Review:
This book will stand as a landmark in the comparative study of social behavior.
Sociobiology, a new concept, is one with extraordinary potential value for understanding and explaining human behavior.
"Sociobiology" is an excellent book, full of extraordinary insights, and replete with the beauty and poetry of the animal kingdom.
from every corner of the academic world, as the book became a "causus belli" for sociologists, feminists, human geneticists, and psychologists.
or guilty of genetic determinism. They are none of these things and, two Pulitzer Prizes later, Wilson has been vindicated...Wilson's Sociobiology laid the foundations for a lifetime of meditations.
Sociobiology is an excellent book, full of extraordinary insights, and replete with the beauty and poetry of the animal kingdom.
It's been 25 years since E. O. Wilson wrote Sociobiology, naming a new science and starting it off with a bang--and a firestorm of protest. "Nurture!" and "Nature!" came the cries from every corner of the academic world, as the book became a causus belli for sociologists, feminists, human geneticists, and psychologists.
Sociobiology explores the possibility that animal social behaviour--group living, kinship, attraction and mating, reciprocity and sharing, cooperation, conflict, and cheating, to name just the most familiar--has a genetic basis and can be shaped by natural selection: genes can be shaped by natural selection: genes can code for social behaviours in the same way that they code for body parts such as hands, hooves, eyes, antlers and ears. But, in an audacious final chapter, Wilson extended the analysis to humans: biology had grabbed our kinship, cooperation, mate preferences and the rest. Some branded Wilson and his ideas fascist, others as racist or guilty of genetic determinism. They are none of these things and, two Pulitzer Prizes later, Wilson has been vindicated...Wilson's Sociobiology laid the foundations for a lifetime of meditations.
This book enthralls and enchants...If you have this book...you can begin getting your mind ready for the illuminations about human society.--Lewis Thomas "Harper's "
Rarely has the world been provided with such a splendid stepping stone for an exciting future of a new science.--John Tyler Bonner "Scientific American "
From the Back Cover:
Harvard University Press is proud to announce the re-release of the complete original version of Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, now available in paperback for the first time. When this classic work was first published in 1975, it created a new discipline and started a tumultuous round in the age-old nature versus nurture debate. Although voted by officers and fellows of the international Animal Behavior Society the most important book on animal behavior of all time, Sociobiology is probably more widely known as the object of bitter attacks by social scientists and other scholars who opposed its claim that human social behavior, indeed human nature, has a biological foundation. The controversy surrounding the publication of the book reverberates to the present day.
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