Sociobiological Theory

In 1975, Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson published Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, wherein he outlined a framework for investigating the biological basis of social behavior. As a branch of evolutionary biology, sociobiology aims to use demographic parameters (e.g., growth and mortality rates, gender and age distributions) and the genetic structure of populations to predict patterns of social organization across species. One of the conceptual tools sociobiology contributes to investigations of social behavior is an analysis of ultimate causation. Whereas proximate causal analyses focus on, for example, the behavioral, developmental, physiological, or neural mechanisms operating within an individual's lifetime to produce a particular phenotype, an ultimate causal analysis focuses on the selective forces that operated over generations and led to the evolution of the specific phenotype ...