文档介绍：Volume 82, No. 4 December 2007
The Quarterly Review
of Biology
RETHINKING THE THEORETICAL FOUNDATION
OF SOCIOBIOLOGY
David Sloan Wilson
Departments of Biology and Anthropology, Binghamton University
Binghamton, New York 13902 USA
e-mail: ******@
Edward O. Wilson
Museum parative Zoology, Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138 USA
keywords
altruism, cooperation, eusociality, group selection, human evolution,
inclusive fitness theory, kin selection, major transitions, multilevel selection,
pluralism, sociobiology
abstract
Current sociobiology is in theoretical disarray, with a diversity of frameworks that are poorly related
to each other. Part of the problem is a reluctance to revisit the pivotal events that took place during the
1960s, including the rejection of group selection and the development of alternative theoretical frame-
works to explain the evolution of cooperative and altruistic behaviors. In this article, we take a “back
to basics” approach, explaining what group selection is, why its rejection was regarded as so important,
and how it has been revived based on a more careful formulation and subsequent research. Multilevel
selection theory (including group selection) provides an elegant theoretical foundation for sociobiology
in the future, once its turbulent past is appropriately understood.
The Quarterly Review of Biology, December 2007, Vol. 82, No. 4
Copyright ᭧ 2007 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
0033-5770/2007/8204-0001$
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328 THE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF BIOLOGY Volume 82
ARWIN perceived a fundamental prob- of group-related adaptations. However, I
D lem of social life and its potential solu- would question one of the premises on
tion in the following famous passage from De- which the reasoning is based. Chapters 5
scent of Man (1871:166): to 8 will be primarily a defense of the
It must not be forgotten that although a thesis that group-rela