Richard Lewontin Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology
What about sociobiology did Richard have to do with?
What did Richard Lewontin have to do with sociobiology?
Along with others, such as Gould, Lewontin has been a persistent critic of some themes in neo-Darwinism. Specifically, he has criticised proponents of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology such as Edward O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins, who attempt to explain animal behaviour and social structures in terms of evolutionary advantage or strategy. He and others criticize this approach when applied to humans, as he sees it as genetic determinism. In his writing, Lewontin suggests a more nuanced view of evolution is needed, which requires a more careful understanding of the context of the whole organism as well as the environment.  Such concerns about what he views as the oversimplification of genetics has led Lewontin to be a frequent participant in debates, and an active life as a public intellectual. He has lectured widely to promote his views on evolutionary biology and science. In books such as Not in Our Genes (co-authored with Steven Rose and Leon J. Kamin) and numerous articles, Lewontin has questioned much of the claimed heritability of human behavioral traits, such as intelligence as measured by IQ tests.  Some academics have criticized him for rejecting sociobiology for non-scientific reasons. Edward Wilson (1995) suggested that Lewontin's political beliefs affected his scientific view. Robert Trivers described Lewontin as "...a man with great talents who often wasted them on foolishness, on preening and showing off, on shallow political thinking and on useless philosophical rumination while limiting his genetic work by assumptions congenial to his politics." Lewontin has at times identified himself as Marxist, and admitted that his ideological views have affected his scientific work (Levins and Lewontin 1985). Others such as Kitcher (1985) have countered that Lewontin's criticisms of sociobiology are genuine scientific concerns about the discipline. He wrote that attacking Lewontin's motives amounts to an ad hominem argument. CANNOTANSWER
he has criticised proponents of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology such as Edward O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins,
Richard Charles Lewontin (March 29, 1929 – July 4, 2021) was an American evolutionary biologist, mathematician, geneticist, and social commentator. A leader in developing the mathematical basis of population genetics and evolutionary theory, he pioneered the application of techniques from molecular biology, such as gel electrophoresis, to questions of genetic variation and evolution.

In a pair of seminal 1966 papers co-authored with J. L. Hubby in the journal Genetics, Lewontin helped set the stage for the modern field of molecular evolution. In 1979 he and Stephen Jay Gould introduced the term "spandrel" into evolutionary theory. From 1973 to 1998, he held an endowed chair in zoology and biology at Harvard University, and from 2003 until his death in 2021 had been a research professor there.

Lewontin opposed genetic determinism.

Early life and education
Lewontin was born in New York City, to parents descended from late 19th-century Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants. His father was a broker of textiles, and his mother a homemaker. He attended Forest Hills High School and the École Libre des Hautes Études in New York. In 1951 he graduated from Harvard College with a BS degree in biology. In 1952, Lewontin received an MS degree in mathematical statistics, followed by a PhD degree in zoology in 1954, both from Columbia University, where he was a student of Theodosius Dobzhansky.

He held faculty positions at North Carolina State University, the University of Rochester, and the University of Chicago. In 1973 Lewontin was appointed as Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Professor of Biology at Harvard University, holding the position until 1998.

Career

Work in population genetics
Lewontin worked in both theoretical and experimental population genetics.  A hallmark of his work was an interest in new technology.  He was the first person to do a computer simulation of the behavior of a single gene locus (previous simulation work having been of models with multiple loci).  In 1960, he and Ken-Ichi Kojima were the first population geneticists to give the equations for change of haplotype frequencies with interacting natural selection at two loci.  This set off a wave of theoretical work on two-locus selection in the 1960s and 1970s. Their paper gave a theoretical derivation of the equilibria expected, and also investigated the dynamics of the model by computer iteration. Lewontin later introduced the D' measure of linkage disequilibrium. (He also introduced the term "linkage disequilibrium", about which many population geneticists have been unenthusiastic.)

In 1966, he and J. L. Hubby published a paper that revolutionized population genetics.   They used protein gel electrophoresis to survey dozens of loci in the fruit fly Drosophila pseudoobscura, and reported that a large fraction of the loci were polymorphic, and that at the average locus there was about a 15% chance that the individual was heterozygous. (Harry Harris reported similar results for humans at about the same time.) Previous work with gel electrophoresis had been reports of variation in single loci and did not give any sense of how common variation was.

Lewontin and Hubby's paper also discussed the possible explanation of the high levels of variability by either balancing selection or neutral mutation.  Although they did not commit themselves to advocating neutrality, this was the first clear statement of the neutral theory for levels of variability within species. Lewontin and Hubby's paper had great impact—the discovery of high levels of molecular variability gave population geneticists ample material to work on, and gave them access to variation at single loci. The possible theoretical explanations of this rampant polymorphism became the focus of most population genetics work thereafter.  Martin Kreitman was later to do a pioneering survey of population-level variability in DNA sequences while a Ph.D. student in Lewontin's lab.

Work on human genetic diversity
In a landmark paper, published in 1972, Lewontin identified that most of the variation (80–85%) within human populations is found within local geographic groups, and differences attributable to traditional "race" groups are a minor part of human genetic variability (1–15%). In a 2003 paper, A. W. F. Edwards criticized Lewontin's conclusion that race is an invalid taxonomic construct, terming it Lewontin's fallacy. He argued that the probability of racial misclassification of an individual based on variation in a single genetic locus is approximately 30% and the misclassification probability becomes close to zero if enough loci are studied. Edwards' criticism in turn garnered its own criticism from biologists such as Jonathan Marks, who argued that "the point of the theory of race was to discover large clusters of people that are principally homogeneous within and heterogeneous between, contrasting groups. Lewontin's analysis shows that such groups do not exist in the human species, and Edwards' critique does not contradict that interpretation."

Debates within mainstream evolutionary biology

In 1975, when E. O. Wilson's book Sociobiology proposed evolutionary explanations for human social behaviors, biologists including Lewontin, his Harvard colleagues Stephen Jay Gould and Ruth Hubbard responded negatively.

Lewontin and Gould introduced the term spandrel to evolutionary biology, inspired by the architectural term "spandrel", in an influential 1979 paper, "The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme."  "Spandrels" were described as features of an organism that exist as a necessary consequence of other (perhaps adaptive) features, but do not directly improve fitness (and thus are not necessarily adaptive). The relative frequency of spandrels versus adaptations continues to stir controversy in evolutionary biology.

Lewontin was an early proponent of a hierarchy of levels of selection in his article, "The Units of Selection". He has been a major influence on philosophers of biology, notably William C. Wimsatt (who taught with Lewontin and Richard Levins at the University of Chicago), Robert Brandon and Elisabeth Lloyd (who studied with Lewontin as graduate students), Philip Kitcher, Elliott Sober, and Sahotra Sarkar.  Lewontin briefly argued for the historical nature of biological causality in "Is Nature Probable or Capricious?".

In "Organism and Environment" in Scientia, and in more popular form in the last chapter of Biology as Ideology, Lewontin argued that while traditional Darwinism has portrayed the organism as a passive recipient of environmental influences, a correct understanding should emphasize the organism as an active constructor of its own environment. Niches are not pre-formed, empty receptacles into which organisms are inserted, but are defined and created by organisms. The organism-environment relationship is reciprocal and dialectical. M. W. Feldman and others have developed Lewontin's conception in more detailed models under the term niche construction.

In the adaptationist view of evolution, the organism is a function of both the organism and environment, while the environment is only a function of itself. The environment is seen as autonomous and unshaped by the organism. Lewontin instead believed in a constructivist view, in which the organism is a function of the organism and environment, with the environment being a function of the organism and environment as well. This means that the organism shapes the environment as the environment shapes the organism. The organism shapes the environment for future generations.

Lewontin criticized traditional neo-Darwinian approaches to adaptation. In his article "Adaptation" in the Italian Enciclopedia Einaudi, and in a modified version for Scientific American, he emphasized the need to give an engineering characterization of adaptation separate from measurement of number of offspring, rather than simply assuming organs or organisms are at adaptive optima. Lewontin said that his more general, technical criticism of adaptationism grew out of his recognition that the fallacies of sociobiology reflect fundamentally flawed assumptions of adaptiveness of all traits in much of the modern evolutionary synthesis.

Lewontin accused neo-Darwinists of telling Just-So Stories when they try to show how natural selection explains such novelties as long-necked giraffes.

Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology
Along with others, such as Gould, Lewontin was a persistent critic of some themes in neo-Darwinism. Specifically, he criticized proponents of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, such as Edward O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins, who attempt to explain animal behaviour and social structures in terms of evolutionary advantage or strategy. He and others criticize this approach when applied to humans, as he sees it as genetic determinism. In his writing, Lewontin suggests a more nuanced view of evolution is needed, which requires a more careful understanding of the context of the whole organism as well as the environment.

Such concerns about what he viewed as the oversimplification of genetics led Lewontin to be a frequent participant in debates, and an active life as a public intellectual. He lectured widely to promote his views on evolutionary biology and science. In the book Not in Our Genes (co-authored with Steven Rose and Leon J. Kamin) and numerous articles, Lewontin questioned much of the claimed heritability of human behavioral traits, such as intelligence as measured by IQ tests.

Some academics have criticized him for rejecting sociobiology for non-scientific reasons. Edward Wilson (1995) suggested that Lewontin's political beliefs affected his scientific view. Others, such as Kitcher (1985), countered that Lewontin's criticisms of sociobiology are genuine scientific concerns about the discipline. He wrote that attacking Lewontin's motives amounts to an ad hominem argument. Lewontin at times identified himself as Marxist, and asserted that his philosophical views have bolstered his scientific work (Levins and Lewontin 1985).

Agribusiness
Lewontin has written on the economics of agribusiness. He has contended that hybrid corn was developed and propagated not because of its superior quality, but because it allowed agribusiness corporations to force farmers to buy new seed each year rather than plant seed produced by their previous crop of corn (Lewontin 1982). Lewontin testified in an unsuccessful suit in California challenging the state's financing of research to develop automatic tomato pickers. This favored the profits of agribusiness over the employment of farm workers (Lewontin 2000).

Lewontin, R. C. 1982. Agricultural research and the penetration of capital. Science for the People 14 (1): 12–17. 
http://www.science-for-the-people.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/SftPv14n1s.pdf.

Lewontin, R.C. 2000. The maturing of capitalist agriculture: farmer as proletarian. Pgs 93–106 in F. Magdoff, J. B. Foster, and F. H. Buttel, Eds. 2000. Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers, Food, and the Environment. Monthly Review Press, NY.

Personal life
As of 2003, Lewontin was the Alexander Agassiz Research Professor at Harvard. He has worked with and had great influence on many philosophers of biology, including William C. Wimsatt, Elliott Sober, Philip Kitcher, Elisabeth Lloyd, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Sahotra Sarkar, and Robert Brandon, often inviting them to work in his lab.

Since 2013, Lewontin has been listed on the Advisory Council of the National Center for Science Education.

As of mid-2015, Lewontin and his wife Mary Jane (Christianson) lived on a farm in Brattleboro, Vermont. They had four sons. He was an atheist.

Lewontin died at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts on July 4, 2021, at the age of 92.

Recognition
1961: Fulbright Fellowship
1961: National Science Foundation Senior Postdoctoral Fellow
1970s: Membership of the National Academy of Sciences (later resigned)
1994: Sewall Wright Award from the American Society of Naturalists
2015: Crafoord Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (shared with Tomoko Ohta)
2017: Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal from the Genetics Society of America

Bibliography

 
 
 
 "The Apportionment of Human Diversity," Evolutionary Biology, vol. 6 (1972) pp. 391–398.
 
 "Adattamento," Enciclopedia Einaudi, (1977) vol. 1, 198–214.
 "Adaptation," Scientific American, vol. 239, (1978) 212–228.

 "The Organism as Subject and Object of Evolution," Scientia vol. 188 (1983) 65–82.
Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature (with Steven Rose and Leon J. Kamin) (1984) 
The Dialectical Biologist (with Richard Levins), Harvard University Press (1985) 
Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA (1991) 
The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment, Harvard University Press (2000) 
It Ain't Necessarily So: The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions, New York Review of Books (2000)
Biology Under The Influence: Dialectical Essays on the Coevolution of Nature and Society (with Richard Levins), (2007)

References

Further reading

 - a two volume Festschrift for Lewontin with a full bibliography

External links
 
 an interview given at Berkeley in 2003
 Richard Lewontin's Profile at the California Institute of Technology
 Gene, Organism and Environment: Bad Metaphors and Good Biology - RealAudio stream of Hitchcock lecture on UCTV
 The Concept of Race: The Confusion of Social and Biological Reality - RealAudio stream of Hitchcock lecture on UCTV
 Internalism and Externalism in Biology, lecture delivered at Harvard university on December 13, 2007.
 

1929 births
2021 deaths
20th-century American mathematicians
21st-century American mathematicians
Jewish American atheists
21st-century American biologists
American Marxists
American social commentators
Columbia University faculty
Columbia University alumni
Critics of creationism
Evolutionary biologists
Extended evolutionary synthesis
Harvard College alumni
Harvard University faculty
Intelligence researchers
Jewish American scientists
North Carolina State University faculty
People from Brattleboro, Vermont
Population geneticists
Race and intelligence controversy
Santa Fe Institute people
Scientists from New York City
Scientists from Vermont
Theoretical biologists
University of Chicago faculty
University of Rochester faculty
Mathematicians from New York (state)
Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature is a 1984 book by the evolutionary geneticist Richard Lewontin, the neurobiologist Steven Rose, and the psychologist Leon Kamin, in which the authors criticize sociobiology and genetic determinism and advocate a socialist society.

The book formed part of a larger campaign against sociobiology. Its authors were praised for their criticism of IQ testing and were complimented by some for their critique of sociobiology. However, they have been criticized for misrepresenting the views of scientists such as the biologist E. O. Wilson and the ethologist Richard Dawkins, for using “determinism” and “reductionism” simply as terms of abuse, and for the influence of Marxism on their views. Critics have seen its authors’ conclusions as political rather than scientific.

Summary
Lewontin, Rose and Kamin identify themselves as "respectively an evolutionary geneticist, a neurobiologist, and a psychologist." They criticize biological determinism and reductionism, and state that they share a commitment to the creation of a socialist society and a recognition that "a critical science is an integral part of the struggle to create that society". Their understanding of science draws on ideas suggested by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and developed by Marxist scholars in the 1930s. They also draw on the ideas of the Marxist philosopher György Lukács, as put forward in History and Class Consciousness (1923), as well as the ideas of the Marxist philosopher Ágnes Heller and the communist revolutionary Mao Zedong. They discuss and criticize the views of authors such as E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and Donald Symons. They criticize Wilson's Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975). They maintain that, like some other sociobiologists, Symons maintains that "the manifest trait is not itself coded by genes, but that a potential is coded and the trait only arises when the appropriate environmental cue is given." In their view, "Despite its superficial appearance of dependence on environment, this model is completely genetically determined, independent of the environment." They write that Symons' arguments in The Evolution of Human Sexuality (1979) provide examples "of how sociobiological theory can explain anything, no matter how contradictory, by a little mental gymnastics".

Publication history
Not in Our Genes was first published by Pantheon Books in 1984. Later that year it was published by Pelican Books. In 1990, it was published by Penguin Books.

Reception

Mainstream media
Not in Our Genes received positive reviews from the columnist Gene Lyons in Newsweek and the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould in The New York Review of Books, a mixed review from the philosopher Philip Kitcher in The New York Times Book Review, and negative reviews from the anthropologist Melvin Konner in Natural History and the biologist Patrick Bateson and the ethologist Richard Dawkins in New Scientist. The editors of New Scientist noted that the book would "inevitably attract either extreme criticism or glowing praise" depending on the reviewer's stance on sociobiology, and that they published two reviews to help encourage debate, having approached Dawkins "for the opposition" and Bateson, "who feels that the attack on genetic determinism is justified." The book was also reviewed by the psychologist Sandra Scarr in American Scientist, Nathaniel S. Lehrman in The Humanist, and by The Wilson Quarterly and Science News.

Lyons described the book as a "spirited, if often repetitive, demolition of sociobiology's pretensions", adding that its authors' arguments were "made doubly impressive" by their "analysis of how the economic determinism of what they call '“vulgar” Marxism' and the spinelessness of 'sociological relativism' have contributed to a climate in which the speculations of sociobiology have found a hearing." Gould described the book as "important and timely". He credited Lewontin et al. with exposing the fallacies of biological determinism (though he noted that theirs was only one critique among many), and presenting a view of human behavior that went beyond the controversy over nature and nurture. However, he believed that while they exposed problems with research on schizophrenia, they did not reveal "fatal and debilitating flaws". He agreed with Lewontin et al. that "interactionism is also based on deep fallacies and cultural biases that play into the hands of biological determinism", showing that it is guilty of the fallacy of "reductionism".

Kitcher described the book as "informative, entertaining, lucid, forceful, frequently witty, occasionally unfair, sometimes intemperate, never dull". He  praised Lewontin et al.′s discussion of intelligence, and complimented their discussions of sex differences and the use of drugs and surgery to modify behavior. He was less convinced by their discussion of schizophrenia, writing that in it their "policy of treating their opponents as patsies begins to seem unjustified". Konner believed that the book's authors provided an "acceptable review of the dismal historical record of abuse of ideas in behavioral genetics" but that this history had received better discussions. He criticized Lewontin et al. for giving little attention to "similar abuses that have occurred under political systems that espouse a cultural-determinist ideology." He accused them of falsely attributing a belief in "heredity privilege" to advocates of IQ testing, employing tactics such as guilt through association, providing misleading discussions of issues in psychiatry and neurology, such as attention deficit disorder, psychosurgery, and antipsychotic drugs, and criticizing sociobiology on the basis of the weakest studies in the field and popular writings by journalists. He considered Wilson's discussion of the development of behavior in Sociobiology more sophisticated than that of Lewontin et al. He called the book "unfortunate", writing that its authors "offer little, except for pious hand-wringing and 'dialectical' rhetoric, that might help us to grapple with the great unanswered questions of our behavior and experience, normal and abnormal."

Bateson accused the book's authors of making it easy for themselves to criticize the genetic analysis of behavior by focusing on its weakest advocates, though he granted that their "counter-rhetoric" was "brilliant" and sometimes "illuminating." He also praised their discussion of measuring intelligence, writing that it was clear and "merciless" in its "exposure of poor method." He credited them with making a strong case against genetic explanations of both differences in IQ and schizophrenia, but did not consider their conclusions about either issue definitive, noting that both remained subject to dispute. He also found their criticism of ethology and sociobiology distorted by their personal biases, writing that despite errors by some proponents of sociobiology, Lewontin et al. were incorrect to dismiss it altogether. He noted that they ignored developments in the field that corrected some of the initial mistakes made by Wilson in Sociobiology. He also wrote that their claim that the belief that animals have a tendency not to mate with individuals familiar from early life is based on little evidence is incorrect. According to Bateson, even though he was predisposed to be sympathetic to Lewontin et al.′s approach, the value of their work was undermined by their poor scholarship and bad arguments, and the errors they made in discussing his field forced him to wonder about the value of their work even when it seemed strong, such as the portions concerning IQ and schizophrenia. Though agreeing with their views about the interaction between the social and physical environment, he accused them of wrongly suggesting that they were novel, when they were held by many others and it was doubtful whether anyone actually believed in the form of interactionism they criticized. He predicted that most scientists would simply disregard their book, and questioned whether discrediting genetic determinism would help create a more just society.

Dawkins accused the book's authors of promoting a "bizarre conspiracy theory of science" that suggested that sociobiology was a response to 1960s student activism, and of wrongly using quotations from non-sociobiologists such as the Conservative politician Patrick Jenkin and representatives of the British National Front and the French Nouvelle Droite as though they represented sociobiology. He described their claim that sociobiologists believe in genetic determinism as a "simple lie", and wrote that they employed the term "biological determinism" without having a clear idea of what they meant by it, and used the words "determinist" and "reductionist" simply as terms of abuse. He argued that biologists practice an appropriate form of "reductionism" that involves explaining complex wholes in terms of their parts, and never practice the form of "reductionism" criticized by Lewontin et al., which involves the idea that "the properties of a complex whole are simply the sum of those same properties in the parts". He maintained that the anthropologists Marshall Sahlins and Sherwood Washburn, praised by Lewontin et al. for their criticism of sociobiology, were both guilty of elementary misunderstandings of kin selection theory and that Lewontin knew enough about genetics that he should have realized this, and that the "dialectical biology" advocated by Lewontin et al. actually involved ideas similar to those suggested by Bateson and Dawkins himself. He attributed the positive reviews of the book from liberals to its authors' opposition to racism. Though he believed that its chapters on "IQ testing and similar topics" had some value, he nevertheless concluded that Lewontin et al.′s book was both poorly written and "silly, pretentious, obscurantist and mendacious".

Scientific and academic journals
Not in Our Genes received positive reviews from the biologist Peter Medawar in Nature, the geneticist Alan Emery in Trends in Neurosciences, and T. Benton in The Sociological Review, the biologist Franz M. Wuketits in the Journal of Social and Biological Structures, and a mixed review from the anthropologist Vernon Reynolds in Ethnic and Racial Studies. The book was also reviewed by Howard L. Kaye in Society.

Medawar described the book as a well-written and "in the main convincing rebuttal of a variety of determinist ideologies that have come to acquire the status of a public nuisance in biology and sociology." He endorsed its authors' criticism of IQ testing and their argument that determinism is an expression of conservative ideology. However, he was less satisfied by their criticism of reductionism, writing that despite its shortcomings reductive analysis was "the most successful research stratagem ever devised in science." He argued that it was also the way of understanding the world that made it easiest to see how it could be changed, something left-wing writers such as the authors of Not in Our Genes should appreciate. Emery welcomed the book as a refreshing attempt to create a more balanced view of the relevance of genetics to human behavior.

Benton described the book as an "immense achievement" and a well-written work accessible to a large audience. He complimented its authors for their historical survey of biological determinism and reductionism and their philosophical discussion of their dialectical alternative, and praised their discussions of IQ testing, biological determinist defences of patriarchy, psychiatry, schizophrenia, and sociobiology. He believed that they exposed the logical and conceptual problems of defining and measuring intelligence and identifying schizophrenia as a unitary disorder, as well as problems in the methodologies of heritability studies in both cases, including their assumption that "the determinants of any characteristic can be analysed as of two, separable kinds, heredity and environment, and that it makes sense to ask what proportion of each went into the making of the particular characteristic." He wrote that they dealt "selectively (and probably appropriately) with the work of Wilson and Dawkins". However, he believed that they did not have a fully developed alternative to biological and cultural determinism, questioned whether they were able to present a view different from cultural determinism, and noted that while they treated sociobiology as a form of genetic determinism, the main sociobiological writers had become "more sophisticated and qualified in their assumptions." He criticized them for using quotations in a selective fashion to argue that sociobiology is still an unqualified form of genetic determinism, and for equating "biological determinism and political reaction", noting that religious fundamentalists wanted to outlaw the teaching of evolutionary theory, and some progressive thinkers accept that biological processes shape personality.

Wuketits described the book as "concise and well written", and "more provocative than anything else written in opposition to genetic determinism and its ideological interpretation" because of its identification of sociobiology with the New Right. Although he agreed with many of Lewontin et al.′s views, he nevertheless considered them mistaken to view sociobiology as only an "ideological program", writing that it was primarily a scientific discipline and should not be dismissed simply for ideological reasons. He expressed regret that the book would give readers not familiar with the scientific background to sociobiology the impression that it is "nothing but a dangerous pseudoscientific ideology."

Reynolds argued that because Lewontin et al. dismissed biological approaches to understanding human nature, they invalidated their own claims about human nature, reducing them from scientific to political statements. He maintained, in opposition to Lewontin et al., that a single "committed political position" cannot be used to evaluate or criticize science, and that determining to what extent scientific claims are actually political in nature requires consideration of all political positions. He wrote that Lewontin et al. provided a dubious description of science that made it sound like a "right wing political movement", noting that their own credentials as scientists suggested that their politicized view of science was incorrect. However, he considered them correct to claim that the arguments of sociobiology were only "speculative suggestions" and that it was unfortunate if "the fascist right" adopted them as "scientific validation of its ideology", and that some scientific work, such as "IQ testing", is politicized science, and credited them with showing that "a good many branches of the science of human nature all revolve around the problem of inequality" and "mostly validate it." He also found their book enjoyable reading.

Other evaluations
The psychologist David P. Barash described Not in Our Genes as an example of the controversy surrounding sociobiology. He criticized Lewontin et al. for unfairly connecting sociobiology with "racist eugenics and misguided Social Darwinism." Dawkins accused Lewontin et al. of misquoting him, writing that they misrepresented his comment of genes, "they created us, body and mind", by altering the word "created" to "control". He maintained that genes do not control people in the way that "genetic determinism" suggests and accused Lewontin et al. of failing to understand that "it is perfectly possible to hold that genes exert a statistical influence on human behavior while at the same time believing that this influence can be modified, overridden or reversed by other influences."

The biologist Dean Hamer described Not in Our Genes as "a political rather than a scientific book". He expressed his disagreement with its politics. Nevertheless, Hamer commented that it taught him that the genetics of behavior is an emotionally and politically charged topic, especially where it concerns sexuality, and helped motivate him to change fields from metallothionein research to the genetics of homosexuality. The philosopher Daniel Dennett criticized Lewontin et al.′s account of reductionism, calling it "idiosyncratic". He also criticized their claim that memes involve a Cartesian view of the mind, arguing that memes are "a key (central but optional) ingredient in the best alternatives to Cartesian models", and accused them of being willing to use unscrupulous tactics to criticize people they considered determinists.

The author Richard Webster considered Not in Our Genes, "more subtle and valuable than the Marxism which frequently informs it". Rose commented that he and his co-authors in the book presented a critique of reductionism that was "systematic and based upon a coherent philosophical and political analysis which sees modern science as the inheritor of nineteenth-century mechanical materialism, itself tightly linked ideologically to a particular phase of the development of industrial capitalism." Writing with the sociologist Hilary Rose, he  noted that Not in Our Genes was one of a number of books that criticized sociobiology. Hilary Rose suggested that Not in Our Genes had been misread by critics, and credited its authors with offering "an alternative theory to biological determinism more robust than the rather weak concept of interaction between nature and nurture".

The historian of science Roger Smith described Not in Our Genes as an accessible critique of sociobiology. The psychologist Steven Pinker criticized Lewontin et al. for engaging in "innuendos about Donald Symons's sex life" and misquoting Dawkins. The sociologist Ullica Segerstråle suggested that Not in Our Genes, along with Gould's anti-sociobiological essays in Natural History, represented the height of the "critical attack" on sociobiology from its opponents. She noted that the book constituted a late admission from critics of sociobiology that some of them wanted a socialist society. According to Segerstråle, Rose threatened to sue Dawkins for libel for his review of the book, and although he did not make good on the threat, the evolutionary biologist W. D. Hamilton and other scientists made efforts to protect Dawkins, including seeking help from Segerstråle herself. She suggested that Rose's reaction to Dawkins's review may been influenced by the fact that while New Scientist, which commissioned reviews from Dawkins and Bateson, had expected the former to write a negative and the latter a positive review, both reviews were in fact negative, which may have disappointed Rose, a friend of Bateson. She also noted that the book's attack on sociobiology led Dawkins to identify himself as a sociobiologist for the first time.

The behavioral ecologist John Alcock argued that while Lewontin et al. were correct to maintain that no genes for social behavior had been identified as of 1984, it was nevertheless clear that thousands of genes are expressed in human brain cells and must be relevant to the structure of the brain and to human behavior. Pinker accused Lewontin et al. of using words such as "determinism" and "reductionism" as "vague terms of abuse". He also accused them of misrepresenting the views of scientists such as Wilson and Dawkins, falsely ascribing ridiculous beliefs to them. He saw them and other critics of "determinism" as misusing the term by using it to refer to the idea that people simply have a tendency to behave in a certain fashion. Pinker endorsed Dawkins's review of Not in Our Genes. He noted that Lewontin and Rose were themselves both "reductionist biologists", and attributed their rejection of the idea of human nature to their acceptance of Marxism.

See also
 Marxist philosophy
 Socialism

References

Bibliography
Books

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Journals

External links
Critical review in New Scientist by Richard Dawkins.
Positive review in Nature by Sir Peter Medawar.

1984 non-fiction books
Biology books
Books about sociobiology
Books by Leon Kamin
Books by Richard Lewontin
Books by Steven Rose
English-language books
Marxist books
Pantheon Books books Sociobiology is a field of biology that aims to examine and explain social behavior in terms of evolution. It draws from disciplines including psychology, ethology, anthropology, evolution, zoology, archaeology, and population genetics. Within the study of human societies, sociobiology is closely allied to evolutionary anthropology, human behavioral ecology, evolutionary psychology, and sociology.

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, so also it led to the genetic evolution of advantageous social behavior.

While the term "sociobiology" originated at least as early as the 1940s, the concept did not gain major recognition until the publication of E. O. Wilson's book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis in 1975. The new field quickly became the subject of controversy.  Critics, led by Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, argued that genes played a role in human behavior, but that traits such as aggressiveness  could be explained by social environment rather than by biology. Sociobiologists responded by pointing to the complex relationship between nature and nurture.

Definition

E. O. Wilson defined sociobiology as "the extension of population biology and evolutionary theory to social organization".

Sociobiology is based on the premise that some behaviors (social and individual) are at least partly inherited and can be affected by natural selection. It begins with the idea that behaviors have evolved over time, similar to the way that physical traits are thought to have evolved. It predicts that animals will act in ways that have proven to be evolutionarily successful over time. This can, among other things, result in the formation of complex social processes conducive to evolutionary fitness.

The discipline 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.

For example, newly dominant male lions often kill cubs in the pride that they did not sire. This behavior is adaptive 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 behavior may have died out as those lions were less successful in reproducing.

History

The philosopher of biology Daniel Dennett suggested that the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes was the first sociobiologist, arguing that in his 1651 book Leviathan Hobbes had explained the origins of morals in human society from an amoral sociobiological perspective.

The geneticist of animal behavior John Paul Scott coined the word sociobiology at a 1948 conference on genetics and social behaviour which called for a conjoint development of field and laboratory studies in animal behavior research. With John Paul Scott's organizational efforts, a  "Section of Animal Behavior and Sociobiology" of the Ecological Society of America was created in 1956, which became a Division of Animal Behavior of the American Society of Zoology in 1958. In 1956, E. O. Wilson came in contact with this emerging sociobiology through his PhD student Stuart A. Altmann, who had been in close relation with the participants to the 1948 conference. Altmann developed his own brand of sociobiology to study the social behavior of rhesus macaques, using statistics, and was hired as a "sociobiologist" at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in 1965.
Wilson's sociobiology is different from John Paul Scott's or Altmann's, insofar as he drew on mathematical models of social behavior centered on the maximisation of the genetic fitness by W. D. Hamilton, Robert Trivers, John Maynard Smith, and George R. Price. The three sociobiologies by Scott, Altmann and Wilson have in common to place naturalist studies at the core of the research on animal social behavior and by drawing alliances with emerging research methodologies, at a time when "biology in the field" was threatened to be made old-fashioned by "modern" practices of science (laboratory studies, mathematical biology, molecular biology).

Once a specialist term, "sociobiology" became widely known in 1975 when Wilson published his book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, which sparked an intense controversy. Since then "sociobiology" has largely been equated with Wilson's vision. The book pioneered and popularized the attempt to explain the evolutionary mechanics behind social behaviors such as altruism, aggression, and nurturance, primarily in ants (Wilson's own research specialty) and other Hymenoptera, but also in other animals. 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 1890s, is a popular example. The final chapter of the book is devoted to sociobiological explanations of human behavior, and Wilson later wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning book, On Human Nature, that addressed human behavior specifically.

Edward H. Hagen writes in The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology that sociobiology is, despite the public controversy regarding the applications to humans, "one of the scientific triumphs of the twentieth century." "Sociobiology is now part of the core research and curriculum of virtually all biology departments, and it is a foundation of the work of almost all field biologists" Sociobiological research on nonhuman organisms has increased dramatically and continuously in the world's top scientific journals such as Nature and Science. The more general term behavioral ecology is commonly substituted for the term sociobiology in order to avoid the public controversy.

Theory
Sociobiologists maintain that human behavior, as well as nonhuman 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.

Natural selection is fundamental to evolutionary theory. Variants of hereditary traits which increase an organism's ability to survive 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 greater chance of surviving and/or reproducing in the past are more likely to survive in present organisms. 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 researchers 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.

Sociobiology is based upon two fundamental premises:
 Certain behavioral traits are inherited,
 Inherited behavioral traits have been honed by natural selection. Therefore, these traits were probably "adaptive" in the environment in which the species evolved.

Sociobiology uses Nikolaas Tinbergen's four categories of questions and explanations of animal behavior. Two categories are at the species level; two, at the individual level. The species-level categories (often called "ultimate explanations") are
 the function (i.e., adaptation) that a behavior serves and
 the evolutionary process (i.e., phylogeny) that resulted in this functionality.
The individual-level categories (often called "proximate explanations") are
 the development of the individual (i.e., ontogeny) and
 the proximate mechanism (e.g., brain anatomy and hormones).

Sociobiologists are interested in how behavior can be explained logically as a result of selective pressures in the history of a species. Thus, they are often interested in instinctive, or intuitive behavior, and in explaining the similarities, rather than the differences, between cultures. For example, mothers within many species of mammals – including humans – are very protective of their offspring. Sociobiologists reason that this protective behavior likely evolved over time because it helped the offspring of the individuals which had the characteristic to survive. This parental protection would increase in frequency in the population. The social behavior is believed to have evolved in a fashion similar to other types of nonbehavioral adaptations, such as a coat of fur, or the sense of smell.

Individual genetic advantage fails to explain certain social behaviors as a result of gene-centred selection. E.O. Wilson argued that evolution may also act upon groups. The mechanisms responsible for group selection employ paradigms and population statistics borrowed from evolutionary game theory. Altruism is defined as "a concern for the welfare of others". If altruism is genetically determined, then altruistic individuals must reproduce their own altruistic genetic traits for altruism to survive, but when altruists lavish their resources on non-altruists at the expense of their own kind, the altruists tend to die out and the others tend to increase. An extreme example is a soldier losing his life trying to help a fellow soldier. This example raises the question of how altruistic genes can be passed on if this soldier dies without having any children.

Within sociobiology, a social behavior is first explained as a sociobiological hypothesis by finding an evolutionarily stable strategy that matches the observed behavior. Stability of a strategy can be difficult to prove, but usually, it will predict gene frequencies. The hypothesis can be supported by establishing a correlation between the gene frequencies predicted by the strategy, and those expressed in a population.

Altruism between social insects and littermates has been explained in such a way. Altruistic behavior, behavior that increases the reproductive fitness of others at the apparent expense of the altruist, in some animals has been correlated to the degree of genome shared between altruistic individuals. A quantitative description of infanticide by male harem-mating animals when the alpha male is displaced as well as rodent female infanticide and fetal resorption are active areas of study. In general, females with more bearing opportunities may value offspring less, and may also arrange bearing opportunities to maximize the food and protection from mates.

An important concept in sociobiology is that temperament traits exist in an ecological balance. Just as an expansion of a sheep population might encourage the expansion of a wolf population, an expansion of altruistic traits within a gene pool may also encourage increasing numbers of individuals with dependent traits.

Studies of human behavior genetics have generally found behavioral traits such as creativity, extroversion, aggressiveness, and IQ have high heritability. The researchers who carry out those studies are careful to point out that heritability does not constrain the influence that environmental or cultural factors may have on those traits.

Criminality is actively under study, but extremely controversial. Various theorists have argued that in some environments criminal behavior might be adaptive. The evolutionary neuroandrogenic (ENA) theory, by sociologist/criminologist Lee Ellis, posits that female sexual selection have led to increased competitive behavior among men, leading to criminality in some cases. In another theory, Mark van Vugt argues that a history of intergroup conflict for resources between men have led to differences in violence and aggression between men and women. The novelist Elias Canetti also has noted applications of sociobiological theory to cultural practices such as slavery and autocracy.

Support for premise
Genetic mouse mutants illustrate the power that genes exert on behaviour. For example, the transcription factor FEV (aka Pet1), through its role in maintaining the serotonergic system in the brain, is required for normal aggressive and anxiety-like behavior. Thus, when FEV is genetically deleted from the mouse genome, male mice will instantly attack other males, whereas their wild-type counterparts take significantly longer to initiate violent behaviour. In addition, FEV has been shown to be required for correct maternal behaviour in mice, such that offspring of mothers without the FEV factor do not survive unless cross-fostered to other wild-type female mice.

A genetic basis for instinctive behavioural traits among non-human species, such as in the above example, is commonly accepted among many biologists; however, attempting to use a genetic basis to explain complex behaviours in human societies has remained extremely controversial.

Reception

Steven Pinker argues that critics have been overly swayed by politics and a fear of biological determinism, accusing among others Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin of being "radical scientists", whose stance on human nature is influenced by politics rather than science, while Lewontin, Steven Rose and Leon Kamin, who drew a distinction between the politics and history of an idea and its scientific validity, argue that sociobiology fails on scientific grounds. Gould grouped sociobiology with eugenics, criticizing both in his book The Mismeasure of Man.

Noam Chomsky has expressed views on sociobiology on several occasions. During a 1976 meeting of the Sociobiology Study Group, as reported by Ullica Segerstråle, Chomsky argued for the importance of a sociobiologically informed notion of human nature. Chomsky argued that human beings are biological organisms and ought to be studied as such, with his criticism of the "blank slate" doctrine in the social sciences (which would inspire a great deal of Steven Pinker's and others' work in evolutionary psychology), in his 1975 Reflections on Language. Chomsky further hinted at the possible reconciliation of his anarchist political views and sociobiology in a discussion of Peter Kropotkin's Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, which focused more on altruism than aggression, suggesting that anarchist societies were feasible because of an innate human tendency to cooperate.

Wilson has claimed that he had never meant to imply what ought to be, only what is the case. However, some critics have argued that the language of sociobiology readily slips from "is" to "ought", an instance of the naturalistic fallacy. Pinker has argued that opposition to stances considered anti-social, such as ethnic nepotism, is based on moral assumptions, meaning that such opposition is not falsifiable by scientific advances. The history of this debate, and others related to it, are covered in detail by , , and .

See also

 Biocultural anthropology
 Biosemiotics
 Cultural evolution
 Cultural selection theory
 Darwinian anthropology
 Dual inheritance theory
 Evolutionary anthropology
 Evolutionary developmental psychology
 Evolutionary ethics
 Evolutionary neuroscience
 Evolutionary psychology
 Genopolitics
 Human behavioral ecology
 Kin selection
 Memetics
 Social evolution
 Social neuroscience
 Sociophysiology

References
Informational notes

Citations

Bibliography
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Richards, Janet Radcliffe (2000). Human Nature After Darwin: A Philosophical Introduction. London: Routledge.

External links

 Sociobiology (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
 The Sociobiology of Sociopathy, Mealey, 1995
 Speak, Darwinists! – interviews with leading sociobiologists
 Race and creation by Richard Dawkins
 Scientist at Work | Edward O. Wilson | Taking a Cue From Ants on Evolution of Humans by Nicholas Wade

 
Biology
Ecology
Ethology
Evolutionary biology
Evolutionary psychology
Subfields of zoology
Science studies