The new synthesis?

Abstract

I shall be addressing three related questions: What are the aims and claims of contemporary sociobiology? How does the enterprise fit into the history of ideas7 And does sociobiology have the earmarks of being indeed the beginning of a major synthesis? There are really two pursuits going under the term, sociobiology. One of the two pursuits is what I would call the Special (or Restricted) Discipline; the other, the General Discipline. The former deals with animals below man. In Wilson's book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975), he devotes about 90 percent of the text pages and all but a handful of the approximately 2,500 references to research in the Special Discipline. And there seems to be little doubt that, in the sense of the Special Discipline, sociobiology "works" for large areas of animals exhibiting social behavior, perhaps best for social insects, but to a greater or lesser degree also for others, from slime molds and corals to nonhuman primates. Thus, many specific observable and measurable aspects of behavior are correlated with genetic factors. To be sure, as in any growing scientific field, there should be and are vigorous debates about detailed observations and conclusions, for example, to what extent the relative investment in the care of offsprings is influenced by the degree of genetic relatedness of individuals in the Order Hymenoptera (wasps, ants, and bees). But the Special Discipline promises to mature soon into a Special Theory that may explain much of the observable social behavior of animals below man. This by itself is no mean promise, not least because of the large number (an estimated 10,000) and the staggering biological diversity of social species that exist on this planet. One is thus led to expect to attain the use of one coherent corpus of variables and one theory to predict aspects of the social behavior of nonhuman animals from a knowledge of population parameters (demographic information concerning population growth and age structure) combined with information on the behavioral constraints imposed by the genetic constitution of the species. Such an achievement would surely be counted among the major advances of science, even if not a single word of it would apply to the case of man. (One may add that if such a discontinuity in the applica-