Sociobiology: The New Synthesis

1398 Pages·2000·34.89 MB·English

by  Edward O. Wilson

Sociobiology
By the Same Author
Biological Diversity: The Oldest Human Heritage
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge
In Search of Nature
Biodiversity II: Understanding and Protecting Our Natural
Resources
co-editor with Marjorie L. Reaka-Kudla and Don E. Wilson Naturalist
Journey to the Ants
with Bert Hölldobler
The Biophilia Hypothesis
co-editor with Stephen R. Kellert
The Diversity of Life
Success and Dominance in Ecosystems: The Case of the Social
Insects
The Ants
with Bert Hölldobler
Biodiversity
editor
Biophilia
Promethean Fire
with Charles J. Lumsden
Genes, Mind, and Culture
with Charles J. Lumsden
Caste and Ecology in the Social Insects
with George F. Oster
On Human Nature
The Insect Societies
A Primer of Population Biology
with William H. Bossert
The Theory of Island Biogeography
with Robert H. MacArthur
Sociobiology
THE NEW SYNTHESIS
Edward O. Wilson
Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England
Copyright © 1975, 2000 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wilson, Edward Osbourne, 1929– Sociobiology: the new synthesis /Edward O. Wilson.—25th
anniversary ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p.) ISBN 0-674-00089-7—ISBN 0-674-00235-0 (pbk.) 1.
Social behavior in animals. 2. Sociobiology. I. Title.
QL775.W54 2000
591.56—dc21 99-044307
Sociobiology at Century’s End
Sociobiology was brought together as a coherent discipline in Sociobiology: The
New Synthesis (1975), the book now reprinted, but it was originally conceived in
my earlier work The Insect Societies (1971) as a union between entomology and
population biology. This first step was entirely logical, and in retrospect,
inevitable. In the 1950s and 1960s studies of the social insects had multiplied
and attained a new but still unorganized level. My colleagues and I had worked
out many of the principles of chemical communication, the evolution and
physiological determinants of caste, and the dozen or so independent
phylogenetic pathways along which the ants, termites, bees, and wasps had
probably attained advanced sociality. The idea of kin selection, introduced by
William D. Hamilton in 1963, was newly available as a key organizing concept.
A rich database awaited integration. Also, more than 12,000 species of social
insects were known and available for comparative studies to test the
adaptiveness of colonial life, a great advantage over the relatively species-poor
vertebrates, of which only a few hundred are known to exhibit advanced social
organization. And finally, because the social insects obey rigid instincts, there
was little of the interplay of heredity and environment that confounds the study
of vertebrates.
During roughly the same period, up to 1971, researchers achieved comparable
advances in population biology. They devised richer models of the genetics and
growth dynamics of populations, and linked demography more exactly to
competition and symbiosis. In the 1967 synthesis The Theory of Island
Biogeography, Robert H. MacArthur and I (if you will permit the continued
autobiographical slant of this account) meshed principles of population biology
with patterns of species biodiversity and distribution.
It was a natural step then to write The Insect Societies at the close of the
1960s as an attempt to reorganize the highly eclectic knowledge of the social
insects on a base of population biology. Each insect colony is an assemblage of
related organisms that grows, competes, and eventually dies in patterns that are
consequences of the birth and death schedules of its members.
And what of the vertebrate societies? In the last chapter of The Insect
Societies, entitled “The Prospect for a Unified Sociobiology,” I made an
optimistic projection to combine the two great phylads:
In spite of the phylogenetic remoteness of vertebrates and insects and the basic distinction between their
respective personal and impersonal systems of communication, these two groups of animals have evolved
social behaviors that are similar in degree and complexity and convergent in many important details. This
fact conveys a special promise that sociobiology can eventually be derived from the first principles of
population and behavioral biology and developed into a single, mature science. The discipline can then be
expected to increase our understanding of the unique qualities of social behavior in animals as opposed to
those of man.
The sequel in this reasoning is contained in the book before you. Presented in
this new release by Harvard University Press, it remains unchanged from the
original. It provides verbatim the first effort to systematize the consilient links
between termites and chimpanzees, the goal suggested in The Insect Societies,
but it goes further, and extends the effort to human beings.
The response to Sociobiology: The New Synthesis in 1975 and the years
immediately following was dramatically mixed. I think it fair to say that the
zoology in the book, making up all but the first and last of its 27 chapters, was
favorably received. The influence of this portion grew steadily, so much so that
in a 1989 poll the officers and fellows of the international Animal Behavior
Society rated Sociobiology the most important book on animal behavior of all
time, edging out even Darwin’s 1872 classic, The Expression of the Emotions in
Man and Animals. By integrating the discoveries of many investigators into a
single framework of cause-and-effect theory, it helped to change the study of
animal behavior into a discipline connected broadly to mainstream evolutionary
biology.
The brief segment of Sociobiology that addresses human behavior,
comprising 30 out of the 575 total pages, was less well received. It ignited the
most tumultuous academic controversy of the 1970s, one that spilled out of
biology into the social sciences and humanities. The story has been told many
times and many ways, including the account in my memoir, Naturalist, where I
tried hard to maintain a decent sense of balance; and it will bear only a brief
commentary here.
Although the large amount of commotion may suggest otherwise, adverse
critics made up only a small minority of those who published reviews of
Sociobiology. But they were very vocal and effective at the time. They were
scandalized by what they saw as two grievous flaws. The first is inappropriate
reductionism, in this case the proposal that human social behavior is ultimately
reducible to biology. The second perceived flaw is genetic determinism, the
belief that human nature is rooted in our genes.
It made little difference to those who chose to read the book this way that
reductionism is the primary cutting tool of science, or that Sociobiology stresses
not only reductionism but also synthesis and holism. It also mattered not at all
that sociobiological explanations were never strictly reductionist, but
interactionist. No serious scholar would think that human behavior is controlled
the way animal instinct is, without the intervention of culture. In the
interactionist view held by virtually all who study the subject, genomics biases
mental development but cannot abolish culture. To suggest that I held such
views, and it was suggested frequently, was to erect a straw man—to fabricate
false testimony for rhetorical purposes.
Who were the critics, and why were they so offended? Their rank included
the last of the Marxist intellectuals, most prominently represented by Stephen
Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin. They disliked the idea, to put it mildly, that
human nature could have any genetic basis at all. They championed the opposing
view that the developing human brain is a tabula rasa. The only human nature,
they said, is an indefinitely flexible mind. Theirs was the standard political
position taken by Marxists from the late 1920s forward: the ideal political
economy is socialism, and the tabula rasa mind of people can be fitted to it. A
mind arising from a genetic human nature might not prove conformable. Since
socialism is the supreme good to be sought, a tabula rasa it must be. As
Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon J. Kamin frankly expressed the matter in Not
in Our Genes (1984): “We share a commitment to the prospect of the creation of
a more socially just—a socialist—society. And we recognize that a critical
science is an integral part of the struggle to create that society, just as we also
believe that the social function of much of today’s science is to hinder the
creation of that society by acting to preserve the interests of the dominant class,
gender, and race.”
That was in 1984—an apposite Orwellian date. The argument for a political
test of scientific knowledge lost its strength with the collapse of world socialism
and the end of the Cold War. To my knowledge it has not been heard since.
In the 1970s, when the human sociobiology controversy still waxed hot,
however, the Old Marxists were joined and greatly strengthened by members of
the New Left in a second objection, this time centered on social justice. If genes
prescribe human nature, they said, then it follows that ineradicable differences in
personality and ability also might exist. Such a possibility cannot be tolerated. At
least, its discussion cannot be tolerated, said the critics, because it tilts thinking
onto a slippery slope down which humankind easily descends to racism, sexism,
class oppression, colonialism, and—perhaps worst of all—capitalism! As the
century closes, this dispute has been settled. Genetically based variation in
individual personality and intelligence has been conclusively demonstrated,
although statistical racial differences, if any, remain unproven. At the same time,
all of the projected evils except capitalism have begun to diminish worldwide.
None of the change can be ascribed to human behavioral genetics or
sociobiology. Capitalism may yet fall—who can predict history?—but, given the
overwhelming evidence at hand, the hereditary framework of human nature
seems permanently secure.
Among many social scientists and humanities scholars a deeper and less
ideological source of skepticism was expressed, and remains. It is based on the
belief that culture is the sole artisan of the human mind. This perception is also a
tabula rasa hypothesis that denies biology, or at least simply ignores biology. It
too is being replaced by acceptance of the interaction of biology and culture as
the determinant of mental development.
Overall, there is a tendency as the century closes to accept that Homo sapiens
is an ascendant primate, and that biology matters.
The path is not smooth, however. The slowness with which human
sociobiology (nowadays also called evolutionary psychology) has spread is due
not merely to ideology and inertia, but also and more fundamentally to the
traditional divide between the great branches of learning. Since the early
nineteenth century it has been generally assumed that the natural sciences, the
social sciences, and the humanities are epistemologically disjunct from one
another, requiring different vocabularies, modes of analysis, and rules of
validation. The perceived dividing line is essentially the same as that between
the scientific and literary cultures defined by C. P. Snow in 1959. It still
fragments the intellectual landscape.
The solution to the problem now evident is the recognition that the line
between the great branches of learning is not a line at all, but instead a broad,
mostly unexplored domain awaiting cooperative exploration from both sides.
Four borderland disciplines are expanding into this domain from the natural
sciences side:
Cognitive neuroscience, also known as the brain sciences, maps brain activity
with increasingly fine resolution in space and time. Neural pathways, some