The DOI matches its Crossref record; 10 of the 10 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Sociobiology
Abstract
Current sociobiology is in theoretical disarray, with a diversity of frameworks that are poorly related to each other Part of the problem is a reluctance to revisit the pivotal events that took place during the 1960s, including the rejection of group selection and the development of alternative theoretical frameworks to explain the evolution of cooperative and altruistic behaviors. In this article, we take a "back to basics" approach, explaining what group selection is, why its rejection was regarded as so important, and how it has been revived based on a more careful formulation and subsequent research. Multilevel selection theory (including group selection) provides an elegant theoretical foundation for sociobiology in the future, once its turbulent past is appropriately understood.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
The genetical evolution of social behaviour. I
Hamilton, W. D. (1964) · Journal of Theoretical Biology · doi:10.1016/0022-5193(64)90038-4 · Cited by 15,725
Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation
Nowak, M. A. (2006) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1133755 · Cited by 5,894
Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution
Richerson, P. J., & Boyd, R. (2004) · doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226712130.001.0001 · Cited by 2,793
Evolution of indirect reciprocity
Nowak, M. A., & Sigmund, K. (2005) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature04131 · Cited by 2,762
Social semantics: altruism, cooperation, mutualism, strong reciprocity and group selection.
WEST, S. A., GRIFFIN, A. S., & GARDNER, A. (2007) · Journal of Evolutionary Biology · doi:10.1111/j.1420-9101.2006.01258.x · Cited by 1,889
Punishment allows the evolution of cooperation (or anything else) in sizable groups
Boyd, R., & Richerson, P. J. (1992) · Ethology and Sociobiology · doi:10.1016/0162-3095(92)90032-y · Cited by 1,482
Wilson, D. S. (1975) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.72.1.143 · Cited by 1,259
Self-citationGroup Competition, Reproductive Leveling, and the Evolution of Human Altruism
Bowles, S. (2006) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1134829 · Cited by 604
The Origins of Life: From the birth of life to the origin of language
Maynard Smith, J., & SzathmáRy, E. (1999) · doi:10.1093/oso/9780198504931.001.0001 · Cited by 334
Complex societies: The evolutionary origins of a crude superorganism
Richerson, P. J., & Boyd, R. (1999) · Human Nature · doi:10.1007/s12110-999-1004-y · Cited by 227
Cited by
Evolution, the Extended Synthesis
(2010) · The MIT Press eBooks · doi:10.7551/mitpress/9780262513678.001.0001 · Cited by 964
Cooperation between non-kin in animal societies
Clutton-Brock, T. (2009) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature08366 · Cited by 951
The cultural evolution of prosocial religions
Norenzayan, A., Shariff, A. F., Gervais, W. M., Willard, A. K., McNamara, R. A., Slingerland, E., & Henrich, J. (2016) · Behavioral and Brain Sciences · doi:10.1017/s0140525x14001356 · Cited by 934
The mentalizing approach to psychopathology: State of the art and future directions
Luyten, P., Campbell, C., Allison, E., & Fonagy, P. (2020) · Annual Review of Clinical Psychology · doi:10.1146/annurev-clinpsy-071919-015355 · Cited by 748
The varieties of self-transcendent experience
Yaden, D. B., Haidt, J., Hood, R. W., Vago, D. R., & Newberg, A. B. (2017) · Review of General Psychology · doi:10.1037/gpr0000102 · Cited by 701
Metadata
- Authors
- Wilson, D. S., & Wilson, E. O.
- Venue
- The Quarterly Review of Biology
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- Published
- 2007-12
- Volume
- 82
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 327-348
- ISSN
- 0033-5770 (ISSN-L)
- 1539-7718
- OpenAlex
- W2123684750
- Cited by
- 1,206
- References
- 10
- FWCI
- 212.25
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Sociobiology. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1086/522809
- The paper
- Wilson, D. S., & Wilson, E. O. (2007). Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Sociobiology. The Quarterly Review of Biology. https://doi.org/10.1086/522809
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
