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  1. Between Kin Selection and Cultural Relativism: Cultural Evolution and the Origin of Inequality.William T. Lynch - 2019 - Perspectives on Science 27 (2):278-315.
    Cultural anthropologists and sociobiologists developed initially incommensurable approaches to explaining cooperation and altruism in human societies. When understood as complex cultural adaptations, however, scientific research programs are subject to piecemeal changes in the research programs driving scientific research. The emergence of new research programs in cultural evolution and group selection resulted. This transformation is examined with a focus on explanations for the origin and maintenance of human inequality. The transmission, modification, and selection of the complex cultural packages underlying egalitarianism and (...)
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  • Task Allocation and the Logic of Research Questions: How Ants Challenge Human Sociobiology.Ryan Ketcham - 2019 - Biological Theory 14 (1):52-68.
    After biologist Deborah Gordon made a series of experimental discoveries in the 1980s, she argued that a change in terminology regarding the division of labor among castes of specialists was needed. Gordon’s investigations of the interactive effects of ants in colonies led her to believe that the established approach Edward O. Wilson had pioneered was biased in a way that made some alternative candidate adaptive explanations invisible. Gordon argued that this was because the term “division of labor” implied a division (...)
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  • ‘Morals can not be drawn from facts but guidance may be’: the early life of W.D. Hamilton's theory of inclusive fitness.Sarah A. Swenson - 2015 - British Journal for the History of Science 48 (4):543-563.
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  • Revisiting the Left-Wing Response to Sociobiology: The Case of Finland in a European Context.Antti Lepistö - 2015 - Journal of the History of Biology 48 (1):99-136.
    This article revisits the left-wing response to sociobiology in the 1970s and 1980s by examining the sociobiology debate in Finland in a larger European context. It argues that the Finnish academic left’s response to sociobiology represents a “third way” alongside the purely negative, often Marxist denial of biology’s relevance, which characterized the left’s response to sociobiology in many European countries such as Hungary and Sweden, and alongside the disregard that sociobiology confronted in most parts of Eastern Europe, as well as (...)
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  • Edward O. Wilson and the Organicist Tradition.Abraham H. Gibson - 2013 - Journal of the History of Biology 46 (4):599-630.
    Edward O. Wilson’s recent decision to abandon kin selection theory has sent shockwaves throughout the biological sciences. Over the past two years, more than a hundred biologists have signed letters protesting his reversal. Making sense of Wilson’s decision and the controversy it has spawned requires familiarity with the historical record. This entails not only examining the conditions under which kin selection theory first emerged, but also the organicist tradition against which it rebelled. In similar fashion, one must not only examine (...)
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  • The misunderstanding of memes: Biography of an unscientific object, 1976–1999.Jeremy Trevelyan Burman - 2012 - Perspectives on Science 20 (1):75-104.
    "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit." "From the outset [in 1976] the reviews were gratifyingly favorable and it [The Selfish Gene] was not seen, initially, as a controversial book. Its reputation for contentiousness took years to grow until, by now, it is widely regarded as a work of radical extremism. But over the very same years as the book’s reputation for (...)
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