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Parents, as well as children, have genetic interests that emerge as manipulation. One of Trivers' examples: a parent may be overprotective in order to keep a grown child at home helping with the other offspring—something that promotes the self-interest of the parents and the younger kids but diminishes the chances of reproductive success for the older child. Says Trivers: "Humans are caught in an intense co-evolutionary struggle with their closest relatives. Parents, siblings and offspring are our allies as well as our opponents."
In fact, sociobiologists believe, conflict—both in the family and with outsiders—is the essence of life. But they do not think that man is at the mercy of an irresistible aggressive instinct, as Lorenz (On Aggression) and Author Robert Ardrey (The Territorial Imperative) insisted in their popular books more than a decade ago. For sociobiologists the trick in becoming an evolutionary winner is to hit just the right level of aggression. Too little, and the organism may be muscled out by competitors. Too much, and it may die in battle without reproducing, or use up time and energy in fighting while competitors steal its food or mate. Aggression, in other words, pays off only when the cost-benefit ratio makes it a workable strategy.
Sociobiology seems to have an explanation—usually a deflating one—for nearly every human phenomenon. Maternal love is a genetic investment policy. Friendship and law are probably rooted in reciprocal altruism and its calculus of self-interest. The socialization of children, at home and school, is as much forced indoctrination in reciprocal altruism as it is genuine teaching. Ethnic pride (as well as racism) can be viewed as an irrational generalization of the biological tendency to distrust strangers and prefer the company of individuals who look like ourselves. Says Wilson: "We are likely to see some of our most exalted feelings explained in terms of traits which evolved. We may find that there is an overestimation of the nature of our deepest yearnings."
Sociobiologists argue that those yearnings are so encrusted with self-deceit and rationalizations that only a rigorous evolutionary analysis will make them clear. Wilson, in fact, calls for "ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biol-ogicized." Though Wilson is hazy about what a biologicized ethic might be, he suggests there could be different moral strictures for males and females, old and young. An ethic of children, he says, might account for their genetically based resistance to parental control, as well as for the tendency of teen-agers to band together and set their own rules.
Wilson, 48, curator of entomology at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, is currently writing a book on the evolution of ethics in relation to sociobiology. A specialist in the social insects, he wrote The Insect Societies (1971), then put in three years of 90-hour weeks working on his sociobiology text. Says he: "I wanted to synthesize and draw the boundaries to shape sociobiology into a discipline."