sociobiology

For more information on sociobiology, visit Britannica.com.

A scientific discipline that applies principles of evolutionary biology to the study of animal and human social behavior. It is a synthesis of ethology, ecology, and evolutionary theory in which social behavior is viewed as a product of natural selection and other biological processes. Although most of the research in sociobiology has focused on understanding the behavior of nonhumans, sociobiological explanations have been used to interpret patterns of human behavior as well. See also Ecology; Ethology; Organic evolution.

Sociobiology predicts that individuals will behave in ways that maximize their fitness (their success at projecting copies of their genetic material into succeeding generations) and argues that such behaviors can arise through the same evolutionary processes that operate on other trait systems. The central principle underlying sociobiology is that an individual's behavior is shaped, in part, by its genes, and thus is heritable and subject to natural selection. Natural selection is simply the result of the differential survival and reproduction of individuals who show heritable variation in a trait. The variants of a trait that convey greater fitness will increase in frequency in a population over time. The distinctive sociobiological perspective on behavior views behaviors as strategies that have evolved through natural selection to maximize an individual's fitness. Note that under this view there is absolutely no need to assume that maximizing fitness is in any way a conscious goal underlying an animal's behavior—successful behavior is simply an emergent result of the evolutionary process and not the force driving that process. See also Behavioral ecology.

Altruism

Animals sometimes behave in ways that seem to reduce their own personal fitness while increasing that of other individuals. For example, in many species of social mammals and in numerous species of birds, individuals commonly give alarm vocalizations that alert others to the presence of a predator while seemingly rendering themselves more conspicuous to attack. Evolutionary biologists since Charles Darwin have noted that these seemingly altruistic acts pose a challenge to the notion of an animal's behavior being a strategy to maximize individual fitness. See also Social insects; Social mammals.

One resolution to this paradox comes from taking a “gene's eye view” of evolution, which recognizes that Darwinian fitness (an individual's success in producing offspring) is simply a specific case of the more general concept of inclusive fitness. Because an individual shares genes with its relatives, there are actually two different routes by which it can pass on copies of those genes to the next generation: first, through personal or direct reproduction; and second, by helping relatives to reproduce. Inclusive fitness is a composite measure of an individual's genetic contribution to the next generation that considers both of these routes.

Animals who behave altruistically toward relatives may, in fact, be behaving selfishly in the genetic sense if their behavior sufficiently enhances their inclusive fitness through its effects on the survival and reproduction of relatives. This phenomenon is referred to as kin selection. Because close relatives share more genes, on average, with an individual than do distant relatives, such seemingly altruistic behavior tends to be directed toward closer kin.

Another solution to the altruism paradox—one that can even operate among nonrelatives under certain conditions—is reciprocity. If the recipient of some altruistic behavior is likely to repay a donor in the future, it may be beneficial for the donor to perform the behavior even at some immediate cost to its own fitness. This is especially true if the cost is low and the anticipated benefit is high. Examples include food sharing among unrelated vampire bats and alliance behavior in some primates.

Under some conditions, it is possible for altruism to result from natural selection operating at the level of groups, rather than at the level of individuals or genes (for example, if groups containing altruists were at a sufficient selective advantage compared with groups containing only selfish individuals). However, within such groups, selection acting on individuals would still tend to favor selfishness over altruism. In any event, much of the cogency of sociobiology has resulted from the recognition that selection seems to be most powerful when it acts at lower levels—notably, genes and individuals rather than groups or species.

Other social strategies

Over the past three decades, the sociobiological view of behavior as an evolved strategy for maximizing inclusive fitness has proven to be a powerful explanatory paradigm for investigating many other aspects of animal social behavior. The phenomenon of sociality, for example, has been extensively explored from this perspective. Each species—and individuals within each species—can be investigated as to the relative costs and benefits associated with the decision of whether or not to be social. Similar considerations apply to many other strategic (though typically unconscious) decisions that animals make during their lives, such as whether to reproduce sexually, when in life to begin reproducing (with regard to season and age at maturation), how many partners to mate with and who those partners should be, whether to compete with other individuals over access to partners, and whether to bestow parental care and the level of care to give. See also Maternal behavior; Reproductive behavior; Sexual dimorphism.

Some animals lead very solitary lives, but others, including humans, live in complex social groups. Sociobiology is the branch of biology that deals with the behaviour of these social animals. The term was coined by the Harvard entomologist, Edward O. Wilson, whose book of the same name brought to a wider public several important developments in theoretical biology that had been made during the 1960s and 1970s.

These developments addressed the phenomenon of altruism, which had long been seen as a problem in evolutionary biology (see evolution). Altruism is defined by biologists as any act that makes the recipient more likely to survive and reproduce while reducing the donor's own reproductive success. Since natural selection cares only about reproductive success, it seemed that altruism could not have evolved by such a process. And yet it was everywhere visible, from the parental care exhibited by mammals and birds to the selfless devotion of worker ants to their nest.

In the 1960s and 1970s, two solutions were proposed to this problem. The first of these was the theory of kin selection, which was first proposed by W. D. Hamilton in 1964. Hamilton argued that the spread of a gene did not depend only on its effects on the reproductive success of the body in which it sat, but also on its effects on the reproductive success of close kin, because they are likely to carry the same gene. A gene that caused its owner to risk his or her life to save several siblings, each of whom has a 50% chance of having the same gene, would spread quickly through the population, even if it often caused its owner to die childless. As Richard Dawkins put it graphically in The Selfish Gene (1976), the theory of kin selection showed that genes could proliferate by helping copies of themselves in other bodies.

Hamilton's theory of kin selection explains altruism between closely related individuals, but what about altruism between unrelated organisms? This is where the second solution to the problem of altruism comes in. In 1971, Robert Trivers argued that altruism may often be merely apparent, since it will turn out on a closer analysis to be a reciprocal exchange of favours. Trivers dubbed the phenomenon ‘reciprocal altruism’, and argued that the appearance of altruism is generated by the fact that the reciprocation may not be immediate. For example, a vampire bat may give up some of its food to a hungry companion one day without any immediate reward, but only because it expects that the favour will be returned in the future. In the years following Trivers' initial paper many biologists thought that reciprocal altruism was widespread in the animal kingdom. More recently, however, considerable doubt has been cast on this assumption.

The theories of kin selection and reciprocal altruism have led to much productive research in animal behaviour. When applied to human behaviour, however, they have generated much more controversy. Wilson's Sociobiology, for example, unleashed a torrent of criticism when it was published in 1975. Although he dedicated only a short final chapter of the book to human behaviour, the ensuing debate focused almost entirely on the possibility of applying sociobiological tools to humans. Social scientists, in particular, objected to such biological explanations on the grounds that they did not do justice to the rich cultural variability of human behaviour (see instinct).

After the initial backlash against sociobiology in the late 1970s, attempts to apply theories such as those of Hamilton and Trivers to human behaviour regained popularity during the 1990s. The second generation of sociobiologists, who are much more circumspect in avoiding some of the brash pronouncements of the 1970s, go under the name of ‘evolutionary psychologists’. Evolutionary psychology, while in many ways the heir of sociobiology, differs in stressing the importance of the mental mechanisms that mediate selective pressures and behaviour. It is thus more mentalist than sociobiology, and draws on the explanatory tools of cognitive science, such as the use of the language of information processing to describe the mind.

However, unlike cognitive scientists of a more classical bent, evolutionary psychologists reject the idea of a central ‘executive’ within the mind, arguing instead that co-ordinated behaviour emerges from a collection of psychological mechanisms, none of which is ‘in control’. These ‘mental modules’ are thought to be designed by natural selection to solve adaptive problems that were recurrently faced by our ancestors. For example, it is has been hypothesized that there is a module for detecting cheats, another for recognizing faces, and so on.

Like sociobiology, evolutionary psychology has attracted more than its fair share of critics. Some of these attack evolutionary psychology for allegedly excessive speculation, while others have ethical and political objections. Evolutionary psychologists reject both kinds of criticism. The debate goes on.

— Dylan Evans

Bibliography

• Pinker, S. (1997). How the mind works. Penguin, Harmondsworth.
• Wilson, E. O. (1975). Sociobiology: the new synthesis. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA

See also evolution, human; genetics, human.

An attempt to explain social behaviour by reference to modern biological theories and by natural selection in particular. The ‘new synthesis’ of biology and the social sciences, promised by E. O. Wilson amongst others, rests squarely upon Darwinian population biology, comparative ethology, modern evolutionary theory—once that theory had been purged of Lamarckism—and finally upon kin-selection. Consequently the sociobiologists' central belief is that, while not all biological phenomena are adaptive in each moment of time, nevertheless natural selection has a pervasive role in shaping all classes of traits in organisms. They have done best at explaining the natural selection of altruistic behaviour. In principle, then, all significant human social behaviour ought also to be explained by its biological basis. And, again in principle, it ought to be possible to establish the co-evolution of genes and culture. Whatever the truth of these claims, some practitioners of sociobiology have given the impression that they are genetic determinists. Debate about these issues has taken up a disproportionate amount of time and energy.

— John Halliday

The academic discipline best known through the work of Edward O. Wilson who coined the term in his Sociobiology: the New Synthesis (1975). The approach to human behaviour is based on the premise that all social behaviour has a biological basis, and seeks to understand that basis in terms of genetic encoding for features that are then selected for through evolutionary history. The philosophical problem is essentially one of methodology: of finding criteria for identifying features that can usefully be explained in this way, and for finding criteria for assessing various genetic stories that might provide useful explanations.

Among the features that are proposed for this kind of explanation are such things as male dominance, male promiscuity versus female fidelity, propensities to sympathy and other emotions, and the limited altruism characteristic of human beings. The strategy has proved unnecessarily controversial, with proponents accused of ignoring the influence of environmental and social factors in moulding people's characteristics (e.g. at the limit of silliness, by postulating a ‘gene for poverty’). However there is no need for the approach to commit such errors, since the feature explained sociobiologically may be indexed to environment: for instance it may be a propensity to develop some feature in some social or other environment (or even a propensity to develop propensities…). The main problem is to separate genuine explanation from speculative just so stories which may or may not identify real selective mechanisms. See also biology, philosophy of; evolutionary psychology.

The study of social organization and behaviour in humans and other animals which uses biological explanations based on the premise that all behaviour is adaptive.

Sociobiology, which is considered by some as a subdiscipline of behavioral ecology, is the study of the social organization of a species. Sociobiology attempts to develop rules that explain the evolution of certain social systems.

An area of inquiry in biology, still somewhat controversial but gaining wider acceptance. Its central tenet is that many human behavioral and social traits are genetically inherited and are thus determined by genetic makeup and not culture.

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

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Sociobiology is a synthesis of scientific disciplines which attempts to explain social behavior in animal species by considering the Darwinian advantages specific behaviors may have. It is often considered a branch of biology and sociology, but also draws from ethology, anthropology, evolution, zoology, archaeology, population genetics and other disciplines. Within the study of human societies, sociobiology is closely related to the fields of human behavioral ecology and evolutionary psychology.

Sociobiology investigates social behaviors, such as mating patterns, territorial fights, pack hunting, and the hive society of social insects. Just as selection pressure led to animals evolving useful ways of interacting with the natural environment, it led to the genetic evolution of advantageous social behavior.

Sociobiology has become one of the greatest scientific controversies of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, especially in the context of explaining human behavior. Applied to non-humans, sociobiology is uncontroversial. Criticism, most notably made by Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, centers on sociobiology's contention that genes play an ultimate role in human behavior and that traits such as aggressiveness can be explained by biology rather than a person's social environment. Many sociobiologists, however, cite a complex relationship between nature and nurture. In response to the controversy, anthropologist John Tooby and psychologist Leda Cosmides launched evolutionary psychology as a branch of sociobiology made less controversial by avoiding questions of human biodiversity.

Contents 1 Definition 2 Introductory examples 3 History 4 Sociobiological theory 5 Criticism 6 See also 7 References 7.1 Notes 7.2 Bibliography 8 External links

Definition

E.O. Wilson defines sociobiology as: “The extension of population biology and evolutionary theory to social organisation”^[1]

Sociobiology is based on the premise that some behaviors (both social and individual) are at least partly inherited and can be affected by natural selection. 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 therefore 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 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.

Introductory examples

For example, newly dominant male lions often will kill cubs in the pride that were not sired by them. This behaviour is adaptive in evolutionary terms 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 behaviour may have "died out" as those lions were less successful in reproducing.

Genetic mouse mutants have now been harnessed to illustrate the power that genes exert on behaviour. For example, the transcription factor FEV (aka Pet1) has been shown, through its role in maintaining the serotonergic system in the brain, to be required for normal aggressive and anxiety-like behavior^[2]. 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 behaviour. In addition, FEV has been shown to be required for correct maternal behaviour in mice, such that their offspring do not survive unless cross-fostered to other wild-type female mice^[3]

A genetic basis for instinctive behavioural 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 behaviours in human societies has remained extremely controversial.

History

E. O. Wilson, a central figure in the history of sociobiology.

According to the OED, John Paul Scott coined the word "sociobiology" at a 1946 conference on genetics and social behaviour, and became widely used after it was popularized by Edward O. Wilson in his 1975 book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. However, the influence of evolution on behavior has been of interest to biologists and philosophers since soon after the discovery of the evolution itself. Peter Kropotkin's Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, written in the early 1890s, is a popular example. Antecedents of modern sociobiological thinking can be traced to the 1960s and the work of such biologists as Robert Trivers and William D. Hamilton.

Nonetheless, it was Wilson's book that pioneered and popularized the attempt to explain the evolutionary mechanics behind social behaviors such as altruism, aggression, and nurturence, primarily in ants (Wilson's own research specialty) but also in other animals.^{[citation needed]} 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.

Sociobiological theory

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Sociobiologists believe that human behavior, as well as nonhuman animal behavior, can be partly explained as the outcome of natural selection. They contend that in order fully to 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 species` evolutionarily evolved environment.

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 instinctive, or intuitive behavior, and in explaining the similarities, rather than the differences, between cultures. For example, mothers within many species of mammals – including humans – are very protective of their offspring. Sociobiologists reason that this protective behavior likely evolved over time because it helped those individuals which had the characteristic to survive and reproduce. Over time, individuals who exhibited such protective behaviours would have had more surviving offspring than did those who did not display such behaviours, such that this parental protection would increase in frequency in the population. In this way, the social behavior is believed to have evolved in a fashion similar to other types of nonbehavioral adaptations, such as (for example) fur or the sense of smell.

Individual genetic advantage often fails to explain certain social behaviors as a result of gene-centred selection, and evolution may also act upon groups. The mechanisms responsible for group selection employ paradigms and population statistics borrowed from game theory. E.O. Wilson argued that altruistic individuals must reproduce their own altruistic genetic traits for altruism to survive. When altruists lavish their resources on non-altruists at the expense of their own kind, the altruists tend to die out and the others tend to grow. In other words, altruism is more likely to survive if altruists practice the ethic that "charity begins at home."

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, a well-formed strategy 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. Measurement of genes and gene-frequencies can be problematic, however, because a simple statistical correlation can be open to charges of circularity (Circularity can occur if the measurement of gene frequency indirectly uses the same measurements that describe the strategy).

Altruism between social insects and littermates has been explained in such a way. Altruistic behavior in some animals has been correlated to the degree of genome shared between altruistic individuals. A quantitative description of infanticide by male harem-mating animals when the alpha male is displaced as well as rodent female infanticide and fetal resorption are active areas of study. In general, females with more bearing opportunities may value offspring less, and may also arrange bearing opportunities to maximize the food and protection from mates.

An important concept in sociobiology is that temperamental traits within a gene pool and between gene pools exist in an ecological balance. Just as an expansion of a sheep population might encourage the expansion of a wolf population, an expansion of altruistic traits within a gene pool may also encourage the expansion of individuals with dependent traits.

Sociobiology is sometimes associated with arguments over the "genetic" basis of intelligence. While sociobiology is predicated on the observation that genes do affect behavior, it is perfectly consistent to be a sociobiologist while arguing that measured IQ variations between individuals reflect mainly cultural or economic rather than genetic factors. However, many critics point out that the usefulness of sociobiology as an explanatory tool breaks down once a trait is so variable as to no longer be exposed to selective pressures. In order to explain aspects of human intelligence as the outcome of selective pressures, it must be demonstrated that those aspects are inherited, or genetic, but this does not necessarily imply differences among individuals: a common genetic inheritance could be shared by all humans, just as the genes responsible for number of limbs are shared by all individuals. An even more sensitive subject is race and intelligence.

Researchers performing twin studies have argued that differences between people on behavioral traits such as creativity, extroversion and aggressiveness are between 45% to 75% due to genetic differences, and intelligence is said by some to be about 80% genetic after one matures (discussed at Intelligence quotient#Genetics vs environment). However, critics (such as the evolutionary geneticist R. C Lewontin) have highlighted serious flaws in twin studies, such as the inability of researchers to separate environmental, genetic, and dialectic effects on twins.^[4]

Criminality is actively under study, but extremely controversial. There are arguments that in some environments criminal behavior might be adaptive.^[5]

Criticism

Many critics draw an intellectual link between sociobiology and biological determinism, the belief that most human differences can be traced to specific genes rather than differences in culture or social environments. Critics also draw parallels between biological determinism as an underlying philosophy to the social Darwinian and eugenics movements of the early 20th century, and the controversy over IQ test controversy. Steven Pinker argues that critics have been overly swayed by politics and a "fear" of biological determinism.^[6] However, all these critics have claimed that sociobiology fails on scientific grounds, independent of their political critiques. In particular, Lewontin, Rose & Kamin drew a detailed distinction between the politics and history of an idea and its scientific validity,^[4] as has Stephen Jay Gould.^[7]

Wilson and his supporters counter the intellectual link by denying that Wilson had a political agenda, still less a right-wing one. They pointed out that Wilson had personally adopted a number of liberal political stances and had attracted progressive sympathy for his outspoken environmentalism. They argued that as scientists they had a duty to uncover the truth whether that was politically correct or not. They argued that sociobiology does not necessarily lead to any particular political ideology as many critics implied. Many subsequent sociobiologists, including Robert Wright, Anne Campbell, Frans de Waal and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, have used sociobiology to argue quite separate points. Noam Chomsky came to the defense of sociobiology's methodology, noting that it was the same methodology he used in his work on linguistics. However, he roundly criticized the sociobiologists' actual conclusions about humans as lacking substance. He also noted that the anarchist Peter Kropotkin had made similar arguments in his book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, although focusing more on altruism than aggression, suggesting that anarchist societies were feasible because of an innate human tendency to cooperate.^[8]

Wilson's claims that he had never meant to imply what ought to be, only what is the case are supported by his writings, which are descriptive, not prescriptive. However, many critics have pointed out that the language of sociobiology often slips from "is" to "ought",^[4] leading sociobiologists to make arguments against social reform on the basis that socially progressive societies are at odds with our innermost nature. For example, some groups have supported positions of ethnic nepotism.^[9] Views such as this, however, are often criticized as examples of the naturalistic fallacy, when reasoning jumps from descriptions about what is to prescriptions about what ought to be. (A common example is the justification of militarism if scientific evidence showed warfare was part of human nature.) It has also been argued that opposition to stances considered anti-social, such as ethnic nepotism, are based on moral assumptions, not bioscientific assumptions, meaning that it is not vulnerable to being disproved by bioscientific advances.^[6]:145 The history of this debate, and others related to it, are covered in detail by Cronin (1992), Segerstråle (2000) and Alcock (2001). Adaptationists such as Steven Pinker have also suggested that the debate has a strong ad hominem component.

See also

Concepts Biocultural anthropology Cultural selection theory Dual inheritance theory Ethics and evolutionary psychology Evolutionary psychology Evolutionary developmental psychology Human behavioral ecology Iterated prisoner's dilemma Kin selection Prisoner's dilemma Social evolution Sociophysiology Evolutionary ethics

Well-known sociobiologists Richard Dawkins Edward O. Wilson W. D. Hamilton Robert Trivers George C. Williams Sarah Blaffer Hrdy Richard Machalek Steven Pinker Francois Nielsen

Books

• Sociobiology: The New Synthesis by E. O. Wilson, 1975
• The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker
• The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
• Biology, Ideology and Human Nature: Not In Our Genes by Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose & Leon Kamin

References

Notes

1. ^ Wilson, E.O. (1978) On Human Nature Page x, Cambridge, Ma: Harvard
2. ^ 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
3. ^ Lerch-Haner JK, Frierson D, Crawford LK, Beck SG, Deneris ES. Serotonergic transcriptional programming determines maternal behavior and offspring survival. Nat Neurosci. 2008 Sep;11(9):1001-3.
4. ^ ^{a b c} Richard Lewontin, Leon Kamin, Steven Rose (1984). Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature. Pantheon Books. ISBN 0-394-50817-3. 
5. ^ The Sociobiology Of Sociopathy: An Integrated
6. ^ ^{a b} Pinker, Steven (2002). The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. New York: Viking.
7. ^ Gould, S.J. (1996) "The Mismeasure of Man", Introduction to the Revised Edition
8. ^ Chomsky, Noam (1995). "Rollback, Part II." Z Magazine 8 (Feb.): 20-31.
9. ^ Salter, Frank (2007). "Ethnic nepotism as heuristic." In R. Dunbar and L. Barrett Oxford handbook of evolutionary psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 541-551.

Bibliography

This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (May 2007)

• Alcock, John (2001). The Triumph of Sociobiology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Directly rebuts several of the above criticisms and misconceptions listed above.
• Barkow, Jerome (Ed.). (2006) Missing the Revolution: Darwinism for Social Scientists. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Cronin, H. (1992). The Ant and the Peacock: Altruism and Sexual Selection from Darwin to Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Richards, Janet Radcliffe (2000). Human Nature After Darwin: A Philosophical Introduction. London: Routledge.
• Segerstråle, Ullica (2000). Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Gisela Kaplan, Lesley J Rogers (2003). Gene Worship: Moving Beyond the Nature/Nurture Debate over Genes, Brain, and Gender. Other Press. ISBN 1-59051-034-8. 
• Richard M. Lerner (1992). Final Solutions: Biology, Prejudice, and Genocide. Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 0-271-00793-1. 
• Nancy Etcoff (1999). Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty. Anchor Books. ISBN 0-385-47942-5. 

External links

• Sociobiology (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) - Harmon Holcomb & Jason Byron
• The Sociobiology of Sociopathy, Mealey, 1995
• Speak, Darwinists! Interviews with leading sociobiologists.
• Race and Creation - Richard Dawkins
• Genetic Similarity and Ethnic Nationalism - An Attempted Sociobiological Explanation of the scientific basis for Political Group Formation.
• A brief history on sociobiology

v • d • e Sociobiology Evolutionary biology portal Related topics Altruism · Behavioral genetics · Dual inheritance theory · Ethology · Evolutionary psychology · Group selection · Kin selection · Eusociality · Morality · Presociality · Subsociality · Sexual selection · Biology of gender Criticism Not in Our Genes · Evolutionary psychology controversy Bibliography Sociobiology: The New Synthesis · Bibliography of evolution and human behavior

v • d • e Evolutionary psychology Psychology portal · Evolutionary biology portal Processes Altruism · Group selection · Kin selection · Sexual selection · Sociobiology  · Coevolution  · Evolutionarily stable strategy Areas Psychological development · Morality · Religion · Depression  · Developmental psychopathology  · Educational psychology  · Music Seminal writers Pascal Boyer · David Buss · Leda Cosmides · Charles Darwin · Richard Dawkins · Daniel Dennett · Jared Diamond · David Geary · Kevin B. MacDonald · Geoffrey Miller · Steven Mithen · John Tooby · Robert Trivers · E. O. Wilson · D. S. Wilson Related subjects Memetics · Sociobiology  · Evolutionary neuroscience · Human evolution · Sociocultural evolution  · Evolutionary anthropology  · Evolutionary medicine · Evolutionary linguistics Lists Evolutionary psychologists  · Evolutionary Psychology Research Groups and Centers  · Bibliography of evolution and human behavior Books The Adapted Mind  · Why is Sex Fun?

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