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( Sociobiology)
Portal ยท History Sociobiology investigates social behaviors, such as mating patterns, territorial fights, pack hunting, and the hive society of social insects. 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. Applied to nonhumans, sociobiology is noncontroversial. Sociobiology has become one of the greatest scientific controversies of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, especially in the context of explaining human behavior. Criticism, most notably made by Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, centers on sociobiology's contention that genes play a central role in human behavior and that variation in traits such as aggressiveness can be explained by variation in peoples' biology and is not necessarily a product of the person's social environment. Many sociobiologists, however, cite a complex relationship between nature and nurture. In response to the controversy, anthropologist John Tooby and psychologist Leda Cosmides launched evolutionary psychology as a branch of sociobiology made less controversial avoiding questions of human biodiversity. Sociobiology is based on the idea that some behaviors (both social and individual) are at least partly inherited and can be affected by natural selection. It starts with the idea that these behaviors have evolved over time, similar to the way that physical traits are thought to have evolved. Therefore, it predicts that animals will act in ways that have proven to be evolutionarily successful over time, which can among other things result in the formation of complex social processes that have proven to be conducive to evolutionary fitness.
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