Sociobiology
Modified: 2023-08-08 (9:04 PM CDST)
Sociobiology, in its most recent form, dates from the 1970s and the
work of Edward O. Wilson. However, the roots of sociobiology are
older. The first use of the term sociobiology likely dates to the
work of Warder C. Allee, Alfred E. Emerson, and their associates in
their 1949 book, Principles of Animal Ecology.
- Sociobiogists study the behavior of social animals, including
humans.
- Sociobiology developed from studies in population biology and
genetics.
- Research in the social insects, especially ants and honey
bees, had shown that the old Darwinian maxim of individual selection,
of individuals working for their own reproductive success, did not
seem to apply to those groups.
- The worker castes of those species do
not reproduce; yet, their behavior in defense of their nests was
tenacious and often life-threatening to the defenders. How could such
behavior be explained?
- The answers began to crystallize when Hamilton (1964) developed
the concept of inclusive fitness.
- Inclusive fitness incorporated not
only one's own reproductive success, but also the reproductive
success of relatives.
- In the social insects, all of the workers born
of the same queen are full sisters, but, they are all even more
closely related to their mother, the queen.
- So, if one transfers the
logic of evolution from the individual to genes, then the behavior of
social insects begins to make sense. When workers die in defense of
their nests, they are more likely to increase the likelihood of their
genes' survival, even though they died in the effort.
- Sociobiology, however, is far more than the study of social
insects.
- It is the study of all social species.
- Further, it is an
attempt to find the evolutionary pressures which led to the evolution
of social behavior in diverse groups of animals.
- Sociobiology is most
controversial when such analyses are directed at human behavior.
- For
example, the question of human criminal behavior may be analyzed via
sociobiology.
- I should emphasize strongly at this point that such
analyses are extremely incomplete at this point.
- A good example of
the kind of controversy that sociobiology causes when it studies
humans was a conference on criminal behavior that was canceled
forcibly in 1993 at the University of Maryland.
- Some of the
participants in that conference were to present theories and data
concerning the genetics of criminal behavior in humans. Why are such
data controversial?
- Quite simply, we live in a society that has a
philosophical tradition that says that our behavior is primarily
shaped by our external environments.
- When others suggest that our
internal environments, our genes, also have the power to shape our
behavior, we recoil away from those people and their ideas.
- It is
most interesting to note that we do not have the same response to
sociobiology when it is applied to other animals.
- We breed chickens
and dogs to be more aggressive as a matter of course.
- One can hardly
drive through South Louisiana on a Saturday night without running
into a cock fight.
- But, when sociobiologists suggest that some humans
may have been naturally selected in the same way, we refuse to accept
those arguments.
The modern catalyst of sociobiological research is E. O. Wilson,
who taught at Harvard. His textbook (Wilson, 1975) on
sociobiology reinvigorated that field. He and sociobiology have been
mired in the kind of controversy described above since the
publication of that text.
References
Alled, W.C., Emerson, A.E., Park, O., Park, T., & Schmidt, K.
P. (1949). Principles of Animal Ecology. Philadelphia, PA: W.
B. Saunders.
Hamilton, W. D. (1964). The genetical theory of social behavior: I
and II. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 7, 1-52.
Wilson, E. O. (1975). Sociobiology: The new synthesis.
Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
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