The second word in the subtitle of this article is crucial. For there can be no doubt but that the possibility of sociobiology below the human level has already been abundantly realized in, for instance, the main body of E. O. Wilson's enormous and encyclopedic treatise Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. What may more reasonably be doubted, and what is in fact questioned here, is whether, as Wilson and others hope and believe, there is much room, or indeed any, for a (...) sociobiology of our own notoriously wayward and idiosyncratic species. In proposing this particular project Wilson and his colleagues have seen themselves as promoting a climactic conquest for evolutionary biology. For surely, they seem to have thought, now, more than a century after Darwin, it is high time and past time to launch the final assault upon the last citadel. But, as we shall proceed to argue, there are reasons—reasons which were available at least in outline even to Darwin himself—why the ideas which have been so triumphantly successful in explaining The Origin of Species cannot properly be applied to what is in truth a fundamentally different task. They cannot, that is to say, properly be transferred to explain developments either within or out of the particular problem species of which the author of that book, along with both all the authors and all the readers of all other books, have been themselves members. (shrink)

Recent evidence that psychopathy is a nonarbitrary population, such that the trait may be categorical rather than continuous, is consistent with Mealey's distinction between primary and secondary psychopaths. Thus, there are likely to be at least two routes to criminality, and psychopathic and nonpsychopathic criminals are likely to respond differently to interventions.

Four questions are raised about Mealey's genetic argument: (1) Where is the evidence that secondary sociopathy is less heritable than primary sociopathy? (2) What is the genetic correlation between the two types of sociopathy? (3) How does genotype-environment interaction relate? (4) How strong are the links between our evolutionary past and current heritability?

Mealey's excellent target article rests on several assumptions that may be questioned, including the overarching assumption that sociopathy reflects the failure of a small minority of males to cooperate with the larger group. I suggest that violent competition in ancestral bands cheatinggame was the primary evolutionary precursor of sociopathy. Today's violent sociopath is far more a than a failed cooperator.

We doubt that primary sociopathy is adaptive, for three reasons: First, its prevalence is too low to require an adaptive explanation. Second, a common sequela of damage to the orbito-frontal lobes is Any pattern of behavior that can be produced by brain damage is unlikely to be adaptive. Third, we argue that most human social behavior is not under tight genetic control, but is produced by open-ended calculation of fitness-contingencies.