who is credited with coining the term sociobiology
John Paul Scott
title: Sociobiology text: behavior. While the term "sociobiology" originated at least as early as the 1940s, the concept did not gain major recognition until the publication of E. O. Wilson's book "" in 1975. The new field quickly became the subject of controversy. Critics, led by Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, argued that genes played a role in human behavior, but that traits such as aggressiveness could be explained by social environment rather than by biology. Sociobiologists responded by pointing to the complex relationship between nature and nurture. E. O. Wilson defined sociobiology as "the extension of population biology and evolutionary theory title: Sociobiology text: of successfully reproducing male lions, whereas non-killing behavior may have died out as those lions were less successful in reproducing. The philosopher of biology Daniel Dennett suggested that the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes was the first sociobiologist, arguing that in his 1651 book "Leviathan" Hobbes had explained the origins of morals in human society from an amoral sociobiological perspective. The geneticist of animal behavior John Paul Scott coined the word "sociobiology" at a 1948 conference on genetics and social behaviour which called for a conjoint development of field and laboratory studies in animal behavior research. With John Paul Scott's organizational title: Sociobiology text: in 1975 when Wilson published his book "Sociobiology: The New Synthesis", which sparked an intense controversy. Since then "sociobiology" has largely been equated with Wilson's vision. The book pioneered and popularized the attempt to explain the evolutionary mechanics behind social behaviors such as altruism, aggression, and nurturance, primarily in ants (Wilson's own research specialty) and other Hymenoptera, but also in other animals. However, the influence of evolution on behavior has been of interest to biologists and philosophers since soon after the discovery of evolution itself. Peter Kropotkin's "", written in the early 1890s, is a popular example. The final chapter title: Sociobiology: The New Synthesis text: Sociobiology: The New Synthesis 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. Wilson popularized the term "sociobiology" as an attempt to explain the evolutionary mechanics behind social behaviour such as altruism, aggression, and the nurturing of the young. It formed a position within the long-running nature versus nurture debate. The fundamental principle guiding sociobiology is that title: Sociobiology text: Scott's or Altmann's, insofar as he drew on mathematical models of social behavior centered on the maximisation of the genetic fitness by W. D. Hamilton, Robert Trivers, John Maynard Smith, and George R. Price. The three sociobiologies by Scott, Altmann and Wilson have in common to place naturalist studies at the core of the research on animal social behavior and by drawing alliances with emerging research methodologies, at a time when "biology in the field" was threatened to be made old-fashioned by "modern" practices of science (laboratory studies, mathematical biology, molecular biology). Once a specialist term, "sociobiology" became widely known