowship prize money to help her travel around the world and interview colleagues and relatives of Hamilton. “He was an extremely interesting and complex personality but didn’t speak a lot about himself,” Segerstrale says of Hamilton, an Oxford professor, who died suddenly in Africa in 2000 after an expedition to Africa researching the origins of the AIDS virus. “He has close colleagues and family in the United States, New Zealand, Brazil, Switzerland, England, Scotland, and Italy that I would like to interview,” she says.
Since 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has awarded more than $200 million in fellowships to more than 15,000 individuals. Fellowships are awarded to artists, scholars, and scientists to help them pursue their work. This year, there were 2800 applicants for awards totaling $6,750,000. Decisions are based on recommendations from hundreds of expert advisors and are approved by the foundation’s Board of Trustees. Fellows this year include writers, painters, sculptors, photographers, filmmakers, biological scientists, social scientists, and scholars in the humanities.
Segerstrale is the first faculty member at IIT to win the prestigious award, which Paul Barrett, chairman of the university’s Lewis Department of Humanities, describes as an “American Nobel Prize.” It is especially notable that Segerstrale was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for her biography because IIT is best known as an engineering school, Barrett explains.
Segerstrale focuses on how science and society shape and influence one another. In recent years, she has concentrated on sociobiology, a field born in the 1960s when theoretical biologist William D. Hamilton, still a graduate student, introduced the “gene’s eye view” theory of evolution. Sociobiology was later popularized by Edward O. Wilson in his famous book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis.
Previous to Hamilton, evolutionary biologists believed that evolution was driven by “survival of the fittest,” in which individuals best suited to their environments lived and reproduced, while individuals least suited to their environment perished. Hamilton shifted the focus from individual survival to survival of the individual’s genes.
Among the behaviors that inspired the new sociobiological theory is termed “altruistic behavior”, where animals in crisis situations, such as being attacked by a predator, will attempt to “save” individuals closely related to themselves: siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles.
Hamilton posited that the force behind this “altruism” was that the siblings and cousins of a particular individual share many of the same genes, and thus by saving these relatives, an individual is helping their shared genes make it to the next generation. This theory was later coined “kin selection.”
Segerstrale is the author of Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond (Oxford University Press, 2000), and co-editor of Nonverbal Communication: Where Nature Meets Culture (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997), and editor of Beyond the Science Wars: The Missing Discourse about Science and Society (SUNY Press, 2000).
She is a visiting sociology professor at ETH, the Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland.
Founded in 1890, IIT is a Ph.D.-granting technological university that awards degrees in the sciences, mathematics, and engineering, as well as architecture, psychology, design, business, and law. IIT’s interprofessional, technology-focused curriculum prepares the university’s 6,200 students for leadership roles in an increasingly complex and culturally diverse global workplace.
