Sociobiology: The New Synthesis is a book by E. O. Wilson that helped start the sociobiology debate, one of the great scientific controversies in biology of the 20th century (see Criticism of evolutionary psychology). Wilson popularized the term "sociobiology" as an attempt to explain the evolutionary mechanics behind social behaviors such as altruism, aggression, and nurturance. The fundamental principle guiding sociobiology is that an organism's evolutionary success is measured by the extent to which its genes are represented in the next generation.
The book was first published in 1975, then reprinted in 1976. A twenty-fifth anniversary edition was published in 2000 by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
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Famous quotes containing the word synthesis:
“Our art is the finest, the noblest, the most suggestive, for it is the synthesis of all the arts. Sculpture, painting, literature, elocution, architecture, and music are its natural tools. But while it needs all of those artistic manifestations in order to be its whole self, it asks of its priest or priestess one indispensable virtue: “faith.””
—Sarah Bernhardt (1845–1923)