Introduction
Sociobiology was founded by E.O. Wilson (1975) in a massive book of the same title. However what Wilson really did was to give a name to a field that was already being developed in evolutionary biology, the study of the adaptive value of social behavior. His contribution was important because he examined all aspects of social behavior then known with separate chapters on the behavior of birds, mammals, insects, and the like that were known in 1975 to live in groups and behave socially and whose behavior had been demonstrated to promote the reproductive or genetic success of individuals. The field would have probably remained uncontroversial were it not for the strong negative response of opponents led by some of Wilson’s own colleagues at Harvard, namely, Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin. These opponents, the self-named Science for the People, produced strongly worded attacks on the book Sociobiologyand its author claiming that sociobiology incorporated outdated...
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Alcock, J. (2020). Sociobiology. In: Vonk, J., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_504-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_504-1
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Sociobiology- Published:
- 04 August 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_504-2
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Sociobiology- Published:
- 26 May 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_504-1