Human beings were traditionally thought to be separate from and above the animal kingdom. We had faculties of reason and also immortal souls. Darwin challenged that separation and made it possible to look seriously at human beings as kin to the other animals, as a product of evolution, with the higher primates as our cousins. A recent spate of popular books reflects more serious, scientific work that attempts to push biological understanding very far indeed. Today this field is known as sociobiology and is roughly the attempt to reduce sociology to biology, to show that many features of our social organization, competitive capitalism, military aggression, urban violence, and sex roles are, to a significant degree, genetically determined.
Ethologists are scientists who study animals in their natural habitats.
Ethologists such as Konrad Lorenz long ago argued for a genetic basis for human aggression. More recently, Edward O. Wilson, in Sociobiology , among others, claimed that social sciences such as anthropology, psychology, and sociology, and even parts of economics, reduce to evolutionary biology, that our biological nature shapes every aspect of our thought, action, and culture, that biology is the basic human science. This is one form of biological determinism. The sociobiology movement produced a storm a controversy. Still more controversially, Arthur Jenson and William Shockley and others argued, on the basis of IQ tests, that the negro race was somewhat inferior to the caucasion race and, accordingly, that social programs of remediation were bound to fail.