Richard Lewontin
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Sociobiology is a neo-Darwinian synthesis of scientific disciplines that attempts to explain social behavior in all species by considering the evolutionary advantages the behaviors may have. It is often considered a branch of biology and sociology, but also draws from ethology, anthropology, evolution, zoology, archaeology, population genetics and other disciplines. Within the study of human societies, sociobiology is closely related to the fields of human behavioral ecology and evolutionary psychology.
Sociobiology investigates social behaviors, such as mating patterns, territorial fights, pack hunting, and the hive society of social insects. Just as selection pressure led to animals evolving useful ways of interacting with the natural environment, it led to the genetic evolution of advantageous social behavior. Applied to nonhumans, sociobiology is noncontroversial.
Sociobiology has become one of the greatest scientific controversies of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, especially in the context of explaining human behavior. Criticism, most notably made by Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, centers on sociobiology's contention that genes play a central role in human behavior and that variation in traits such as aggressiveness can be explained by variation in peoples' biology and is not necessarily a product of the person's social environment. Many sociobiologists, however, cite a complex relationship between nature and nurture. In response to the controversy, anthropologist John Tooby and psychologist Leda Cosmides launched evolutionary psychology as a branch of sociobiology made less controversial avoiding questions of human biodiversity.
See also
- Concepts
- Biocultural anthropology
- Biosocial theory
- Cultural selection theory
- Dual inheritance theory
- Ethics and evolutionary psychology
- Evolutionary psychology
- Evolutionary developmental psychology
- Human behavioral ecology
- Iterated prisoner's dilemma
- Kin selection
- Prisoner's dilemma
- Social evolution
- Sociophysiology
- Evolutionary ethics
- Well-known sociobiologists
- Richard Dawkins
- Edward O. Wilson
- W. D. Hamilton
- Robert Trivers
- George C. Williams
- Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
- Richard Machalek
- Steven Pinker
- Francois Nielsen
- Books
- Sociobiology: The New Synthesis by E. O. Wilson, 1975
- The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker
- The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
- Biology, Ideology and Human Nature: Not In Our Genes by Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose & Leon Kamin
