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[47]: 127–128 The sociobiological view is that all animal social behavior is governed by epigenetic rules worked out by the laws of evolution. This theory and research proved to be seminal, controversial, and influential. [48] Wilson argued that the unit of selection is a gene, the basic element of heredity.
Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975; 25th anniversary edition 2000) is a book by the biologist E. O. Wilson.It helped start the sociobiology debate, one of the great scientific controversies in biology of the 20th century and part of the wider debate about evolutionary psychology and the modern synthesis of evolutionary biology.
A response from 137 other evolutionary biologists argued "that their arguments are based upon a misunderstanding of evolutionary theory and a misrepresentation of the empirical literature". [2] David Sloan Wilson and Elliott Sober's 1994 Multilevel Selection Model, illustrated by a nested set of Russian matryoshka dolls. Wilson himself compared ...
Evolutionary thought, the recognition that species change over time and the perceived understanding of how such processes work, has roots in antiquity. With the beginnings of modern biological taxonomy in the late 17th century, two opposed ideas influenced Western biological thinking: essentialism, the belief that every species has essential characteristics that are unalterable, a concept ...
Two useful introductions to the fundamental theory underlying the unit of selection issue and debate, which also present examples of multi-level selection from the entire range of the biological hierarchy (typically with entities at level N-1 competing for increased representation, i.e., higher frequency, at the immediately higher level N, e.g., organisms in populations or cell lineages in ...
The co-operative behaviour of social insects like the honey bee can be explained by kin selection.. Kin selection is a process whereby natural selection favours a trait due to its positive effects on the reproductive success of an organism's relatives, even when at a cost to the organism's own survival and reproduction. [1]
Homer William Smith (January 2, 1895 – March 25, 1962) was an American physiologist and science writer known for his experiments on the kidney and philosophical writings on natural history and the theory of evolution.
Wilson categorized species into evolutionary "stages", which today are commonly described in the outline by Ricklefs & Cox (1972). [3] However, with the advent of molecular techniques to construct time-calibrated phylogenetic relationships between species, the taxon cycle concept was further developed to include well-defined temporal scales [4] and combined with concepts from ecological ...