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As evidenced by this contributed volume communication is multifarious. It exists among organisms but also between cells and in networks, and even possesses inorganic properties as a result of collective organization. The approaches that can be adopted to study communication are similarly varied — from the mechanistic to the functional, and from cell biology to linguistics. This book has formulated the synthesis that this volume has achieved in a personal sociobiological view that encompasses both a reductionist and a systems biology view. The expanding toolbox with which to dissect mechanisms requires a robust interdisciplinary logic and sound theory to achieve the functional balance needed to make further progress in the evolutionary study of communication.

Edward O. Wilson is a public intellectual and the best-selling author of On Human Nature, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, Biophilia, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, and many other books. Wilson is also a world authority on ants. In 1990, in collaboration with the German biologist Bert Hölldobler, Wilson published the Pulitzer prize-winning The Ants, a massive work of 732 beautifully illustrated pages. Moving beyond ants, he has expanded into the study of social insects, social animals, and human beings. Wilson is also known as an environmentalist and for his work in evolutionary psychology.

This chapter presents an overview of the book. It argues that the metaphysical approach to ethics is a failure and that the time has come to take a scientific view of morality. A social contract is taken to be the set of common understandings that allow the citizens of a society to coordinate. Such social contracts are seen as the product of biological and cultural evolution. To survive, a social contract must therefore be an equilibrium in the repeated game of life played by a society. Since the folk theorem of repeated game theory says that there are large numbers of such equilibria, fairness norms then become explicable as an equilibrium selection device that selects one of the many efficient equilibria of a society's game of life. It is suggested that the deep structure of such fairness norms is captured by John Rawls' notion of the original position, and is therefore universal in the human species. On the other hand, the standard of interpersonal comparison needed as an input to the original position is culturally determined.

This chapter provides a brief history of some of the theoretical strands that form the backdrop to contemporary debates among nativists about the evolutionary and cognitive underpinnings of culture, and the ways that culture shapes the mind. Summaries of the contents of each of the chapters in the volume are also provided.

This chapter examines the sociobiology of human cooperation. Given the tendency of people to copy the successful and the fact that natural selection favors the more fit, the chapter asks how our altruistic preferences overcame the cultural and biological evolutionary handicaps entailed by the reduced payoffs that they elicited. To answer this question, two major biological explanations of cooperation are discussed: inclusive fitness in either a kin-based or a multi-level selection model, and reciprocal altruism and its indirect reciprocity and costly signaling variants. The chapter explores a model of inclusive fitness based on group differentiation and competition, clarifying what is meant by multi-level selection and how it works. It also discusses models that address equilibrium selection, the link between standing strategy and indirect reciprocity, and positive assortment. Finally, it assesses the mechanisms and motives underlying helping behavior.

This chapter attempts to demonstrate the plausibility, from an evolutionary standpoint, of the action-theoretic model presented so far. It begins with an overview of contemporary debates over the problem of altruism and the puzzle of human cooperation. It shows how evolutionary theorists have wound up focusing upon two features of human social behavior as the key to understanding the occurrence of large-scale cooperation amongst genetically unrelated individuals. The first is imitativeness with a conformist bias, the second is moralistic punishment. These two features, it is argued, correspond closely to the action-theoretic primitives being posited in the formal model of deontic constraint outlined in the previous chapters.

Questions of human origins and human nature stir emotional debates over Darwin and the Bible. This chapter looks at evolutionist and creationist views of morality. It asks whether human nature is explained best by (1) top–down or bottom–up forces, (2) mind–body dualism or biological monism, and (3) sociability or selfishness. It covers sociobiology, evolutionary “emergence” of morals, apes as ancestors, the social role of religion, and the “soul.”

This chapter discusses new understandings of humanity from the 1960s onward. It shows how a particular group of scientists struggled with the question of human nature by conceiving of natural and sexual selection as acting at the level of individuals, who in turn served as genetic-information processing units. A trait could not spread in a population unless it conferred some advantage to the individuals who possessed it, allowing them to contribute more copies of their genes to the next generation of that population than other individuals. These struggles are furthermore framed within a period when sociobiology was just starting to get a foothold in academics.

This chapter explores the increasingly heated debates over sociobiology. These debates within academic circles had polarized into arguments over nature versus nurture, biology versus culture, as the primary determinants of why humans behave the way we do. Scientists on both sides of the issue accused the other of allowing politics to interfere with clear-headed scientific analysis. Sociobiology's critics mobilized out of a concern that sociobiologists were using their authority as scientists to advance ideas and concepts that at best lacked rigorous proof and at worst reframed social policy in the language of natural order. That sociobiologists did not intend for their theories to be used as the basis for social policy was irrelevant. If the not-so-Cold War had taught scientists anything, sociobiologists' detractors argued, it should have been that they had a moral obligation to choose their research topics carefully. This precept extended to conflicts at home, where courts and politicians used biological and anthropological research to prop up discriminatory social policies, they suggested, as well as abroad, where the efforts of scientists in creating bombs and other weapons of war were deployed to devastating effect.

This chapter looks at the scientific revelations produced by Jane Goodall's studies on great apes and the effects these studies had on the contentious field of sociobiology. When Jane Goodall and David Hamburg argued for the biological similarities shared by humans and chimpanzees, they also articulated a vision of human nature. They based this vision on biological relatedness rather than on ecological sympathy and implicitly questioned the gendered roles and social hierarchies that characterized baboon behavior as the most appropriate primate model for reconstructing the social and behavioral norms that might have characterized early human life on the savannah. Goodall's early discoveries that chimpanzees manufactured tools, sticks with which to eat termites and masticated leaves with which to sponge up water, fit well with hypotheses that the origins of tool use lay in manufacturing aids for “gathering and processing food” rather than as weapons. But one of Hamburg's graduate students later recalled him warning her not to go overboard with sociobiology.

In the academy, the so-called Science Wars of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s were waged largely by those on the left who were interested in the theories and findings of the several disciplines in which historical, philosophical, political, and sociological science studies are pursued. These radical critics equated scientific knowledge with power, but made an exception for ecology, which they saw as utopian because they too readily accepted the popular view of ecology as holistic and communitarian, and therefore as radically unlike physics, which has long set the standard for reductive and mechanistic views of nature as well as for objectivity and certainty. Radical critics of science have no faith in the latter, believing instead in the social construction of scientific knowledge, and asserting that the goal of most scientific research and experimentation is the domination of nature. Their confidence in theories of social construction leads them to treat science as just one form of discourse among others, and to dismiss disciplines like sociobiology and genetics as politically suspect. But many of these critics of science — who are variously influenced by Critical Theory, cultural studies, ecofeminism, and so-called social ecology — seem blithely to accept sociological determinism (which would appear to be just as onerous as any other form of determinism) and seem to misunderstand scientific realism, which is a realism not about theories or “discourses” but about entities which cannot be understood as mere effects of meaning or artifacts of signification.

This chapter examines the uses and misuses of Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory in study by social scientists of human behavior. It discusses some of the theoretical gains social scientists think they have achieved from evolutionary theory and analyses why some scholars have found evolution and sociobiology useless in the study of human nature. This chapter suggests that the return of biology by the social sciences is likely to continue because biological sciences continue to throw fresh light on the nature of human beings in their relation with the rest of the animal world.

This chapter discusses how four poets made use, or may have done so, of specific articles from Scientific American, a magazine that deliberately set out to provide the public with sufficient information about scientific developments to contribute to democracy. Sometimes a poet only later acknowledges it as a source, as in the case of Rae Armantrout’s poem “Natural History,” which critiques sociobiology. The chapter speculates whether Frank O’Hara’s famous poem about the sun was written in response to a specific Scientific American article and concludes that the circumstantial evidence is not strong enough. Jackson Mac Low’s poems in Stanzas for Iris Lezak make use of several articles from Scientific American. The chapter argues that his acrostic proceduralism is an original mode of inquiry by which he exposes hidden strata in scientific texts, and exposes norms of poetic communication. Robert Duncan explicitly cites a diagram in an article on human evolution in the Scientific American in his poem “Osiris and Set,” which is shown to be responsive not only to that passage in the article, but also to the general mood of an issue of the magazine full of advertisements for advanced nuclear weaponry.

This chapter examines evolution theory as a general proposition but not so much as a scientific theory. How the evolutionary thought started can be explained by the simple fact that life on Earth evolved and there are scientific explanations that fit with the core claims of evolutionary theory. This chapter distinguishes elements and parts of the theory and poses the more serious problem of defining the evolution theory. The core to the theory of evolution is a simple fact but evolutionary biology is another field of study with many theories. There are central ideas to the controversy of the pace of evolution and natural selection, which is the subject of a continuing debate on evolution.

E. O. Wilson's book ‘Sociobiology: The New Synthesis’ was published in 1975 and is considered a modern incarnation of Charles Darwin's ideas. The book presented issues on sociobiology which later came into heated arguments and the faction of debate divided among followers who established evolutionary psychology as a more contemporary version of the idea. It does have some mistakes such as that it proposes theories rather than actual observation. Arguments on people violating rules are mostly presented as claims to evolutionary psychology, but the research related to this matter does not expose the truth behind the act, which leads to thinking that the human mind must be understood first before investigating the other form of evolution theory.

The sociobiology debate, which has often been interpreted as a political controversy between conservative hereditarians and progressive culturalists (or environmentalists), in fact represented a clash between two total scientific-cum-moral world views. What was at stake was the nature of science and the moral responsibility of the scientist, especially when it came to “telling the truth” about the biological foundation of human nature. It was fundamentally a debate about the nature of evolutionary explanation of human behavior and what ought to count as “acceptable knowledge” at a particular time.