Ecology, Biology and Social Life

Explaining the Origins of Primate Sociality

Bibliographic Data

ID4392475
AuthorsAmanda Rees (0000-0003-1979-3621, University of York, corresponding author)
Year2006
Volume44
Issue4
Pages409-434
Publication date2006-12-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueHistory of Science (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0073-2753 • E-ISSN: 1753-8564
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/007327530604400402
OpenAlexW164633317
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited29

Popular culture frequently stereotypes the opposition between ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ in the attempts to account for the origin and organization of the capacities of the individual or the structures of social life. Both biology and environment have been, and are, blamed or lauded as the ultimate sources for educational achievement, lifetime earnings, levels of aggression, and sexual or racial discrimination. Equally frequently, this binary opposition is overlaid on the demarcation between the sciences and the humanities and, more specifically, on the division between the natural and the social sciences. Biologists, it is frequently assumed, argue that the workings of social life are the product of innate biological propensities, while sociologists and political scientists insist that learning and the influence of the immediate environment must take priority in the attempts to unravel social structures and inequalities. While examples of such one-sided accounts can be found even in the professional literature — although normally they appear in reports written to appeal to, and publicized as suitable for, a wider readership — this outdated and stereotypical conflict between ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ elides the complexities of the scientific debate concerning the origins of sociality. In part, this opposition can be traced to the vitriolic debates surrounding sociobiology and its application to human social life, debates that have left abiding scars on the academic body, and which did contribute substantially to a deepening of the divide between the natural and the social sciences. However, the controversy surrounding sociobiology did not create the nature/ nurture debate, nor is the question of the appropriate relationship between biology, environment and society only disputed between the ‘two cultures’ of academe. It isn’t even the case that it is a problem that applies only to the story of human social life. Similar themes can be identified in accounts of animal behaviour, and are deserving of serious historical and sociological attention for two reasons. In the first place, the nature of these accounts has changed dramatically over the course of the twentieth century, as the location of primary explanatory factors moved between the internal and external environments of the animal. It is easy, in the aftermath of the sociobiological revolution and its successes, to imagine that biology has always dominated scientific accounts of the origin of social life: this, however, was by no means the case, nor is it an accurate account of the present-day state of affairs. This leads to the second reason for taking these animal stories seriously: they are often used as a means of elucidating the basis of human social life. Since the emergence of sociobiology, this has meant that the urge to sociality has been presented as prompted by competition, selfishness and self-interest: elements that, as many previous researchers have noted

Biology · Environmental ethics · Primate · Sociality · Sociology · Anthropology · Ecology · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Philosophy · Primate Behavior and Ecology

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