ABSTRACT
Sociobiology is a research program that seeks to use evolutionary theory to account for significant social, psychological, and behavioural characteristics in various species. What separates sociobiology from its predecessors is its use of the vocabulary of contemporary evolutionary theory. E. O. Wilson announced that the principal problem for sociobiology is the evolution of altruism. Critics have seen sociobiology as the instalment in a long line of biological ideas, stretching from the social Darwinism popular at the end of the nineteenth century through the IQ testing movement around the period of First World War to Nazi "racial biology," and to the debate about race and IQ in the 1960s. Sociobiology, like its predecessors in this lineage, is charged with being ideological. Sociobiology has been criticized for defending the political status quo. If sociobiology entailed a strong thesis of biological determinism, the charge would make sense.
