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Sociobiology
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Sociobiology was E. O. Wilson’s term for the evolutionary study of behaviour, introduced in his tome of the same name published in 1975. Human sociobiology drew its name from an infamous final chapter, a highly innovative but rather naïve attempt to apply general evolutionary principles to aspects of human affairs. Despite sharp political, ideological and intellectual exchanges, evolutionary analyses of human behaviour began to bubble and ferment throughout the remaining years of the 1970s, and by the late 1980s HBES was formed. Prominent biologists attended these early meetings, providing a stamp of approval, and much heady enthusiasm surrounded the testing of evolutionary theories for human behavioural diversity. Anthropologists were, from the start, well represented among human sociobiologists. They conducted fieldwork in many parts of the world, exploring the extent to which human cultural behaviour is adaptive, and hence interpretable in a broader Darwinian framework.
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Sociobiology is a hotly debated theory which proposes to explain the evolution of behavior. The debate, especially as it deals with the application of sociobiology theory to humans, has been the cause of much misunderstanding between scientists with different views on the subject. Sociobiology has important implications for the nature of man, and consequently it is important for a Christian who is searching for a strong foundation for moral values to understand those implications of sociobiology before deciding what to do with the theory. A theory is not necessarily all correct or all wrong, but must be analyzed with care. Could it be that sociobiology theory correctly describes some of the changes that have occurred, even in man, in a post-creation world in which mutations are affecting behavior as well as morphology, but not necessarily implying that major groups of animals have evolved from common ancestors?
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Sociobiology initially made an immense media splash and received enormous coverage. However, the rapid counter-attack of biologist critics at Harvard made clear to the academic world, at least, that sociobiology was not, as E. O. Wilson initially attempted to present it, the unanimous utterance of Scientific Authority. Preparing their statement before Wilson's book was printed, equally prestigious biologists... chaired at Harvard, claimed that the emperor had no clothes. Gould and Richard Lewontin were able to use the pages of The New York Review of Books (NYR) and Natural History to carry out a running battle against sociobiology. Although the preemptive counterstrike by leftist biologists prevented uncritical acceptance of the veracity of sociobiology by the general intellectual community, the sociobiology won on two other fronts. First, in the popular press, notions of character "running in the blood" and "bar room wisdom" about sex differences eased acceptance of "gee whiz" accounts of sociobiology in the major news and popular science magazines.
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Sociobiology has provided the strong Darwinian foundations which have contributed to the development of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology did not seek to replace sociobiology, but instead it strengthened and expanded upon the strongest sociobiological theses, incorporating these new and improved ideas into its infrastructure. At the same time, it has ... incorporated biological, physiological, and biochemical hypotheses, thus encompassing the hard core sciences into the field of psychology. In doing this, concrete data that can be seen (by microscope) and proven using techniques other than human observation are now available to psychology. Sociobiology has evolved, and born into the world of science is a new and improved theory, evolutionary psychology.
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Sociobiology can be seen as the application of evolutionary theory to human behavior. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection explains adaptation, the functional ‘fit’ of organic form to its conditions of life, by linking differential adaptation to differential reproductive success. Traits less adapted to particular conditions of life will not persist in a population, because organisms with those traits will tend to have lower rates of survival and reproduction. Sociobiologists model the evolution of human behaviors in much the same way, using various ‘behavioral strategies’ as the relevant traits. However, in addition to the assumptions of standard evolutionary theory, sociobiology contributes several theoretical components of its own. For example, sociobiologists assume that humans, like other organisms, have behavioral control systems with particular functions whose evolutionary history can be individually traced.
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Sociobiology is based on the idea that some behaviors (both social and individual) are at least partly inherited and can be affected by natural selection. It starts with the idea that these behaviors have evolved over time, similar to the way that physical traits are thought to have evolved. Therefore, it predicts that animals will act in ways that have proven to be evolutionarily successful over time, which can among other things result in the formation of complex social processes that have proven to be conducive to evolutionary fitness.
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