page_title: Sociobiology: The New Synthesis
section_title: Part III. The Social Species
hierarchical_section_title: Sociobiology: The New Synthesis / Book / Contents / Part III. The Social Species
caption_attribution_description: Elephant males throughout their lives challenge one another to establish dominance. Credit: Richard Ruggiero/USFWS
context_page_description: Sociobiology: The New Synthesis is a book by the biologist E. O. Wilson. It helped start the sociobiology debate, one of the great scientific controversies in biology of the 20th century and part of the wider debate about evolutionary psychology and the modern synthesis of evolutionary biology. Wilson popularized the term "sociobiology" as an attempt to explain the evolutionary mechanics behind social behaviour such as altruism, aggression, and the nurturing of the young. It formed a position within the long-running nature versus nurture debate. The fundamental principle guiding sociobiology is that an organism's evolutionary success is measured by the extent to which its genes are represented in the next generation.
  The book was generally well reviewed in biological journals. It received a much more mixed reaction among sociologists, mainly triggered by the brief coverage of the implications of sociobiology for human society in the first and last chapters of the book; the body of the text was largely welcomed. A review reached the front page of the New York Times, such was the level of interest in the debate.
context_section_description: The section describes the distribution of social behaviour in different taxa. The theme is that evolution is progressive, with four pinnacles of social evolution, namely the colonial invertebrates such as corals, the social insects, mammals other than humans, and finally humans. The last chapter argues that natural selection has made humans far more flexible in social organisation than any other species.
  18. The Four Pinnacles of Social Evolution
  19. The Colonial Microorganisms and Invertebrates
  20. The Social Insects
  21. The Cold-Blooded Vertebrates
  22. The Birds
  23. Evolutionary Trends within the Mammals
  24. The Ungulates and Elephants
  25. The Carnivores
  26. The Nonhuman Primates
  27. Man: From Sociobiology to Sociology
caption: Animals such as elephants have complex societies. Here, two males struggle for dominance.
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