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SOCIOBIOLOGY THEORY

Critiques of SocioBiology

DEFINITION OF SOCIOBIOLOGY

HISTORY

SOCIOBIOLOGICAL THEORY

  • Is a field of scientific study which is based on the assumption that social behavior has resulted from evolution and attempts to explain and examine social behavior within that context. Often considered a branch of biology and sociology, it also draws from ethology, anthropology, evolution, zoology, archeology, population genetics, and other disciplines . Within the study of human socities, sociobiology is very closely allied to the fields of Darwinian anthropology, human behavioral ecology and evolutionary psychology.

Sociobiologists believe that human behavior, as well as non human animal behavior, can be partly explained as the outcome of natural selection. They contend that in order to fully understand behavior, it must be analyzed in terms of evolutionary considerations.

Like any theory, sociobiology has its critics. One critique of the theory is that it is inadequate to account for human behavior because it ignores the contributions of the mind and culture. A second critique of sociobiology is that it relies on genetic determinism, which implies approval of the status quo. For example, if male aggression is genetically fixed and reproductively advantageous, critics argue, then male aggression seems to be a biologic reality in which we have little control.

  • sociobiology is based on the premise that some behaviors (both social and individual) are a least partly inherited and can be affected by natural selection. It begins with the idea that behaviors have evolved. It predicts, be evolutionarily successful over time. This can, among other things, result in the formation of complex social processes conducive to evolutionary fitness.
  • The disicipline 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

According to the OED, Edward O. Wilson coined the word "Sociobiology" at a 1946 conference on genetics and social behavior, and it 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 evolution itself. Peter kropotkin's Mutual Aid: A factor of Evolution, written in the early 1980s, is a popular example. Antecedents of modern sociobiological thinking can be traced to the 1960s and the work of such biologists as Richard D. Alexander, Robert Trivers and William D. Hamilton. The idea of the inheritance of behavior arose from J B S Haldanes's idea about how "altruistic behaviour" could be passed from generation to generation. Nonetheless, it was Wilson's book that pioneered and popularized the attempt to explain the evolutionary mechanics behind social behaviors such as altruism, aggresion, and nurturence, primarily in ants but also in other animals (bees,wasps and termites). The final chapter of the book is devoted to sociobiological explanations of human behavior, and Wilson later wrote a Pulitzwer Prize winning book, On Human Nature, that addressed human behvior specifically.

Natural selection is fundamental to evolutionary theory. Variants of heriditary traits which an organism's ability to survived 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 greaterchance of surviving and/or reproducing in the past are more likely to survive in present organism. 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 researches 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.

DIFFERENCES FROM EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY

  • Evolutionary psychology

EDWARD OSBORNE WILSON

CRITICISM

(BORN: JUNE 10,1929)

Evolutionary psychology (EP) is an approach in the social and natural sciences that examines psychological traits such as memory, perception, and language from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify which human psychological traits are evolved adaptations – that is, the functional products of natural selection or sexual selection. Adaptationist thinking about physiological mechanisms, such as the heart, lungs, and immune system, is common in evolutionary biology. Some evolutionary psychologists apply the same thinking to psychology, arguing that the mind has a modular structure similar to that of the body, with different modular adaptations serving different functions. Evolutionary psychologists argue that much of human behavior is the output of psychological adaptations that evolved to solve recurrent problems in human ancestral environments.

CONCLUSION

There are many critics towards the views put forward by sociobiology.

Most of these objections can be placed in four (4) categories:

  • Sociobiology

Sociobiology investigates social behaviors, such as mating patterns, territorial fights, pack hunting, and the hive society of social insects. It argues that 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.

1. Anthropomorphism-is the action of ascribing human behaviors to animal behaviors.

2. Reification-is the practice of mentally treating abstract behaviors as actual "objects" when there is no evidence to support that these behaviors are true traits.

3. Hyper-adaptionism-is the practice of sociobiologists to believe that any given trait is an adapation.

4. Just-so stories-are neat explanations of the evolution of a trait that has no supporting evidence other than its own internal logic.

All of these categories argue that there is not enough evidence to support many theories regarding inherited behaviors.

Sociobiology, despite its complicated history , remains of interest to philosophers and has some import certain important philosophical debates. One such question is whether human beings should be understood to have a nature, a set of characteristics that are somehow essential to or universal in human beings. The title of Wilson's second popular book on sociobiology, "On Human Nature" suggests that Wilson thinks they do; for Wilson, human nature is the set of heritable traits that have been fixed in the human population by natural selection. Consequently, This "nature" can be discovered and understood using the standard adaptationist methods used in other areas of biology. Most importantly , Wilson suggests that some of the characteristics that make up human nature are specifically behavioral.

SOCIOBIOLOGY THEORY

EDWARD OSBORNE WILSON

BY: EDWARD OSBORNE WILSON

EXAMPLE

(BORN: JUNE 10, 1929)

CREATED BY: BANZUELA, KIM EDWARD B.

  • Edward Osborne "E. O." Wilson (born June 10, 1929) is an American biologist, researcher (sociobiology, biodiversity), theorist (consilience, biophilia), naturalist (conservationist) and author. His biological specialty is myrmecology, the study of ants, on which he is considered to be the world's leading authority.

SECTION: 1-AIT

  • Wilson is known for his scientific career, his role as "the father of sociobiology", his environmental advocacy, and his secular-humanist and deist ideas pertaining to religious and ethical matters

Hope You Like It ! =))

A 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.

"That in all things, God may be glorified"

  • Wilson was the Joseph Pellegrino University Research Professor in Entomology for the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He is a Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism. He is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and a New York Times bestseller for The Social Conquest of Earth and Letters to a Young Scientist.
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