Sociobiology
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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 allied to evolutionary anthropology, human behavioral ecology, evolutionary psychology,[1] and sociology.[2][3]
Sociobiology investigates social behaviors such as
While the term "sociobiology" originated at least as early as the 1940s; the concept did not gain major recognition until the publication of
Definition
E. O. Wilson defined sociobiology as "the extension of population biology and evolutionary theory to social organization".[6]
Sociobiology is based on the premise that some behaviors (social and individual) are at least partly inherited and can be affected by natural selection.[7] It begins with the idea that behaviors have evolved over time, similar to the way that physical traits are thought to have evolved. It predicts that animals will act in ways that have proven to be evolutionarily successful over time. This can, among other things, result in the formation of complex social processes conducive to evolutionary fitness.
The discipline seeks to explain behavior as a product of natural selection. Behavior is therefore seen as an effort to preserve one's genes in the population. Inherent in sociobiological reasoning is the idea that certain genes or gene combinations that influence particular behavioral traits can be inherited from generation to generation.[5]
For example, newly dominant male lions often kill cubs in the pride that they did not sire. This behavior is adaptive because killing the cubs eliminates competition for their own offspring and causes the nursing females to come into heat faster, thus allowing more of his genes to enter into the population. Sociobiologists would view this instinctual cub-killing behavior as being inherited through the genes of successfully reproducing male lions, whereas non-killing behavior may have died out as those lions were less successful in reproducing.[8]
History
The philosopher of biology Daniel Dennett suggested that the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes was the first proto-sociobiologist, arguing that in his 1651 book Leviathan Hobbes had explained the origins of morals in human society from an amoral sociobiological perspective.[9]
The geneticist of animal behavior John Paul Scott coined the word sociobiology at a 1948 conference on genetics and social behavior, which called for a conjoint development of field and laboratory studies in animal behavior research.[10] With John Paul Scott's organizational efforts, a "Section of Animal Behavior and Sociobiology" of the Ecological Society of America was created in 1956, which became a Division of Animal Behavior of the American Society of Zoology in 1958. In 1956, E. O. Wilson came in contact with this emerging sociobiology through his PhD student Stuart A. Altmann, who had been in close relation with the participants to the 1948 conference. Altmann developed his own brand of sociobiology to study the social behavior of rhesus macaques, using statistics, and was hired as a "sociobiologist" at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in 1965. Wilson's sociobiology is different from John Paul Scott's or Altmann's, insofar as he drew on mathematical models of social behavior centered on the maximization of the genetic fitness by W. D. Hamilton, Robert Trivers, John Maynard Smith, and George R. Price. The three sociobiologies by Scott, Altmann and Wilson have in common to place naturalist studies at the core of the research on animal social behavior and by drawing alliances with emerging research methodologies, at a time when "biology in the field" was threatened to be made old-fashioned by "modern" practices of science (laboratory studies, mathematical biology, molecular biology).[11]
Once a specialist term, "sociobiology" became widely known in 1975 when Wilson published his book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, which sparked an intense controversy. Since then "sociobiology" has largely been equated with Wilson's vision. The book pioneered and popularized the attempt to explain the evolutionary mechanics behind social behaviors such as altruism, aggression, and nurturance, primarily in ants (Wilson's own research specialty) and other Hymenoptera, but also in other animals. However, the influence of evolution on behavior has been of interest to biologists and philosophers since soon after the discovery of evolution itself. Peter Kropotkin's Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, written in the early 1890s, is a popular example. The final chapter of the book is devoted to sociobiological explanations of human behavior, and Wilson later wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning book, On Human Nature, that addressed human behavior specifically.[12]
Edward H. Hagen writes in The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology that sociobiology is, despite the public controversy regarding the applications to humans, "one of the scientific triumphs of the twentieth century." "Sociobiology is now part of the core research and curriculum of virtually all biology departments, and it is a foundation of the work of almost all field biologists. " Sociobiological research on nonhuman organisms has increased dramatically and continuously in the world's top scientific journals such as Nature and Science. The more general term behavioral ecology is commonly substituted for the term sociobiology in order to avoid the public controversy.[13]
Theory
Sociobiologists maintain that human behavior, as well as nonhuman animal behavior, can be partly explained as the outcome of natural selection. They contend that in order to fully understand behavior, it must be analyzed in terms of evolutionary considerations.
Natural selection is fundamental to evolutionary theory. Variants of hereditary traits which increase an organism's ability to survive and reproduce will be more greatly represented in subsequent generations, i.e., they will be "selected for". Thus, inherited behavioral mechanisms that allowed an organism a greater chance of surviving and/or reproducing in the past are more likely to survive in present organisms. That inherited adaptive behaviors are present in nonhuman animal species has been multiply demonstrated by biologists, and it has become a foundation of evolutionary biology. However, there is continued resistance by some researchers over the application of evolutionary models to humans, particularly from within the social sciences, where culture has long been assumed to be the predominant driver of behavior.
Sociobiology is based upon two fundamental premises:
- Certain behavioral traits are inherited,
- Inherited behavioral traits have been honed by natural selection. Therefore, these traits were probably "adaptive" in the environment in which the species evolved.
Sociobiology uses Nikolaas Tinbergen's four categories of questions and explanations of animal behavior. Two categories are at the species level; two, at the individual level. The species-level categories (often called "ultimate explanations") are
- the function (i.e., adaptation) that a behavior serves and
- the evolutionary process (i.e., phylogeny) that resulted in this functionality.
The individual-level categories (often called "proximate explanations") are
- the development of the individual (i.e., ontogeny) and
- the proximate mechanism (e.g., brain anatomy and hormones).
Sociobiologists are interested in how behavior can be explained logically as a result of selective pressures in the history of a species. Thus, they are often interested in
Individual genetic advantage fails to explain certain social behaviors as a result of gene-centred selection. E.O. Wilson argued that evolution may also act upon
Within sociobiology, a social behavior is first explained as a sociobiological hypothesis by finding an evolutionarily stable strategy that matches the observed behavior. Stability of a strategy can be difficult to prove, but usually, it will predict gene frequencies. The hypothesis can be supported by establishing a correlation between the gene frequencies predicted by the strategy, and those expressed in a population.
Altruism between
An important concept in sociobiology is that temperament traits exist in an
Studies of human behavior genetics have generally found behavioral traits such as creativity, extroversion, aggressiveness, and IQ have high heritability. The researchers who carry out those studies are careful to point out that heritability does not constrain the influence that environmental or cultural factors may have on those traits.[16][17]
Various theorists have argued that in some environments criminal behavior might be adaptive.[18] The evolutionary neuroandrogenic (ENA) theory, by sociologist/criminologist Lee Ellis, posits that female sexual selection has led to increased competitive behavior among men, sometimes resulting in criminality. In another theory, Mark van Vugt argues that a history of intergroup conflict for resources between men have led to differences in violence and aggression between men and women.[19] The novelist Elias Canetti also has noted applications of sociobiological theory to cultural practices such as slavery and autocracy.[20]
Support for premise
Genetic mouse mutants illustrate the power that genes exert on behavior. For example, the transcription factor FEV (aka Pet1), through its role in maintaining the serotonergic system in the brain, is required for normal aggressive and anxiety-like behavior.[21] Thus, when FEV is genetically deleted from the mouse genome, male mice will instantly attack other males, whereas their wild-type counterparts take significantly longer to initiate violent behavior. In addition, FEV has been shown to be required for correct maternal behavior in mice, such that offspring of mothers without the FEV factor do not survive unless cross-fostered to other wild-type female mice.[22]
A genetic basis for instinctive behavioral traits among non-human species, such as in the above example, is commonly accepted among many biologists; however, attempting to use a genetic basis to explain complex behaviors in human societies has remained extremely controversial.[23][24]
Reception
Steven Pinker argues that critics have been overly swayed by politics and a fear of biological determinism,[a] accusing among others Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin of being "radical scientists", whose stance on human nature is influenced by politics rather than science,[26] while Lewontin, Steven Rose and Leon Kamin, who drew a distinction between the politics and history of an idea and its scientific validity,[27] argue that sociobiology fails on scientific grounds. Gould grouped sociobiology with eugenics, criticizing both in his book The Mismeasure of Man.[28]
Wilson has claimed that he had never meant to imply what ought to be, only what is the case. However, some critics have argued that the language of sociobiology readily slips from "is" to "ought",
See also
- Biocultural anthropology
- Biosemiotics
- Cultural evolution
- Cultural selection theory
- Darwinian anthropology
- Dual inheritance theory
- Evolutionary anthropology
- Evolutionary developmental psychology
- Evolutionary ethics
- Evolutionary neuroscience
- Evolutionary psychology
- Genopolitics
- Human behavioral ecology
- Kin selection
- Memetics
- Phytosemiotics
- Social evolution
- Social neuroscience
- Sociophysiology
- Zoosemiotics
References
Informational notes
- ^ Biological determinism was a philosophy underlying the social Darwinian and eugenics movements of the early 20th century, and controversies in the history of intelligence testing.[25]
Citations
- ISBN 978-0-674-74416-5
- ISSN 0360-0572.
- ISSN 0269-8595.
- ISSN 0162-3095.
- ^ S2CID 37774648.
- ISBN 978-0674016385.
- S2CID 214321882.
- S2CID 84927815.
- ISBN 978-0140167344.
- ^ "The Life of J.P. Scott". Bowling Green State University. Retrieved 14 December 2016.
- S2CID 129104506.
- ^ Walsh, Bryan (17 August 2011). "All-Time 100 Nonfiction Books". Time.
- ^ The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, edited by David M. Buss, John Wiley & Sons, 2005. Chapter 5 by Edward H. Hagen
- ^ Wilson, 1975. Chapter 5. "Group Selection and Altruism"
- ^ Tessman, Irwin (1995). "Human altruism as a courtship display". Forum: 157.
- PMID 20625474. Archived from the original(PDF) on Sep 11, 2010. Retrieved 29 June 2010.
Moreover, even highly heritable traits can be strongly manipulated by the environment, so heritability has little if anything to do with controllability. For example, height is on the order of 90% heritable, yet North and South Koreans, who come from the same genetic background, presently differ in average height by a full 6 inches (Pak, 2004; Schwekendiek, 2008).
- ^ Turkheimer, Eric (April 2008). "A Better Way to Use Twins for Developmental Research" (PDF). LIFE Newsletter. 2 (1): 2–5. Archived from the original (PDF) on Nov 25, 2011. Retrieved 29 October 2010.
But back to the question: What does heritability mean? Almost everyone who has ever thought about heritability has reached a commonsense intuition about it: One way or another, heritability has to be some kind of index of how genetic a trait is. That intuition explains why so many thousands of heritability coefficients have been calculated over the years. . . . Unfortunately, that fundamental intuition is wrong. Heritability isn't an index of how genetic a trait is. A great deal of time has been wasted in the effort of measuring the heritability of traits in the false expectation that somehow the genetic nature of psychological phenomena would be revealed.
- S2CID 53956461. Archived from the originalon 2002-10-26. Retrieved 27 October 2020.
- ISBN 978-1-137-53819-2
- ^ Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981, pp. 444–445.
- ^ Hendricks TJ, Fyodorov DV, Wegman LJ, Lelutiu NB, Pehek EA, Yamamoto B, Silver J, Weeber EJ, Sweatt JD, Deneris ES. Pet-1 ETS gene plays a critical role in 5-HT neuron development and is required for normal anxiety-like and aggressive behaviour]. Neuron. 2003 Jan 23;37(2):233–47
- PMID 19160496.
- ^ Fisher, Helen (16 October 1994). "'Wilson,' They Said, 'Your All Wet!'". New York Times. Retrieved 21 July 2015.
- ^ Gould, Stephen Jay (16 November 1978). "Sociobiology: the art of storytelling". New Scientist. 80 (1129): 530–533.
- S2CID 29672121.
- ISBN 978-0-14-200334-3.
A surprising number of intellectuals, particularly on the left, do deny that there is such a thing as inborn talent, especially intelligence. Stephen Jay Gould's 191 bestseller The Mismeasure of Man was written to debunk 'the abstraction of intelligence as a single entity ... and the use of these numbers to rank people in a single series of worthiness'
- ^ ISBN 978-0-394-50817-7.
- ^ Gould, Stephen Jay (1996). The Mismeasure of Man. p. Introduction to the Revised Edition.
- ^ Segerstråle 2000, p. 205.
- ^ Chomsky, Noam (1975), Reflections on Language:10. New York: Pantheon Books.
- ^ Chomsky, Noam (1995). "Rollback, Part II." Z Magazine 8 (Feb.): 20–31.
- ^ Pinker, Steven (2002). The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. New York: Viking. p. 145
Bibliography
- Alcock, John (2001). The triumph of sociobiology. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-514383-6.
- Barkow, Jerome, ed. (2006). Missing the Revolution: Darwinism for Social Scientists. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-513002-7.
- ISBN 978-0-521-45765-1.
- ISBN 978-0-385-47942-4.
- ISBN 978-1-59051-034-6.
- ISBN 978-0-271-00793-9.
- Richards, Janet Radcliffe (2000). Human Nature After Darwin: A Philosophical Introduction. London: Routledge.
- Segerstråle, Ullica (2000). Defenders of the truth: The sociobiology debate. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-286215-0.
External links
- Sociobiology (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
- The Sociobiology of Sociopathy, Mealey, 1995
- Speak, Darwinists! – interviews with leading sociobiologists
- Race and creation by Richard Dawkins
- Scientist at Work | Edward O. Wilson | Taking a Cue From Ants on Evolution of Humans by Nicholas Wade