Sociobiology
Based on Wikipedia: Sociobiology
When Lions Kill Their Stepchildren
A male lion takes over a pride. Within days, he murders every cub he didn't father.
This seems monstrous by human standards. But from the perspective of the lion's genes, it's coldly logical. Those cubs would compete with his own future offspring for food and protection. The nursing mothers, freed from caring for the dead cubs, will become fertile again within weeks rather than years. The killer lion will father more cubs, who will carry his genes into the next generation.
This is the central insight of sociobiology: that natural selection shapes not just the bodies of animals, but their social behaviors too. Just as evolution gave the giraffe its long neck to reach high leaves, evolution gave the lion its instinct to kill rival cubs. The behavior is inherited, and it spreads through the population because lions who do it leave more descendants than lions who don't.
The implications are profound and, as we'll see, explosively controversial.
What Sociobiology Actually Claims
At its core, sociobiology makes two straightforward claims. First, that certain behavioral traits are at least partly inherited—passed down through genes from parent to offspring. Second, that inherited behaviors have been shaped by natural selection, meaning they helped ancestors survive and reproduce in the environments where they evolved.
This isn't particularly controversial when applied to insects or fish. Nobody protests when scientists explain why worker bees sacrifice their own reproduction to serve the queen, or why certain spiders eat their mates. The genetic mathematics work out elegantly: behaviors spread if they help copies of the underlying genes get into the next generation.
The controversy erupts when the same logic gets applied to humans.
The Book That Started a War
The word "sociobiology" had been floating around academic circles since at least the 1940s. A geneticist named John Paul Scott coined it at a 1948 conference on animal behavior. For decades it remained a specialist term, used by researchers studying rhesus monkeys and other animals.
Then, in 1975, Edward O. Wilson published a book called Sociobiology: The New Synthesis.
Wilson was already famous in scientific circles as the world's leading expert on ants. He had spent decades studying the elaborate social systems of these tiny creatures—their caste systems, their communication through chemical signals, their willingness to die for the colony. Now he was attempting something far more ambitious: a grand unified theory of social behavior across the entire animal kingdom.
The book was massive, spanning 697 pages. Most of it described the social behaviors of insects, birds, and mammals in meticulous detail. But the final chapter—just one chapter out of twenty-seven—applied the same evolutionary framework to human beings.
That chapter detonated like a bomb in academic circles.
The Firestorm
Within months, a group of scientists at Harvard organized to oppose Wilson's ideas. They called themselves the Sociobiology Study Group, and their most prominent members were Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould—both brilliant evolutionary biologists, both politically left-wing, and both Wilson's colleagues in the same building.
Their objections ran deep. They argued that Wilson was committing an ancient error: assuming that whatever exists in nature is natural and therefore inevitable. If aggression is "in our genes," doesn't that excuse violence? If male dominance evolved, doesn't that justify sexism? They accused sociobiology of providing scientific cover for racism, eugenics, and social inequality.
The conflict got ugly. At a 1978 conference, protesters rushed the stage and dumped a pitcher of water over Wilson's head, chanting "Wilson, you're all wet!" Scientists accused other scientists of being politically motivated. Careers were damaged. Friendships ended.
When the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon tried to organize sessions on sociobiology at a 1976 conference, other scholars attempted to cancel them entirely. The accusations flew: racism, fascism, even Nazism. Only the intervention of the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead allowed the sessions to proceed as scheduled.
The Heart of the Dispute
To understand why the controversy burned so hot, you need to understand what was really at stake.
Sociobiologists weren't claiming that genes determine behavior in some simple, mechanical way. They acknowledged that human behavior is extraordinarily flexible, shaped by culture, learning, and individual choice. Their claim was more subtle: that evolution had given humans certain predispositions, certain tendencies, certain emotional and cognitive systems that influenced—without determining—how we act.
Critics like Gould and Lewontin didn't deny that genes play some role in behavior. Their concern was different. They worried about what happens when you tell people their worst impulses are "natural." They worried about the history of biological arguments being used to justify horrible policies, from forced sterilization to genocide. Gould wrote an entire book, The Mismeasure of Man, tracing how supposedly scientific theories about human nature had been used to oppress minorities throughout history.
The critics drew a distinction between the history and politics of an idea versus its scientific validity. But they also argued that sociobiology failed on purely scientific grounds—that it told "just so stories" about evolution without providing genuine evidence that specific behaviors were actually inherited and selected.
The debate touched on one of the oldest questions in philosophy: What is human nature? Are we blank slates, infinitely moldable by culture and education? Or do we come pre-wired with instincts and tendencies that no amount of social engineering can overcome?
The Linguist Weighs In
Interestingly, Noam Chomsky—the famous linguist and political radical—found himself closer to Wilson than to Wilson's left-wing critics on this particular question.
Chomsky had spent his career arguing that human language ability is innate, built into our brains by evolution. He despised the "blank slate" doctrine that dominated the social sciences, which held that humans are born with no significant cognitive predispositions. To Chomsky, this was obviously false: babies are born with brains structured to learn language in very specific ways.
At a 1976 meeting of the Sociobiology Study Group, Chomsky argued that humans are biological organisms and should be studied as such. He even suggested that sociobiology might be compatible with anarchism, his own political philosophy. After all, the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin had written a book in the 1890s called Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, arguing that cooperation was just as natural as competition. If humans have evolved tendencies toward altruism and cooperation, perhaps anarchist societies are feasible precisely because they align with human nature rather than fighting against it.
The Is-Ought Problem
Wilson insisted he was only describing what is, not prescribing what ought to be. He was a scientist studying behavior, not a moral philosopher making recommendations.
Critics weren't convinced. They argued that the language of sociobiology tends to slide imperceptibly from "is" to "ought." If we say that male aggression is "natural" and "adaptive," aren't we implicitly suggesting it's acceptable, or at least understandable in a way that reduces moral responsibility?
This concern has a long philosophical pedigree. The eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume pointed out that you cannot logically derive statements about what should be from statements about what is. Just because something exists in nature doesn't mean it's good or right. Parasites exist in nature. Cancer exists in nature. No one would argue we should accept these just because they're "natural."
The psychologist Steven Pinker, a later defender of evolutionary approaches to human behavior, acknowledged this problem but argued that critics were often motivated more by political fear than scientific analysis. He accused Gould and Lewontin of being "radical scientists" whose positions on human nature were shaped by their leftist politics rather than by evidence.
Lewontin and his colleagues shot back that scientific ideas don't exist in a vacuum—that the history of how ideas have been used matters, even if it doesn't determine their truth value. The question of whether sociobiology is valid science is separate from the question of whether it's dangerous, but both questions deserve serious attention.
What the Science Shows
While academics argued about politics and philosophy, researchers kept gathering data. Studies of human twins—especially identical twins raised apart—provided striking evidence that many behavioral traits have a heritable component.
Creativity, extroversion, aggressiveness, even performance on intelligence tests: all show significant heritability in twin studies. This doesn't mean these traits are genetically "determined" in some absolute sense. Environment matters enormously. But it does suggest that genetic variation contributes to variation in these traits across the population.
Animal research provided even more direct evidence. Scientists can now manipulate individual genes in mice and observe the behavioral consequences. Remove a gene called FEV, which helps maintain the serotonin system in the brain, and male mice become hyper-aggressive, attacking other males almost immediately rather than going through the normal cautious preliminaries. Female mice lacking this gene show abnormal maternal behavior—their offspring don't survive unless fostered to normal mothers.
These findings don't prove anything about human behavior directly. But they demonstrate the principle: genes can and do influence social behavior in mammals. The connection between DNA and behavior is real, not metaphorical.
The Field Today
Decades later, what became of sociobiology?
Edward Hagen, writing in The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, calls it "one of the scientific triumphs of the twentieth century." He notes that sociobiology is now part of the core curriculum in virtually every biology department, and forms the foundation for most field research on animal behavior. Papers applying evolutionary analysis to animal social behavior appear constantly in top journals like Nature and Science.
But notice that careful phrasing: animal behavior. When it comes to humans, the field has fragmented into several successor disciplines with different names. "Behavioral ecology" studies human behavior using evolutionary principles while carefully avoiding the politically charged "sociobiology" label. "Evolutionary psychology" focuses specifically on the cognitive mechanisms that evolution built into human minds. "Human behavioral ecology" examines how human behavior varies adaptively across different environments.
The name change is partly strategic—a way to escape the toxic associations that accumulated around "sociobiology" in the 1970s and 1980s. But it also reflects genuine intellectual developments. Modern researchers have more sophisticated tools, better data, and a more nuanced understanding of how genes and environment interact.
Four Questions About Behavior
Modern sociobiology—whatever you call it—draws on a framework developed by the Dutch ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen, who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize with Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch for their work on animal behavior.
Tinbergen argued that any complete explanation of a behavior must answer four distinct questions. Two are "ultimate" questions about the species as a whole: What adaptive function does this behavior serve? And what evolutionary history produced it? The other two are "proximate" questions about the individual: How does the behavior develop over the animal's lifetime? And what immediate mechanisms (brain structures, hormones, sensory inputs) trigger it?
Consider birdsong. An ultimate explanation might note that male birds sing to attract mates and defend territories, and that this behavior evolved because singing males left more descendants. A proximate explanation would describe how the brain regions controlling song develop during a critical period in young birds, how testosterone levels influence singing frequency, and how sensory input from rivals triggers competitive displays.
All four explanations are necessary. They're not alternatives but complements, each capturing a different aspect of the same phenomenon. Sociobiology's contribution was to insist that the ultimate, evolutionary questions be taken seriously alongside the proximate, mechanistic ones.
The Philosophical Precursors
Though sociobiology emerged as a named field in the twentieth century, its core ideas have a longer history. The philosopher Daniel Dennett has suggested that Thomas Hobbes, writing in 1651, was a kind of proto-sociobiologist. In his famous book Leviathan, Hobbes tried to explain morality and social order without appealing to God or abstract moral truths. He started from the assumption that humans are fundamentally self-interested creatures, and derived the need for social contracts and political authority from that amoral foundation.
Charles Darwin himself speculated about the evolution of human morality, wondering how altruistic instincts could have evolved when self-interested individuals seem to have an advantage. His tentative answers anticipated much of what sociobiologists would later develop in mathematical detail.
And Kropotkin's Mutual Aid, published in the 1890s, explicitly argued that cooperation was as much a product of evolution as competition—a theme that sociobiology would eventually incorporate, though not before going through a period of excessive focus on conflict and selfishness.
The Three Sociobiologies
It's worth noting that Wilson's sociobiology wasn't the only version. John Paul Scott's sociobiology, which gave the field its name, emphasized the integration of field studies with laboratory experiments. Stuart Altmann, who had been Wilson's PhD student, developed his own approach focused on statistical analysis of primate social behavior.
What distinguished Wilson's version was his embrace of mathematical models from population genetics. William Hamilton had developed equations showing how altruistic behavior could evolve if it helped genetic relatives. Robert Trivers had modeled the evolution of reciprocal altruism between non-relatives. John Maynard Smith had introduced game theory to evolutionary biology. George Price had developed a mathematical equation describing how natural selection operates at multiple levels simultaneously.
Wilson synthesized these mathematical approaches with traditional natural history observation. His genius was in recognizing that the same theoretical framework could illuminate the social behavior of ants, lions, and possibly humans. The synthesis was audacious—and the audacity was precisely what made it so controversial.
An Unfinished Argument
The sociobiology wars have cooled but never quite ended. Every few years, a new book or paper reignites old debates. Is evolutionary psychology legitimate science or politically motivated speculation? Can we study human nature without giving ammunition to those who would justify inequality?
Perhaps the deepest lesson from the controversy is about the relationship between science and values. Wilson was probably right that he was simply describing facts, not making moral recommendations. But his critics were also right that scientific descriptions don't exist in a social vacuum. How we frame facts matters. What we choose to study matters. The metaphors we use to communicate findings matter.
The lion that kills cubs is acting on inherited instincts shaped by millions of years of evolution. Understanding this doesn't make the behavior good or bad—it makes it comprehensible. And comprehension is always the first step, whether toward acceptance or toward change.
Humans, after all, do many things that our ancestors did not. We build cities. We write symphonies. We sometimes even resist the cruelest of our instincts. If evolution shaped us, it also gave us the capacity to understand that shaping—and to imagine, at least, becoming something more than what we were made to be.