Sociobiology and the Comparative Approach: One Way to Study Ourselves

This paper is based on my lecture in a macroevolution course I team-teach with Profs. Daniel Brooks and David Evans at the University of Toronto. The lecture has undergone many revisions over the years as I grappled with problems discussing certain areas (e.g., rape as an adaptive strategy, gender “roles”). Eventually, I realized that the problem areas said more about my personal conflicts than they did about the science. This was one of those epiphany moments, a time when I recognized that I was less likely to accept hypotheses that contradicted the way I wanted the world to be and more likely to uncritically accept hypotheses that confirmed my world view. That epiphany, in turn, led me to realize that science is never separate from the personal biases/demons of its practitioners, especially when we are asking questions about the evolution of human behavior. That realization was not novel within the vast literature of sociology and philosophy. But it was novel for me. I was aware of discussions about personal biases clouding scientific interpretation; I just didn’t think it applied to me (I absorbed the philosophical discussions without making the connection to “my world”). So, on the heels of that epiphany, the following is a very personal take on the question of teaching sociobiology, based on where my journey, aided by my experience as an ethologist and phylogeneticist and colored by my own history, has taken me.