Sociobiology

In his watershed 1975 work Sociobiology, Edward O. Wilson defined sociobiology as the systematic study of the biological basis for human social behavior. Wilson hoped to define more clearly the biological foundations of human social behavior. His later work on the biophilia hypothesis combines work on human sociobiology with the political philosophy of conservation biology to suggest that the innate, evolved human affinity for other life provides ample ammunition for an environmental ethic. Traditionally, parceling out the relative influence of genetic or biological and cultural determinants of behavior has been the primary task of the social sciences and much of the humanities. After the introduction of sociobiology, however, some of this weighty task could be shouldered by natural scientists.

The seeds of sociobiology were planted in the late 1960s. The theory of kin selection, which suggested that genetically-related individuals within a particular species operated as the unit of evolutionary selection, became an increasingly popular explanatory tool for animal behavior. Wilson's The Insect Societies detailed many of the ways that social insects communicate and associate, and was the first scholarly work to effectively fuse entomology and population biology. Wilson argued that sociality in animals could be explained through adaptation and differential reproductive success, which ultimately depended on the perpetuation of genes. It was Wilson's seminal work Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, however, that first attempted to extend the genetic basis of social behavior beyond invertebrates to vertebrates including Homo sapiens.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of Wilson's work, which is considered a milestone in zoology and biology. But Wilson was also harshly criticized for applying sociobiological theory to human behavior and was accused by biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin of reducing human behavior to biology or genetics. Gould and Lewontin founded the Sociobiology Study Group (SSG) at Harvard University, dedicated to challenging the claims of sociobiology. Critics also argued that if sociobiological theory were true, then genetically-based differences in the capacities of humans could lead to racism, sexism, and other injustices.

The fear was that the plight of minorities or other oppressed peoples might be attributed to genetic deficiencies of some kind, creating the worst sort of social Darwinism.

Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene further challenged the SSG by providing a theory of genetic selection that depended, even more than Wilson's work, on the determinative power of genes. Genes, Dawkins argued, essentially act as the engines of natural selection. Genotypes provided the template for phenotypes that behave in a selfish and competitive manner, so that even altruism could be explained as a programmed maneuver to preserve genetic lineages.

The complexity of human behavior and new insights into animal behavior from noted ethologists like Marc Bekoff and Jane Goodall—such as uncertainties about cognitive processing, relationships between the mind and body, and the role of emotion in determining behavior—complicate simple applications of sociobiology. The complex cognitive lives of humans and other animals continue to challenge reductionistic descriptions of sociality.

Despite the criticisms, research supporting Wilson's original contention continues to accumulate. Sociobiology paints a more complex picture than the critics generally acknowledge. For Wilson and his intellectual offspring, human nature is not reducible to either genes or cultural influences. Instead, for them, genes and cultures co-evolve, and the possible range of responses to the environment is determined by a set of epigenetic rules inherited from a deep, biological past. These epigenetic rules of mental development likely include, according to Wilson, adaptive responses to the environment, a predisposition that Wilson termed biophilia.

...