Others realized that the only hope was to accept the theory and jettison those beliefs that were obviously no longer tenable. The liberal Left faces the same problem with sociobiology. Its task is to take seriously the conclusions of sociobiology regarding the dark side of human nature and think through what of its agenda can be salvaged. This book is a long way from meeting the case. The book's third and perhaps most fundamental weakness is its failure to come to grips with the problem that, while sociobiology teaches that man has an inherent propensity to act selfishly, man is nevertheless a moral animal.
Most human beings develop a conscience which dictates their behavior in countless directions.
So the problem for someone writing a book called The Moral Animal is to explain how conscience is acquired. Unfortunately for Mr. Wright, sociobiology does not attempt to explain things like this. To understand how humans develop a conscience one could shift to Pavlovian conditioning theory, which says that parents condition their children by approval and disapproval to behave in acceptable ways, or to modeling theory, which says that children adopt their parents as models for a wide range of behaviors and values. If Robert Wright wished to explain why man is a uniquely moral animal, he chose the wrong theory.