Sociobiology
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 introduced a new scientific discipline.
Sociobiology is defined by Wilson as "the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior" and can be described as a science that applies the principles of evolutionary biology to the social behavior of organisms, analyzing data from a number of disciplines, especially ethology (the biological study of behavior), ecology, and evolution. It employs two chief postulates. The first is the interaction principle, the idea that the action of any organism, including man, arises as a fusion of genotype and learning or experience. The second is the fitness maximization principle, the notion that all organisms will attempt to behave in a manner that passes copies of their genes to future generations.
Sociobiology provides several ways to understand the social behavior of an organism, including those acts termed "altruistic." First, social behaviors can be seen as the genetically conditioned attempts of an organism to save copies of its genes carried in others, especially close relatives. Such acts can also be viewed as a form of "genetic reciprocity" in which an organism helps another and the helped organism (or others) repays the help at some time in the future, thereby enhancing the fitness of each of the organisms involved. Finally, cooperative actions can be understood as the result of natural selection operating at the level of groups, in which "altruistic" groups pass their genes on more successfully than "selfish" groups.
In Sociobiology, Wilson, an entomologist specializing in the biology of ants, develops these concepts using the example of social insects. He shows how their cooperative and "altruistic" behaviors, never fully considered by traditional evolutionary biology, can be understood in terms of genetic fitness and natural selection. But the crucial aspect of Wilson's book is his assertion, within a single chapter, that such genetic theories can be applied to the social behavior of primates and man as well as to "lower" animals. Indeed, Wilson contends that scientists can shrink "the humanities and social sciences to specialized branches of biology" and predicts that to maintain the human species indefinitely, we will have to "drive toward total knowledge, right down to the levels of the neuron and gene," statements in which he seems to suggest that human beings can eventually be explained totally in "mechanistic terms."
Broadly, the premise of Wilson's argument finds its origins in the ideas of René Descartes and the mechanists of the eighteenth century such as Julien Offroy de La Mettrie, whose 1748 book, L'homme-machine, helped define the modern biological study of human beings. Wilson argues that if humans are indeed biological machines, then their actions in the realm of society should not be excluded from examination under biological principles, and dramatically defines his goal by stating that "when the same parameters and quantitative theory are used to analyze both termite colonies and troops of rhesus macaques, we will have a unified science of sociobiology."
Wilson's book, especially his statements in the final chapter, generated a storm of controversy. Some feared that a genetic approach to human behavior could be used by racists (and eugenicists) as a scientific base for their arguments of racial superiority, or that delving too deeply into human genetics might lead to manipulation of genes for undesirable purposes. Well-known evolutionary biologists such as Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin criticized Wilson for stepping over the line between science and speculation. Gould quite openly declared his unhappiness with the final chapter of Sociobiology, stating that it "is not about the range of potential human behavior or even an argument for the restriction of that range from a much larger total domain among all animals. It is, primarily, an extended speculation on the existence of genes for specific and variable traits in human behavior—including spite, aggression, xenophobia, conformity, homosexuality, and the characteristic behavior differences between men and women in Western society." Lewontin argued that sociobiology "is too theoretically impoverished to deal with real life," that "by its very nature, sociobiological theory is unable to cope with the extraordinary historical and cultural contingency of human behavior, nor with the diversity of individual behavior and its development in the course of individual life histories."
Feminists have also taken up the cudgel against sociobiology, asserting that it implicitly sanctions existing social behavior with a latent determinism. If, for example, repressive acts are defined as the result of direct genetic influence, the basis for their moral evaluation disappears.
Wilson has responded to his critics energetically and condemns those using sociobiological arguments to support societal evils by equating "what is" with "what should be." Wilson says: "The 'what is' in human nature is to a large extent the heritage of a Pleistocene hunter-gatherer existence. When any genetic bias is demonstrated, it cannot be used to justify a continuing practice in present and future societies. Since most of us live in a radically new environment of our own making, the pursuit of such a practice would be bad biology; and like all bad biology, it would lead to disaster. For example, the tendency under certain conditions to conduct warfare against competing groups might well be in our genes, having been advantageous to our Neolithic ancestors, but it could lead to global suicide now. To rear as many healthy children as possible was long the road to security; yet with the population of the world brimming over, it is now the way to environmental disaster." He goes on to suggest that "our primitive old genes will therefore have to carry the load of much more cultural change in the future" and, indeed, that our "genetic biases can be trespassed" by thinking and decision-making.
Sociobiology seems to have survived its vilification by critics. Indeed, Wilson's vigorous advocacy of a new synthesis between the social and biological sciences has helped bring into the open a debate about the relationship of biology and society that will probably bear a great deal of scientific fruit.
Resources
Books
Wilson, Edward O. On Human Nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978.
Wilson, Edward O. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.
Periodicals
Lieberman, L., L. T. Reynolds, and D. Friedrich. "The Fitness of Human Sociobiology: The Future Utility of Four Concepts in Four Subdisciplines." Social Biology 39 (Spring-Summer 1992): 158–169.
Wolfe, Alan. "Social Theory and the Second Biological Revolution." Social Research 57 (Fall 1990): 615–648.
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