ABSTRACT
Our point of reference has to be Edward O.Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, published in 1975. In that work he offered a comprehensive survey, theoretical and empirical, of a burgeoning subject he labelled, ‘sociobiology’: the study of animal social behaviour from an evolutionary (more precisely, in Wilson’s case, from a Darwinian evolutionary) perspective. Although much praised, the efforts of Wilson and many of his fellow workers were also much criticized, primarily because he (and others) insisted that an evolutionary perspective throws light, not only on the dumb animals, but also on the thought and action of us humans (Ruse 1985, Montagu 1980).
