guardian | A disagreement between the twin giants of genetic theory, Richard Dawkins and EO Wilson, is now being fought out by rival academic camps in an effort to understand how species evolve.
The learned spat was prompted by the publication of a searingly critical review of Wilson's new book, The Social Conquest of Earth, in Prospect magazine this month. The review, written by Dawkins, author of the popular and influential books The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker and The God Delusion, has prompted more letters and on-line comment than any other article in the recent history of the magazine and attacks Wilson's theory "as implausible and as unsupported by evidence".
"I am not being funny when I say of Edward Wilson's latest book that there are interesting and informative chapters on human evolution, and on the ways of social insects (which he knows better than any man alive), and it was a good idea to write a book comparing these two pinnacles of social evolution, but unfortunately one is obliged to wade through many pages of erroneous and downright perverse misunderstandings of evolutionary theory," Dawkins writes.
The Oxford evolutionary biologist, 71, has also infuriated many readers by listing other established academics who, he says, are on his side when it comes to accurately representing the mechanism by which species evolve. Wilson, in a short piece penned promptly in response to Dawkins's negative review, was also clearly annoyed by this attempt to outflank him.
"In any case," Wilson writes, "making such lists is futile. If science depended on rhetoric and polls, we would still be burning objects with phlogiston [a mythical fire-like element] and navigating with geocentric maps."
Wilson, 83, is a Harvard professor of evolutionary biology who became famous in the early 1970s with his study of social species in his books The Insect Societiesand Sociobiology. He is internationally acknowledged as "the father of sociobiology" and is the world's leading authority on ants.
For lay spectators, the row is a symptom of the long and controversial evolution of the very idea of evolution. At root it is a dispute about whether natural selection, the theory of "the survival of the fittest" first put forward by Charles Darwin in 1859, occurs only to preserve the single gene. Wilson is an advocate of "multi-level selection theory", a development of the idea of "kin selection", which holds that other biological, social and even environmental priorities may be behind the process.
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