Sociobiology: An environmentalist discipline?

Many psychologists associate sociobiology with the view that certain behaviors are inevitable in the ontogeny of each person and that an evolutionary perspective requires that human nature be predetermined. This view, we argue, follows from the work of the classic ethologists who studied conserved, unchanged behaviors to elucidate species differences and similarities. In this article, the concepts of genetically organized life histories and of environmentally contingent strategies for implementing them are integrated with the notion of Darwinian algorithms to provide an evolutionary model of how organisms deal with varying environmental conditions. We conclude that psychologists should concentrate their efforts on studying concurrently and developmentally contingent strategies and that optimal progress will be achieved if attention is concentrated on behaviors (a) with low heritability, (b) that are closely related to reproductive function, and (c) whose sensitivity to environmental conditions would have been adaptive in ancestral populations.