The ivory tower is a buyer's market. Prizes tend to go to people in established disciplines, working on established problems, generating university revenues in the form of federal grants.

For seven years, the Program in Evolution and Human Behavior (EHB) was a glorious exception. In 1986, departing Academic Vice President Billy E. Frye and Graduate School Dean John D'Arms gave seven mostly junior faculty, in five different departments, half a million dollars and a suite of cushy offices in the Rackham Building to study something completely new and completely interdisciplinary: Evolution and human behavior.

The point was to see how Darwinian theory, which had revolutionized the study of animal behavior, might revolutionize the study of human behavior.

Those seven faculty gleefully took the money and "ran." They ran to Shark Bay, Western Australia–to study bottle-nosed dolphins (Barbara Smuts, anthropology and psychology); to Mammoth Lakes, California–to study Belding's ground squirrels (Warren Holmes, psychology); to Kibale, Uganda–to study chimpanzees (Richard Wrangham, anthropology and biology). And they ran to Umeå, Sweden–to study 19th century demographic transition (Bobbi Low, natural resources); or stayed in Ann Arbor–to study mating (David Buss, psychology), to speculate about moral systems (Richard Alexander, biology), or to inject Darwinian theory into modern medicine (Randy Nesse, psychiatry).

In time, two faculty left, and three were added, two of whom study humans (Kim Hill, in anthropology, works on Paraguayan hunter-gatherer demography; Beverly Strassman, in anthropology, works on hormones and fertility in Mali; and John Mitani, also in anthropology, works on the great apes).

By many standards, the EHB program was wildly successful. Students, associates, and faculty collectively published over a hundred books and articles. Many won prizes–Richard Wrangham won a MacArthur award; Barb Smuts and John Mitani won Young Investigator Awards from the National Science Foundation; Richard Alexander won the Henry Russel lectureship and a distinguished professorship. And many got popular press.

The Program itself never made any money, however, and on June 30th of last year, its funds ran out. But not before they'd had an effect. Believe it or not, the Evolution and Human Behavior Program at the University of Michigan was the center of a scientific revolution.

In an era when the words "evolution," "adaptation," and even "Darwinism" were anathema to people in anthropology, human biology, psychology, and even medicine, it was an oasis of intellectual freedom. It was a Mecca for its handful of faculty, post-docs, students, associates and weekly visitors who came to lecture from all fields and from all parts of the country on how human biology, and the study of human behavior generally, might finally be grounded in a single, general, deductive theory: Darwin's.

The work done under the Program, and the excitement it generated in Ann Arbor and elsewhere, has changed the face of academics, and of science, forever. With EHB's demise, some revolutionaries will die; but others are not fading away. In Thomas Kuhn's Scientific Revolution terms, they're becoming "normal" scientists. The work they're doing is now revenue-generating.

Postscript: EHB may be dead, but several of its faculty survive, as does its Thursday afternoon lecture series now funded by constituent departments and housed in Rackham. And before it gave up the ghost, EHB spawned an international organization–the Human Behavior and Evolution Society–which will hold its sixth annual meeting June 16-19 in Ann Arbor. For information on that meeting, on the lecture series or on the faculty, call the Department of Biology at 764-0471–Laura Betzig.