This, however, is a profound misunderstanding of the message of sociobiology, which is rather that human beings are amoral or immoral animals. Sociobiology teaches that humans are programmed to promote the survival of their own genes and that they assist others only insofar as this is likely to serve the genetic objective. A much better title for the book would have been The Selfish Gene, but as this has already been used by Richard Dawkins, Mr. Wright might have called his book The Amoral Animal. Because of his wish to promote the view that sociobiology teaches that humans are naturally moral animals, Mr. Wright omits or summarily dismisses those propositions of sociobiology which show that the human being is a rather nasty animal. The first of these is that human males are biologically programmed to stratify their societies into status hierarchies.
Males compete to become top dog, or at least to become middle dogs.
The top dogs allocate privileges primarily to themselves. They fight off challenges from underdogs, and maintain their status by cunning, the inculcation of fear, and brute force. Sociobiologists have shown that these status hierarchies are present among all social animals and that male striving for status is programmed by the hormone testosterone. It is not particularly pretty to see powerful males grabbing and keeping the goodies largely for themselves, but sociobiology teaches that this is the way men are. The second major respect in which we are hardly moral animals is our propensity for killing one another.