Sociobiology

Updated: 1/28/01

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 teaches entomology 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.