Sociobiology

Sociobiology refers to the study of social phenomena as products of Darwinian selection. It has been the dominant approach to the study of animal social behavior since the late 1960s, although the term has fallen from fashion. The study of the biological basis of social behavior among animals and humans, with essentially the same conceptual approach, is often called "evolutionary psychology", sometimes "behavioral ecology".

Elaboration

Sociobiology is an evolutionary science concerned with all patterns of social living, including those of humans. Established by Edward O. Wilson's famous 1975 book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, sociobiology is distinguished from the more familiar fields of ethology and evolutionary psychology (which stress individual behavior) by its focus on the organization of entire social populations. Sociobiology explores the hypothesis that such whole-society traits are emergent, adaptive outcomes of Darwinian evolution. While gene selection illuminates much animal behavior, human sociality depends crucially on the cycle of gene–culture coevolution. In both animal and human evolution, creativity and innovation behavior may take prominent roles, with surprising outcomes.

Psychologists and anthropologists joined some biologists and (later) geneticists in developing strongly deterministic, evolutionary models of human nature. In the late twentieth century, sociobiology emerged as yet another sophisticated biodeterministic view of human nature. Harvard entomologist E. O. Wilson and his sociobiologist colleagues described human nature and culture as the product of genetic evolution. Only relatively recently in evolutionary history, according to Wilson, and only to a limited degree have social and cultural factors played a role in shaping human nature. In his accounts of sociobiology, Wilson has attempted to describe genetically linked traits of human nature without defending all of the more negative aspects of biodeterministic theories. Unlike Wilson, however, some twentieth-century and contemporary thinkers have not hesitated to use analogies and inferences from evolutionary biology and contemporary genetics to defend the normative elements of earlier views, including the following claims:

• There is a single, inherited type of intelligence factor, often referred to as general intelligence factor or ‘g.’
• Differences in intelligence test scores demonstrate that there is an inherent racial difference in intelligence levels, and that African Americans (and, it is sometimes claimed, other racial groups) are naturally inferior in intelligence to whites and other groups.
• Aggression – especially male aggression and dominance – is natural in humans; sometimes this is extended to the claim that warfare is natural and virtually inevitable.
• Criminality and social deviance of several varieties are biodetermined.

Sociobiology brought a new perspective to bear on the evolution of emotion in the 1970s and 1980s. It also moved the focus of investigation from the basic emotions to the moral and quasi-moral emotions involved in human social interaction. Emotions such as trust, loyalty, guilt, and shame play an obvious role in mediating the competitive social interactions that were the focus of most research in human sociobiology. Numerous sociobiologists made brief comments to the effect that moral emotions must have evolved as psychological mechanisms to implement evolutionary stable strategies of social interaction (Weinrich 1980). Robert A. Frank suggested that the moral emotions evolved as solutions to ‘commitment problems’ (Frank 1988). A commitment problem arises when the winning strategy in an evolutionary interaction involves making a binding but conditional commitment to do something that would be against one's own interests if the condition were ever met.

If such a commitment is to be credible, some special mechanism is needed which would cause the organism to act against its own interests. Frank suggests that emotions such as rage and vengefulness evolved to allow organisms to engage in credible deterrence, threatening self-destructive aggression to deter a more powerful aggressor. Conversely, emotions such as love and guilt evolved to allow organisms to engage in reciprocal altruism in situations where no retaliation is possible if one partner fails to reciprocate. Sociobiologists criticized ethology for its lack of a theoretical framework with which to predict how humans would behave, accusing it of being little more than descriptive natural history (Barash 1979, Barkow 1979). In contrast, sociobiology seemed to make strong predictions that clashed with some aspects of the affect program theory of basic emotions. From a sociobiological perspective it makes no sense for organisms to possess involuntary expressive behavior.

It transformed the study of animal social behavior into a field based on Neo-Darwinian reasoning, which interprets evolution as a change in gene frequencies in populations. This made it possible to develop mathematical models that could be subjected to empirical testing, turning traditional natural history into a more rigorous science. The name ‘sociobiology,’ however, did not become the name in use for practicing biologists. Many scientists involved in what would have been counted as bona fide sociobiological research actively avoided the term, instead calling themselves as behavioral ecologists or functional ethologists. [...] From the 1990s onward, much sociobiological research went under the new label ‘evolutionary psychology’.

As it attempts to explain animal behavior, evolution has a problem with altruistic behavior (behavior that benefits another individual while possibly endangering oneself). Natural selection should not allow altruism to evolve. The theory of sociobiology was the proposed solution to this problem. According to sociobiology, if individuals seem to be helping other individuals at their own expense, they are doing this only when those being helped are close relatives (kin selection) who can pass on genes shared with the one who is helping. Since the helper’s genes are passed on because a relative was saved, the result is actually supposed to be in favor of the helper, and thus is not really altruistic.

In recent years, sociologists have begun incorporating key ideas and explanatory principles from sociobiology into sociology. This has resulted in criticism of the tabula rasa model of the human mind and its replacement by the adapted mind model. Evolutionary sociologists have proposed new explanations of the evolutionary origins of human sociality and societies, and they have applied evolutionary principles to the study of social behaviors.

Sociobiology has as one of its main theoretical bases in the four categories of questions and explanations about animal behavior by Nikolaas Tinbergen.

Dr. William L. Pierce

Darwin himself laid the cornerstone of sociobiology in his little-known “third book,” The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872. Since then many scientists have explored one aspect or another of group evolution. Three decades ago the eminent British anthropologist, embryologist, and anatomist, Sir Arthur Keith, published his A New Theory of Human Evolution, dealing with the genetic basis of altruism, xenophobia, and other inherited social traits. What is new is the emergence of the sociobiologists from their closets after more than 30 years of moral intimidation. In the 1930s the Jews and their liberal camp followers in the biological sciences were terrified that the racial and eugenic programs of the National Socialists in Germany would gain wide popular support in America, England, and elsewhere. Among German National Socialists were a number of very able sociobiologists, and, in fact, National Socialism may properly be thought of as applied sociobiology extended into the political realm. The response of the Jews and the liberals to this very real threat to their goal of a mulatto world of universal “equality” was twofold: They greatly stepped up the promotion of their contrived pseudoscience of racial equality and pure environmentalism; and they launched a campaign of slander and intimidation unprecedented in intensity and viciousness against their opponents in the scientific world — which is to say, against all honest biologists and anthropologists working in areas considered taboo by the pseudoscientists.

The Jewish anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1942), who since early in the century had been boosting the Lamarckian thesis of direct environmental action on the germ plasm with spurious studies of the somatic changes wrought by the North American environment on immigrants from Europe and their descendants, became one of the principal actors in the pseudoscience campaign. Solidly entrenched in New York City’s Columbia University, Boas trained a whole generation of Jewish students in his phony “science” — Mel Herskovits, Otto Klineberg, Gene Weltfish, Ashley Montagu — and then relied on the Jewish publicity apparatus to build their reputations as “scholars.” Montagu, in particular, served as a popularizer of the racial-equality myths of the Boas school of anthropology, churning out literally hundreds of books and pamphlets on the subject, all of which were immediately put into wide circulation by allies in the educational and publishing hierarchies.

The outbreak of the Second World War gave the pseudoscientists an advantage in silencing their critics which they exploited with true chutzpah: anyone who questioned their doctrines or who dared to report scientific findings contrary to the liberal-Jewish doctrine of racial equality and the infinite malleability of human nature was accused of having Nazi tendencies and being subversive. In the immediate postwar years the myth of the “six million gassed Jews” was given an enormous buildup by the controlled media, and the pseudoscientists never hesitated to suggest that anyone who accepted the scientific facts which the German National Socialists had accepted must share the Nazis’ “guilt.” To cite evidence, for example, that Blacks and Whites are not only physically different but also psychically different, implying that racial differences in behavior are, to a large extent, genetically determined, was considered equivalent to putting on a Nazi armband and calling for the extermination of all Blacks. Jewish gas-chamber propaganda is still trotted out regularly by hecklers at lectures by the University of California’s psychologist Arthur Jensen and Stanford University’s physicist-turned-geneticist William Shockley, both of whom have presented hard evidence that Negro mental inferiority is hereditary. After more than 30 years, however, the time-worn fables of the Nazis’ human soap and lampshades have lost much of their bite, and since Jensen’s courageous first venture into taboo territory in 1969 dozens of other scientists have followed.

One of the greatest shames of our race is that, as a whole, we showed so little moral backbone for so long. We allowed ourselves to be intimidated by an alien gang of hucksters posing as scientists into going along with their suppression of truth and promotion of self-serving lies for nearly 40 years. What makes the shame even greater is that we displayed our cowardice most abjectly in the very places we have always most proudly boasted of our bold and fearless independence: in our great universities. Out of the thousands of our scholars who saw through the Jewish-liberal fakery, only a handful had the courage to challenge the liars, deceivers, and obscurantists openly. The vast majority swallowed their pride — and their honor — and put salary and social acceptance ahead of their obligation to truth and their people. Even today a substantial portion of our most distinguished, degree-laden savants tremble in fear that someone may publicly label them “bigots” or “Nazis,” and they nervously hasten to assure anyone who will listen that they are not really racists.

The recent work of Harvard sociobiologist Edward Wilson and others which is cited in Time is a welcome new wave of truth over the top of the dam of lies, censorship, and repression, but it is only a precursor of the flood which will follow as the dam inevitably crumbles under the growing pressure behind it, and the alien filth is swept away forever in a cleansing rush. The great science of life, the foundations of which were laid by Charles Darwin and Gregor (Johann) Mendel more than a hundred years ago, will finally be free of the fetters placed on it by evil men and their soul-sick disciples. Our people will then have at their disposal a mighty tool in their never-ending quest for their unlimited Destiny, a tool which will transform not only the lives of our children and our children’s children, but all of Creation.

See also

• Pioneer Fund
• Social Darwinism
• Genetics denialism
• Portal:Sociobiology

Further reading

• Edward O. Wilson: Sociobiological Revolution and Jewish Reaction, Instauration magazine, September 1977
• Eric Alden Smith: Three Styles in the Evolutionary Analysis of Human Behavior, in "Adaptation and Human Behavior: An Anthropological Perspective" by Napoleon Chagnon, 2017
• Andrés Horacio Reggiani: God's eugenicist. Alexis Carrel and the sociobiology of decline, Berghahn Books, Oxford 2007

External links

• Sociobiology, Encyclopædia Britannica