Sociobiology
Sociobiology is a branch of biology with origins in ethology, evolution and population genetics,
which attempts to explain changes and stability of animal behavior and social structures, in terms of evolutionary advantage or strategy. The term 'sociobiology' was coined by Edward Osborne Wilson in the 1970s. He is the author of the landmark book "Sociobiology: The New Synthesis." Since then, other terms have come into currency, such as evolutionary psychology.
Sociobiology attempts to explain the evolutionary mechanics behind social behaviors such as altruism, parasitism, aggression, and nurturance. From the viewpoint of individual "survival of the fittest," altruistic behaviors may appear suicidal, foolish, or self denigrating. From the viewpoint of group survival, they typically make enormous sense. In essence, on an evolutionary level, "survival of the fittest" selects not only on an individual level, but also selects for some groups or "evolutionary breeding units" at the expense of others. As an example, a soldier who throws himself on to a hand grenade to save his buddies may be acting foolishly on a purely individual level, but if the kind of altruistic sacrifice that he shows allows his army to destroy another that is incapable of patriotic sacrifice, and consequently expand their gene pool over the terroritory of the vanquished, then the altruistic traits in the group will survive, expand, and be self-replicating even though it causes the immolation of particular individuals in the process. From a group level, individuals are like the skin cells of a human body that get expended by friction when a hunter kills game to eat and survive on a total body level. In essence, societies may be viewed as an extended organism.
An important concept in sociobiology is that temperamental traits within a gene pool and between gene pools exist in a kind of ecological balance. Just as an expansion of a sheep population might encourage the expansion of a wolf population one step above in the food chain, an expansion of altruistic traits within a gene pool may also encourage the expansion of individuals with parasitic traits. Also, temperamental traits are shaped by the physical environment. According to various sources, ranging from articles in Mankind Quarterly to the New England Journal of Medicine, human groups that have evolved in frost zone areas of the planet which demand a high level of technological adaptiveness to survive cruel winters have a significantly higher level of cerebral folding and a higher ratio of frontal lobe to anterior lobe brain mass relative to groups which have evolved in temperate zones, and these characteristics correlate with abstract intelligence.
Applying sociobiology to study humans is very controversial issue, from both scientific and political/religious point of view, with opponents coming from the latter being much more vocal. Some have objected that sociobiological views of human beings tend to underestimate the ability of people to remake their environment that it encourages a belief in biological determinism and the naturalistic fallacy. Back around 1987 U.S. News and World Report ran a cover story "The Gene Factor" which reported that the trend in science has been to show that in the age old controversy in psychology about which has more influence on human behavior, the environment or genetics, that the trend of scientific findings are tilting more towards the genetic side. Twin studies suggest that most behavioral traits such as creativity, afilliativeness, and aggressiveness are between 45% to 75% genetic. Intelligence is approximately 80% genetic. Despite all of this, the American media continue to run stories that genetic interpretations of human behavior and ethno-racial performance are "discredited."
A middle path, growing in popularity, says that genes establish a palette of behaviors, which social training can augment, modify, reprioritise and resequence to a varying extent. In this view, scientific genetics and social institutions have roles that can be studied.
Some critics say that sociobiology is not a science. However the scientific method can be applied to sociobiology. A social behavior is first explained as a sociobiological hypothesis by finding an evolutionarily stable strategy that matches the observed behavior. Stability can be difficult to prove. A well-formed strategy will predict gene frequencies. The hypothesis can be confirmed 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 also be problematic, because a simple statistical correlation can sometimes be open to charges of circularity is based on the same measurements that were used to describe the strategy. Though difficult, this process finds favor.
As a successful example, Altruism in animals was first satisfactorily explained by these means, and it was correlated to the degree of genome shared by the altruists, as predicted.
Another successful example was a quantitative description of infanticide by male harem-mating animals when the alpha male is displaced. Female infanticide and fetal resorption are active areas of study. In general, females with more bearing opportunities may value offspring less. Also, females may arrange bearing opportunities to maximize the food and protection from mates.
Criminality is actively under study, but extremely controversial. There are persuasive arguments that in some uncivilized environments, criminal behavior is adaptive. (Including Mealey 1995). Anyone who has read "Den of Thieves" by James Stewart about convicted felon/Wall Street raiders Mike Milken and Ivan Boesky or followed the Enron fiasco knows that criminality and parasitism can exist in supposedly highly civilized societies as well.
A lot of Americans who are imbued with libertarian philosophies of rugged individualism and internalistic free trade may feel uncomfortable with attempts to explain the evolution of traits such as altruism and parasitism in human groups because they might resemble ideas involved with racial nationalist philosophies such as Nazism for Germans, Zionism for Jews, Bushido for Japanese, Sinn Fein for the Irish, or militant indigenous activism for American Indian tribes. Theoretically, some types of successful sociobiological results could justify mass oppression of innocent human beings. Dr. Norman Hall wrote an article "Zoological Subspecies in Man" in Mankind Quarterly in 1960 that argued that "racism" actually exists in most mammalian species, because racial groups within mammalian families (such as moose, rats, and reindeer) tend to usurp each others space and fight rather than act out their ability to mate and form offspring. Hence, "racism" could have an instinctive component in human groups. This would help to explain how, after the fall of communism and decades of antiracist indoctrination in Yugoslavia, the country fractured into warring ethnic groups. This suggests that societies that go too far in trying to introduce racial diversity run the risk that once the economy sours, the central government collapses, or its leftist national media becomes discredited, that the innate racism of different groups could come to the surface and result in bloody warfare. A wise policy might be to not so much try to completely suppress racial and tribal consiousness with leftist propaganda, but rather try to steer and contain it and be respectful of racial territoriality.
Sociobiology must be distinguished from memetics. In sociobiology the evolving entities are genes, while in memetics they are memes. Sociobiology is concerned with the biological basis of human behaviours, while memetics treats humans as products not only of biological evolution, but of cultural evolution also.
Well-known sociobiologists:
Related articles and books: Prisoners dilemma, Memetics, Iterated prisoner's dilemma, Evolutionarily stable strategy "Sociobiology: The New Synthesis" by Dr. Edward Wilson "Intelligence and National Achievement" by Dr. Raymond Cattell "A New Morality from Science: Beyondism" by Dr. Raymond Cattell
External links: The Sociobiology of Sociopathy, Mealey, 1995