Sociobiology, Evolutionary Psychology, and Behavioral Ecology

Edward O. Wilson (born June 10, 1929) is an American biologist, researcher (sociobiology, biodiversity), theorist (consilience, biophilia), naturalist (conservationist) and author.  His biological specialty is myrmecology, the study of ants.  Wilson is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.  He is known for his scientific career, his role as “the father of sociobiology”, his environmental advocacy, and his secular-humanist and deist ideas pertaining to religious and ethical matters.  Wilson received his early training in biology at the University of Alabama (B.S., 1949; M.S., 1950).  After receiving his doctorate in biology at Harvard University in 1955, he was a member of Harvard’s biology and zoology faculties from 1956 to 1976.  At Harvard he was later Frank B. Baird Professor of Science (1976–94), Mellon Professor of the Sciences (1990–93), and Pellegrino University Professor (1994–97).  He was professor emeritus from 1997.  In addition, Wilson served as curator in entomology at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (1973–97).  A recent project of Wilson’s, the Encyclopedia of Life website, catalogs all key information about life of Earth — including data about every living species — and makes it accessible to everyone.  Launched with money from his 2007 TED Prize, the Encyclopedia of Life recently received an additional $10 million from the MacArthur Foundation.  Wilson also is the recipient of the U.S. National Medal of Science, the Crafoord Prize (a sister to the Nobel), and the Audubon Medal.  He is the University Research Professor Emeritus at Harvard University, and continues to research at the Museum of Comparative Zoology.  Recently, Wilson teamed with Harrison Ford to create a new PEN Literary award titled the PEN/E.O.  Wilson Award for Literary Science Writing.

Hailed as a genius of modern science, he’s also been accused of racism in a vicious debate over evolution.  The controversy of sociobiological research is in how it applies to humans.  The theory established a scientific argument for rejecting the common doctrine of tabula rasa, which holds that human beings are born without any innate mental content and that culture functions to increase human knowledge and aid in survival and success.  In the final chapter of the book Sociobiology and in the full text of his Pulitzer Prize-winning On Human Nature, Wilson argues that the human mind is shaped as much by genetic inheritance as it is by culture (if not more).  There are limits on just how much influence social and environmental factors can have in altering human behavior.

Although much human diversity in behavior is culturally influenced, some has been shown to be genetic – rapid acquisition of language, human unpredictability, hypertrophy (extreme growth of pre-existing social structures), altruism and religions.  “Religious practices that consistently enhance survival and procreation of the practitioners will propagate the physiological controls that favor the acquisition of the practices during single lifetimes.  Unthinking submission to the communal will promotes the fitness of the members of the tribe.  Even submission to secular religions and cults involve willing subordination of the individual to the group.  Religious practices confer biological advantages.”

Jerome H. Barkow is a Canadian anthropologist at Dalhousie University who has made important contributions to the field of evolutionary psychology. He received a B.A. in Psychology from Brooklyn College in 1964 and a Ph.D. in Human Development from the University of Chicago in 1970.  He has conducted field research in West Africa, Nova Scotia, and Indonesia, and is currently collaborating on an analysis of mass media and gossip from an evolutionary perspective.  He is Professor of Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University and a Distinguished International Fellow at the Institute of Cognition and Culture, Queen’s University Belfast (Northern Ireland).

Professor Barkow has research and teaching interests in evolution and human nature and in the anthropologies of food and of health.  The connecting theme of his publications is that our evolved psychology underlies human society and culture.  Barkow has published on topics ranging from sex workers in Nigeria to the kinds of sentients SETI might find.  He is best known as the author of Darwin, Sex, and Status: Biological Approaches to Mind and Culture (1989). In 1992, together with Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, Barkow edited the influential book The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture.  In 2006, he edited Missing the Revolution: Darwinism for Social Scientists.

In his article “The Elastic Between Genes and Culture” he argues that a society’s culture may come to include information tending to lead to fitness-reducing behavior on the part of some or all of its members.  This phenomenon results from conflict among factions within each society, from transmitted misinformation (e.g., cupping restores health), from natural and human-caused environmental change so that previously adaptive information becomes maladaptive, and from the long and short-term negative “side effects” of information that may otherwise be fitness enhancing.  Because some cultural information may be fitness reducing, we apparently have been selected for individual-level traits that often result in our revising socially transmitted information that might otherwise have maladaptive consequences.  Two examples of such traits are adolescent “rebelliousness” and the tendency to learn most readily from those higher than ourselves in status.  Such leading-to-culture-revision traits are very imperfect mechanisms, however, so that some likely-to-be maladaptive cultural information, such as medical cupping or denying infants the colostrum, remains part of the culture.  It is doubtful, given the structure of modern human populations and the ubiquity of culture change, that such maladaptive socially transmitted information leads to natural selection for genetic “direct biases” against accepting the practices in question.

The Hunting Handicap: Costly Signaling in Human Foraging Strategies, by Rebecca Bird, Eric Smith, and Douglas Bird

In this article, the authors use a study conducted on the small island of Mer to support their theory of genetics as controlling human behavior — specifically the act of turtle hunting. As described by the authors, men who participated in turtle hunting (either as individuals or in hunting parties) stood to gain something more than what can be acquired nutritionally. According to Optimal Foraging Theory (OFT), human foragers pick food that results in maximum gain for minimal input. As this is not the case in turtle hunting, the authors argue that men use hunting as a way of signaling something significant to other members of the group, thereby making up for the extra energy expended on a less calorically efficient activity. As a result of surveys conducted on the island, the authors found that men who killed more turtles than others were recognized as better hunters, which may mean that they were held in higher esteem and possibly more attractive to the women on the island, thus making it more likely that they will be able to pass along their genes. The question is, can all of this be attributed to genetics? Is all just a result of the basic urge to pass along genes to future generations?