According to the OED, the ethologist John Paul Scott[REF] coined the word "sociobiology" at a 1946 conference on genetics and social behaviour, and it became widely used after it was popularized by Edward O. Wilson in his 1975 book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis.
Edward H. Hagen writes in The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology that sociobiology is, despite the public controversy regarding the applications to humans, "one of the scientific triumphs of the twentieth century."