Sociobiology

The New Synthesis

Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition

Edward O. Wilson

    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.
       --Mary Ellen Curtin, amazon.com

    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

    Its contents do indeed provide a new synthesis, of wide perspective and great authority...Wilson's plain uncluttered prose is a treat to read, his logic is rigorous, his arguments are lucid.
       --V. C. Wymne-Edwards, Nature

    This book will stand as a landmark in the comparative study of social behavior.
       --Quarterly Review of Biology

    Sociobiology is an excellent book, full of extraordinary insights, and replete with the beauty and poetry of the animal kingdom.
       --Times Literary Supplement

    It is impossible to leave Wilson's book without having one's sense of life permanently and dramatically widened.
       --Fred Hapgood, The Atlantic

    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.
       --Mark Pagel, Times Higher Education Supplement

    Sociobiology, a new concept, is one with extraordinary potential value for understanding and explaining human behavior.
       --Practical Psychology

    A towering theoretical achievement of exceptional elegance...Like most great books, Sociobiology is unpedantic, lucid, and eminently accessible.
       --Pierre L. van den Berghe, Contemporary Sociology

  • Cover: Sociobiology
  • A photo of the author

Author Photo: Jon Chase/Harvard 1996

Edward O. Wilson is Pellegrino University Professor at Harvard University. In addition to two Pulitzer Prizes (one of which he shares with Bert Hölldobler), Wilson has won many scientific awards, including the National Medal of Science and the Crafoord Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.