ABSTRACT
Sociobiology may well represent a true “paradigmatic revolution” in the sense of T. S. Kuhn. Certainly, the susceptibility of sociology to such a revolution is due to the current absence of any coherent, organizing framework for the discipline at present. The “reductionism” of sociobiology embodies both its appeal to some and its repulsiveness to others. A rational approach to human sociobiology would be to give at least “for-the-sake-of-argument” credence to evolutionary biology, and to see how much of the variance in human behavior it explains. Future aspirants to academic sociology may be well advised to study sociobiology, in much the same sense that physicists are obliged to know some quantum mechanics, even if their research is not in elementary particles. The essential point was foreshadowed by Norbert Wiener and his colleagues, also in the 1940s: that an automaton or an organism behaves in a goal-directed fashion does not preclude mechanistic explanation of the behavior.
