On Wilson's Sociobiology

Edward Wilson has written an excellent survey of empirical studies of animal social behavior, probably the most comprehensive work of its kind. He has, in addition, brought together ecent theories from ecology and population genetics, merging them with the empirical studies to form an impressive work-massive, attractive, and highly publicized. My intent here is to describe the book briefly and then to evaluate its usefulness for the sociology of human beings. The book is divided into three parts. The first, "Social Evolution" (128 pp.), sets out Wilson's major themes, particularly (1) that certain unifying principles, such as altruism, underlie all social organization from termites to man; and (2) that social behavior is the product of natural selection and therefore has evolved just as the shape of our bodies has evolved. Part 2, "Social Mechanism" (248 pp.), has chapters on the size of social groups, genetic and environmental determinants of behavior, communication, aggression, territory, dominance, sex and role behavior, parental care, and social symbioses. Each topic is illustrated across a wide range of species from insects through primates. In the discussions of primates, the animals I know best, I found very few errors (grooming direction is not a good indicator of dominance in macaques; squirrel monkeys do have dominance hierarchies). Part 3, "The Social Species" (199 pp.), provides overviews of social behavior among large classes of animals: invertebrates, ocial insects, cold-blooded vertebrates, birds, ungulates, carnivores, nonhuman primates, and finally, in the last chapter (29 pp.), man. Primary behavioral features of each animal class are summarized in convenient charts, and this section contains excellent illustrations by Sarah Landry. The final chapter, "Man: From Sociobiology to Sociology," is disappointing. Portions are trite ("Roles in human societies are fundamentally different from castes of social insects" [p. 554]), value-loaded ("Human beings are absurdly easy to indoctrinate-they seek it" [p. 562]), or wrong (Wilson claims on p. 522 that human social organization is generally matrilineal). Wilson is uncritical in his use of data, accepting the most doubtful of Colin Turnbull's descriptions of Ik society (p. 549) and Alfred Kinsey's biased sampling of American society (p. 555). His major socio-