The study of the evolution of social behavior. This field of study is rooted in evolutionary biology, ethology, and comparative psychology.
A subcategory of biology that attempts to trace social behavior to genetically based predispositions, an approach that has led to some controversy when extended to humans.
Analysis of social behavior in terms of evolutionary theory. It assumes that animal or human populations evolve and adapt to their environments in different ways (e.g., through individual learning, cultural tradition, or genetic inheritance).
First used in 1946, a term to describe the effect of biological factors on the behavior of all social animals from humans to ants. The landmark publication was Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975) by Edward O. Wilson. Its publication met with a mixed reception. Wilson was pleased that it received an overwhelmingly favorable response but was puzzled that there was also a furious reaction by some biologists and sociologists.
Most of sociobiology, over 90 percent, is concerned with nonhuman species: insects, fish, birds, and social animals, especially primates. This, the sociobiology of nonhumans, is not the controversial matter, although there is and always will be some disagreement over interpretation of evidence; it is by the resolution of such disagreements that science advances. So, for example, that individual ants will sacrifice themselves in the interest of the community is biologically determined is not disputed, or that some troops of monkeys collaborate in finding food seems understandably a case of sociobiology. On the other hand, to attribute the behavior of a specific monkey troop that learned to wash root vegetables in the sea to its genes would be stretching things too far. In other words, some social behavior of some animal groups is undoubtedly influenced and perhaps entirely prescribed by their biological makeup. Some is not. One has only to watch a squirrel finding its way to food past a series of obstacles to realize that biological determinism is limited, and it may be that the nearer we get to the human species, the less is biologically determined, the more is intelligently adapted.