Sociobiology is used in both a wide and a narrow sense. As Ernst Mayr (1982:598) put it, ‘Sociobiology, broadly speaking, deals with the social behavior of organisms in the light of evolution.’ This definition would include ethology,...

Classical biologists defined the sexes in terms of differences in gamete (the reproductive cells) sizes, with females having large, relatively immobile, nutrient-rich eggs and males having motile small sperm. This definition describes an essential sex...

A perennial debate about human nature, pitting the idea that behavior is culturally conditioned against the notion that human actions are innately controlled, was rekindled in 1975 when Edward O. Wilson's Sociobiology: The New Synthesis...

Sociobiology A term coined by the eminent entomologist Edward O. Wilson to define a field of study combining biology and social sciences. In his 1975 work, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, entomologist Edward O. Wilson first coined the term...

For the book by E. O. Wilson, see Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. 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...

Innocents imagine that universities, the names of many of whose departments include "science" (as in social science), do not perform exorcisms. That is a mistake. Today, universities are among the busiest sites for the practice of intellectual exorcism. Ask any current student to...

To future generations, the Sociobiology Wars may come as something of a puzzle. The shared beliefs of the disputants were so much more impressive than their disagreements that historians may wonder what the fuss was about. Perhaps the controversy will come to resemble...

The acclaimed avant-garde director Ivo van Hove has come up with an unusual attempt to invigorate Molière’s 17th-century masterpiece The Misanthrope: He’s thrown garbage at it. The garbage scene comes when the furious antihero Alceste—a man who looks back in anger at everything—is having another...