Sociobiology

Social Theory in Sociobiology

The term sociobiology first came to notice when the entomologist E. O. Wilson published his great work Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Wilson 1975). Although associated with Wilson ever since, the movement now known as sociobiology was in fact based predominantly on the insights of the English evolutionary geneticist, W. D. Hamilton (1936–2000). Hamilton had read genetics at Cambridge in the early 1960s and at a time when Darwin's work was still very much under a cloud as far as undergraduate-level studies were concerned. Although Darwin's great work on the origin of species had been published in 1859, acceptance of his theories by the biological establishment had been very slow in coming. The principal reason was that Darwin himself had professed a “Lamarckian” theory of “inheritance of acquired characteristics” (he called it Pangenesis, after a Greek precedent) that failed to accord well with his crucial mechanism of natural selection. Because naturally selected traits must be inherited to have any effect on evolution, Darwin's failure to correctly account for inheritance was a serious obstacle to the acceptance of his theory. Furthermore, it was an obstacle that got considerably more serious when Gregor Mendel's (1822–1884) discovery of the laws of inheritance finally came to general notice at the turn of the twentieth century. At first it seemed as if Mendelian inheritance contradicted evolution by natural selection, and it was not until the 1930s that R. A. Fisher (1890–1963) and others proved the contrary and established Darwinism on a firm genetic and mathematical foundation. This, in the subtitle of another famous book, J. S. Huxley's Evolution, became known as the “modern synthesis” (Huxley 1942).

Ironically, in view of his association with sociobiology, Wilson himself always retained a link with an alternative tradition of evolutionary thinking that stemmed from Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), also of course the founder of British sociology. Spencer was responsible for popularizing the term evolution—used by Darwin only once in The Origin of Species, where “evolved” is the final word of the book. Part of the reason for Darwin's reluctance was that his concept of evolution was very different from Spencer's. Whereas Spencer saw evolution as a cosmic process of progressive development toward larger, more complex, and more integrated entities culminating ultimately in Victorian industrial society, Darwin spoke of [Page II-296]“descent with modification” and interpreted evolution simply as a process of gradual change whose antithesis was revolution (sudden change), by contrast to the dissolution that Spencer's understanding of evolution implied. Specifically, Darwin denied that evolution was inherently progressive, and his theory contrasted with Spencer's in being scientific, and based on observable facts, rather than being philosophical in inspiration, and founded on a belief in the inevitability of progress. However, confusion of Spencer's and Darwin's concepts of evolution remains common, especially in the social sciences (Freeman 1974).

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