Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975; 25th anniversary edition 2000) is a book by the biologist E. O. Wilson. It helped start the sociobiology debate, one of the great scientific controversies in biology of the 20th century and part of the wider debate about evolutionary psychology and the modern synthesis of evolutionary biology. Wilson popularized the term "sociobiology" as an attempt to explain the evolutionary mechanics behind social behaviour such as altruism, aggression, and the nurturing of the young. It formed a position within the long-running nature versus nurture debate. The fundamental principle guiding sociobiology is that an organism's evolutionary success is measured by the extent to which its genes are represented in the next generation.
The book was generally well-reviewed in biological journals. It received a much more mixed reaction among sociologists, mainly triggered by the brief coverage of the implications of sociobiology for human society in the first and last chapters of the book; the body of the text was largely welcomed. Such was the level of interest in the debate that a review reached the front page of the New York Times. The sociologist Gerhard Lenski, admitting that sociologists needed to look further into non-human societies, agreed that human society was founded on biology but denied both biological reductionism and determinism. Lenski observed that since the nature-nurture dichotomy was false, there was no reason for sociologists and biologists to disagree. Other sociologists objected in particular to the final chapter, on "Man": Devra G. Kleiman called Wilson's attempt to extend his thesis to humans weak and premature, and noted that he had largely overlooked the importance of co-operative behaviour and females in mammalian societies.
Context
E. O. Wilson was an American biologist, specialising in the study of ants, social insects on which he was the world's leading expert. He is known also for his pioneering work on island biogeography, which relates species richness to island size, an important consideration in nature conservation. Wilson however favoured group selection over the Neo-Darwinian kin selection as an explanation of co-operation in social animals.
Book
Publication The book was first published in 1975. It has been reprinted at least 14 times up to 2014. It has been translated into languages including Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish. An abridged edition was published in 1980.
Illustrations
The book is illustrated with 31 halftone figures, 209 line drawings by Sarah Landry, and 43 tables. The drawings of animal societies were considered "informing and attractive".
Contents
Part I. Social Evolution
The section summarizes the concepts of population genetics, a branch of evolutionary theory combining Mendelian genetics and natural selection in mathematical form to explain the pressures on animal societies. In particular, altruism, self-sacrificing behaviour, would die out unless something such as kin or group selection maintains it.
1. The Morality of the Gene 2. Elementary Concepts of Sociobiology 3. The Prime Movers of Social Evolution 4. The Relevant Principles of Population Biology 5. Group Selection and Altruism
Part II. Social Mechanisms
This section describes the types of social behaviour in animals, including the principles of animal communication, aggression, dominance systems, and insect castes.
6. Group Size, Reproduction, and Time-Energy Budgets 7. The Development and Modification of Social Behavior 8. Communication: Basic Principles 9. Communication: Functions and Complex Systems 10. Communication: Origins and Evolution 11. Aggression 12. Social Spacing, Including Territory 13. Dominance Systems 14. Roles and Castes 15. Sex and Society 16. Parental Care 17. Social Symbioses
Part III. The Social Species
The section describes the distribution of social behaviour in different taxa. The theme is that evolution is progressive, with four pinnacles of social evolution, namely the colonial invertebrates such as corals, the social insects, mammals other than humans, and finally humans. The last chapter argues that natural selection has made humans far more flexible in social organisation than any other species.
18. The Four Pinnacles of Social Evolution 19. The Colonial Microorganisms and Invertebrates 20. The Social Insects 21. The Cold-Blooded Vertebrates 22. The Birds 23. Evolutionary Trends within the Mammals 24. The Ungulates and Elephants 25. The Carnivores 26. The Nonhuman Primates 27. Man: From Sociobiology to Sociology
Reception
Contemporary
Sociobiology attracted a large number of critical reviews, not only by biologists, but by social scientists who objected especially to Wilson's application of Darwinian thinking to humans, asserting that Wilson was implying a form of biological determinism. It was, unusually, reviewed on the front page of the New York Times in May 1975, and again in November that year as the controversy grew. The paper described the effect as "a period of ferment", naming the "monumental" book as the "yeast" [which caused the brew to bubble]. The Times noted that the debate was an updated version of the nature or nurture argument that had simmered ever since Darwin's time: "The assertion that man's body is a biological machine, subject to biological rules, has never completely shaken the conviction that the human intellect and human behavior are unique, the subject of free will." The paper reported that Wilson's colleague at Harvard, Richard Lewontin, had issued a 5,000 word attack on the book, and that the "meticulous" Wilson had said "I've tried to be extremely cautious in all this". The paper noted that Wilson had nowhere actually said that human behaviour was totally determined by genes, and reported him as saying that a rough figure was 10 percent genetic.
By biologists The theoretical biologist Mary Jane West-Eberhard reviewed the book in detail for The Quarterly Review of Biology as a work "of special significance". She began it with a fable of a "small community of modest scholars called natural historians" who all practised their own sciences, until one day a man who "had been called Entomologist, Ecologist, and even Biochemist" arose among them and pronounced "there shall be a new science". She wrote that Wilson had "assumed god-like powers with this book", attempting to reformulate the foundations of the social sciences, making ethology and comparative psychology obsolete, and restructuring behavioural biology. She marvelled at the "sustained enthusiasm and authoritativeness" across a wide range of fields not Wilson's own, and the usefulness of many of the chapters. "In this book sociobiology is a patchwork neatly stitched from relevant pieces of other fields, without a bold new theoretical pattern of its own". She objected strongly to what she considered Wilson's "confused and misleading" discussion of altruism and group selection, arguing that kin selection provided an alternative (fully Darwinian) explanation and that Wilson was wrong to make it seem that group selection was necessary.
Charles D. Michener, an entomologist, reviewed the book for BioScience. He observed that its scope was far wider than the social insects of Wilson's previous book The Insect Societies, dealing with "social phenomena from the slime molds to man". He found the review of population biology (Part I) excellent. He noted Wilson's statement that altruism is the central problem of sociobiology, and remarks that Wilson's account in fact indicates the solution, kin selection. He describes the chapter on Man as being "from the viewpoint of a very knowledgeable extraterrestrial visitor recording man's social natural history".
The ornithologist Herbert Friedmann, reviewing the book for The Journal of Wildlife Management, called the book very important for its coverage of topics including of humans, and its "interpretive attitude". It would be a convenient summary of any of the groups it covers for the student, and the question of bio-ethics of interest to every "intelligent biologist". Friedmann noted that Wilson has "the courage of his convictions" to suggest in the chapter on Man that "human ethics and morality should be expressed biologically rather than philosophically", something that "need not deter the zoologist" since in Friedmann's view ethics does not exist in the human sense "in the nonhuman world".
David Barash, a psychologist, thought it "about time" students of behaviour were finally becoming Darwinian, starting to turn the "ramshackle" science into something with firmer intellectual foundations. He defended sociobiology, arguing that it does not claim that genes somehow control behaviour, but that they along with experience and culture contribute to it. He speculated that it might be possible to make valid predictions about human behaviour by studying "cross-cultural universals in human behaviour", combining anthropology and evolutionary biology's theorem of fitness maximization.
By sociologists
The sociologist Eileen Barker reviewed the book for The British Journal of Sociology. She called it an "impressive tome (it weighs 5 lb)" and "a comprehensive, beautifully laid out and illustrated reference book covering the amazing variety of animal social behaviour". She noted that the final section on "Man" contained "several surprises for most sociologists", and that the book should counter "many of the naive inferences that have recently been made about man's evolutionary heritage."
Marion Blute, in Contemporary Sociology, noted that it was rare for any book to be reviewed on the front page of the New York Times, or to receive "the extremes of reaction" seen for Sociobiology. She found that "the clarity, breadth and richness of accurately rendered detail in this monograph is really quite breath-taking." However, she objected to the claim that the book covered the biological basis of all social behaviour, as it did not cover what she called the "epigenetic disciplines", the effects of the environment on the embryonic and later development of the individual including learning (nurture, not just nature). She called the gap "unfortunate" and pointed out that "the development problem" and the functioning of the human brain were the frontiers of research. She observed, citing Dobzhansky, that "an evolutionary minded sociology which really appreciated the significance of sociocultural transmission along nongenetic lines would likely see society and culture in a very different way". Despite Wilson's neglect of "epigenetic" and social sciences, she urged sociologists to read "this exceptionally fine book", noting that despite its length it should have been twice as long. She looked forward to seeing sociology coming to terms with the neo-Darwinian synthesis, something that was already under way, which (she argued) would enrich social theory, a much better result than the alternative possibility, a renewed waste of time on the nature-versus-nurture debate.