Concept
Sociobiology
Overview
Sociobiology is a field of biology that aims to explain social behavior in terms of evolution. It draws from disciplines including psychology, ethology, anthropology, evolution, zoology, archaeology, and population genetics. Within the study of human societies, sociobiology is closely related to evolutionary anthropology, human behavioral ecology, evolutionary psychology, and sociology.
Sociobiology investigates social behaviors such as mating patterns, territorial fights, pack hunting, and the hive society of social insects. It argues that just as selection pressure led to animals evolving useful ways of interacting with the natural environment, so also it led to the genetic evolution of advantageous social behavior.
While the term "sociobiology" originated at least as early as the 1940s; the concept did not gain major recognition until the publication of E. O. Wilson's book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis in 1975. The field quickly became the subject of scientific controversy. Critics, led by Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, argued that genes played a role in human behavior, but that traits such as aggressiveness could be explained by social environment rather than by biology. Sociobiologists responded by pointing to the complex relationship between nature and nurture. Among sociobiologists, the controversy between laying weight to different levels of selection was settled between D.S. Wilson and E.O. Wilson in 2007.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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Etiology proper comprehends all those branches of natural science in which the chief concern is the knowledge of cause and effect. The sciences teach how, according to an invariable rule, one condition of matter is necessarily followed by a certain other condition; how one change necessarily conditions and brings about a certain other change; this sort of teaching is called _explanation_. The principal sciences in…
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea
States what Sociobiology is; the author is tied to Sociobiology in the knowledge graph.
Dominant species belonging to the larger groups within each class tend to give birth to new and dominant forms; so that each large group tends to become still larger, and at the same time more divergent in character. But as all groups cannot thus go on increasing in size, for the world would not hold them, the more dominant groups beat the less dominant. This tendency in the large groups to go on increasing in size…
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
States what Sociobiology is.
Now, in the lower degree occupied by plant-life and by the vegetative life of animal organisms, it is the _stimulus_ which takes the place of knowledge as a means of determining the individual manifestations of this omnipresent will and as a mediator between the outer world and the changes of such a being; finally, in inorganic Nature, it is _physical agency in general_; and when, as here, observation takes place…
Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and On the Will in Nature
The author is tied to Sociobiology in the knowledge graph.
Philosophers who discussed Sociobiology
- David Stove
- James Mark Baldwin
- Richard Dawkins
- Philip Kitcher
- Arthur Schopenhauer
- Mary Midgley
- Daniel Dennett
Related ideas
- E. O. Wilson
- Falsifiability
- Harvard University Press
- Sociology
- Archaeology
- Leviathan (Hobbes book)
- Natural selection
- Noam Chomsky
- Naturalistic fallacy
- Ontogeny
- Psychology
- Pulitzer Prize
- Stephen Jay Gould
- Thomas Hobbes
- The New York Times
- Tabula rasa
- Time (magazine)
- Altruism
- Zoology
- Richard Lewontin
- Society
- New Scientist
- Morality
- Nature (journal)
Place in the tradition
Part of Evolutionary ethics.