Sociobiology And Politics Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Sociobiology, the synthesis of ethology and population biology, was both hailed and damned when it was first presented systematically in Edward O. Wilson’s 1975 path breaking volume of the same name. Spurred by Wilson’s promise that this emerging new field would lead to the absorption of the social sciences and humanities, a group of political scientists—already intrigued by the promise of rapidly advancing findings in the life sciences—responded to Wilson’s challenge by examining connections between the two fields of inquiry. By 1982, one study by Joseph Losco and Donna Baird found that eighty-eight articles and papers had been authored by political scientists exploring the potential contributions of the new synthesis to their own discipline. The majority of these papers were authored by a small core of political scientists, with nine authors accounting for 64 percent of the output. Most of these scholarly works were generated by political theorists exploring epistemological connections between the two fields.

A second census published fourteen years later found that scholarly output connecting sociobiology or its ethological and evolutionary subcomponents to political phenomena climbed by 326 articles and papers between 1981 and 1994. The number of scholars contributing to this pool had increased to eighty-six. However, most of the entries continued to come from a core of about twenty-five researchers. While most of these continued to focus on theoretic and epistemological issues, a growing number of about 20 percent involved some type of empirical application using historical data, measurable ethological observation, game theoretic modeling, or experimentation.

At its core, sociobiology posits the evolution of adaptive behaviors and strategies via inclusive fitness. Accordingly, individuals can achieve reproductive success not only through their own reproductive activities but also by advancing the reproductive fitness of related individuals with whom they share genetic material. This discovery allowed biologists to explain a number of social behaviors, such as reciprocity and altruism, that had previously eluded explication through strict Darwinian individual selection. Inclusive fitness was given a strong boost by the works of W. H. Hamilton in 1964 and Robert Trivers in 1971, among others, who demonstrated robust empirical support through experimentation and observation in the natural world. The evolution of acts like altruism could now be explained by reference to the fitness benefits conferred upon related others. Thus, a warning cry issued by a prairie dog could save a sufficient number of kin to compensate for the loss of its own genes at the hands of a predator alerted by its call. Sociobiologists have shown also that species can alter the sex ratio of their offspring depending on social rank and that levels of parental investment necessary to raise offspring to reproductive age can account for differing mating strategies by males and females, as shown by Robert Trivers and Dan Willard in 1973.

The potential applicability of this paradigm for understanding human behavior led a number of political scientists to utilize sociobiological theory to analyze phenomena like aggression and warfare, as described by J. Van der Dennen and V. Falger in 1990; leadership, covered by James Schubert in 1988; sexual politics, studies by Glendon Schubert in 1991; reciprocity and coalition building, studied by Robert Axelrod in 1986; and authoritarianism, as shown by Albert Somit and Steven Peterson in 1997. Still, most contributors continued to produce works focusing on sociobiology’s theoretical insights about human nature, such as Roger Masters’ work in 1989, and on theory building, studied by Peter Corning in 1983.

While mainstream biology has accepted many of the Wilson’s ideas despite much early criticism, political science has had less success than sister disciplines like anthropology in generating substantive empirical findings of its own with this new paradigm, partly because of differences in the levels of analysis engaged by each discipline. While sociobiology focuses on units of evolutionary time and ultimate causation, most political scientists seek to explain proximate causes of behavior. As a result, political scientists who employ biological approaches today are more likely to focus on factors issuing from such fields as neuroscience.

Bibliography:

Axelrod, Robert M. “An Evolutionary Approach to Norms.” American Political Science Review 80, no. 4 (1986): 1095–1111.
Corning, Peter. The Synergism Hypothesis. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983.
Hamilton,William. “The Genetical Evolution of Social Behavior: Parts I and II.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 7 (1964): 1–52.
Losco, Joseph. “Sociobiology and Political Science: A Status Report.” In Research in Biopolitics,Volume 4, edited by Albert Somit and Steven A. Peterson, 151–177. Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1996.
Losco, Joseph, and Donna Baird. “The Impact of Sociobiology on Political Science.” American Behavioral Scientist 25, no. 3 (1982): 335–360.
Masters, Roger. The Nature of Politics. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989.
Schubert, Glendon. Sexual Politics and Political Feminism. Greenwich, Conn.: JAI, 1991.
Schubert, James. “Age and Active-passive Leadership Style.” American Political Science Review 82, no. 3 (1988): 763–772.
Somit, Albert, and Steven A. Peterson. Darwinsim, Dominance, and Democracy: The Biological Basis of Authoritarianism. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1997.
Trivers, Robert L. “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism.” Quarterly Review of Biology 46 (1971): 35–57.
Trivers, Robert L., and Dan E.Willard. “Natural Selection of the Parental Ability to Vary the Sex Ratio of Offspring.” Science 179 (1973): 90–91.
Van der Dennen, J., and V. Falger, eds. Sociobiology and Conflict: Evolutionary Perspectives on Competition, Cooperation,Violence, and Warfare. London: Chapman and Hall, 1990.
Wilson, Edward O. Sociobiology:The New Synthesis. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1975.

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