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Sociobiology is essentially the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin expressed in the terms of modern genetics: the central struggle of life is the drive to survive and reproduce. Yet the chief actors in the drama are not individuals or groups, but the genes themselves. Like the old aphorism, a chicken is just one egg's way of making another egg, a body can be viewed as merely a vehicle by which strings of genes produce other strings of genes. Ethologist Richard Dawkins writes that genes "swarm in huge colonies safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, manipulating it by remote control. They are in you and me; they created us body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence ... we are their survival machines."
This genetic Weltanschauung as perceived by sociobiologists appears to solve some problems in evolutionary theory. Darwin's version of the struggle for survival could not fully account for altruistic acts in some species—soldier ants laying down their lives for the colony, or birds risking death to save the rest of the flock by sounding an alarm about a nearby predator. The sociobiological explanation: the ant or bird that gives up its life is actually protecting nearby relatives with many of the same genes and maximizing chances that some of those genes will survive. If it is viewed as a selfish strategy by genes and not an altruistic one by individuals, the action makes evolutionary sense. It also implies that human altruism, and perhaps a good deal more of mankind's morality, may be genetically based. Anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy reported to the convention the sociobiological explanation for another puzzling practice in some animal species: infanticide. For instance, the male monkey langur has been seen to kill the infants when he takes over a group from another male. If he allows them to live, their nursing mothers will not ovulate for many months, delaying and reducing his chances of impregnating the females and getting his own genes into the next generation. Says Hrdy: "Infanticide is adaptive behavior, extremely advantageous for those males who succeed at it."
Heavier Stake. Sociobiologists have a number of explanations for differences in behavior between the sexes. One example: because males can spread their genes widely by impregnating many females, they are usually less devoted to rearing their young than females. The female has a heavier stake in protecting her offspring, because she can start fewer pregnancies in her lifetime than the male. The upshot of this argument, bound to outrage many feminists: in many situations, there is a built-in tendency for females to focus on food and nesting sites and for males to focus on many females. Even more provocative to women is Wilson's opinion that the sexual division of labor among humans "can be safely classified as genetically based."