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:
“It is in this impossibility of attaining to a synthesis of the inner life and the outward that the inferiority of the biographer to the novelist lies. The biographer quite clearly sees Peel, say, seated on his bench while his opponents overwhelm him with perhaps undeserved censure. He sees him motionless, miserable, his head bent on his breast. He asks himself: “What is he thinking?” and he knows nothing.”
—Andre Maurois (1885–1967)