Scientific disciplines are used to regularly submitting their unrefuted theses for a detailed review in order to reassess their relevance in the light of ex post facto data. However, when it comes to multidisciplinary theories, it is already a less regular practice. Furthermore, researchers often seem to ignore that assertions, argumentations and constructions are not the only ones requiring such reviews: protracted controversies should likewise encourage questioning by re-examining the same field where the contradictions appeared. Yet, such re-examination is very rare: disputes are put in the past as soon as possible, and then entrusted to the care of science history, whose intervention will highlight the past nature – or else solved nature – of the disagreement: a misunderstanding, a mistake, a quarrel based on pride.

Sometimes, science finds it difficult to resist the temptation of “jumping forward”, and its representatives are rushing to forget embarrassing shortcomings, as if the will to go forward should make these weaknesses disappear. It can certainly happen sometimes in connection with an unexpected epiphany. However, this wager remains uncertain, and its daring increases with the extent of bypassed opacity: in the “case” that will mobilize us here, we will see that this protracted avoidance has literally already produced disastrous effects.

In 1975, the Harvard publication of Sociobiology: The New Synthesis [WIL 75] triggered a massive international and multidisciplinary controversy, enraging the biology, humanities and philosophy communities. Fever increased through political and ideological implications which, whether asserted or rejected, landed at the forefront of the controversy. Sociobiology promised a reorganization of social sciences in the medium term on the basis of the speculative game of genes in support of their proliferation in future generations. Organism itself was reduced to the necessary intermediary role of strategies: determined through an unwavering ambition of its components to increase their representation within the population.

For almost 15 years, from one country to the other, and on both sides of the Atlantic, we assisted the awakening of dormant convictions and the revival of former antagonisms, to whom flashy technical changes offered the appeal of something new. If we take a closer look, this was the last major university unrest of the 20th Century, which faded bit by bit with the rapid growth of a lethargy of commitments: students and researchers have indeed shifted toward a principled mistrust regarding conflicts, partisan attitudes and, more generally, too strong convictions. The fall of the Berlin Wall facilitated the rise of a horde of relativisms, whose varied ironies quickly reduced any contradiction to overweening verbosity, so that, in the end, the naivety of the aspirations of science itself was snubbed as a whole.

However, the stream of invectives dwindled without any dialogue taking place, without any debate being organized, and without identifying, classifying or weighing the disputed issues. No one ever started to solve any of the numerous problems then outlined in bulk and, worse, no one even thinks of complaining about it. Arguments were given to the public, but never exchanged between researchers: so they did not make any progress. Sociobiologists were in a good position: they simply rejected any objection by condemning them as philosophical or ideological imputing motives. This position of offended dignity helped them to elude purely scientific contestations, even if their phrasing did not allow any criticism. Antagonism was used as an excuse to avoid debate, and we witnessed a controversy without any discussion!

In practice, arrangements between the humanities have varied according to sectors and countries. In France, for example, we have completely ignored that ethologists, after a period of intense criticism, has joined the main stream, and that sociobiology has progressively monopolized university education on animal behavior. Likewise, we pretended not to see its infiltration within the craze of “cognitive sciences”. In the United States, the rise of postmodernism, during the last decade of the 20th Century, drove a nearly insuperable wedge between “scientists” and “relativists”: a nearly silent divide that led to the complete division of some departments of anthropology. Sociobiology used this opportunity to comfortably deploy itself within the strongholds of functionalism.

The last breath of confrontation became a yawn, without, moreover, eroding the gigantic strength of the challenges raised. A strange burn out seems to be passing through the scholarly community, but is it really tiredness? All in all, the general resignation, in which this observation of failure is immersed, threatens much more the credibility of contemporary science than the denials uttered by any relativist thinker, however inspired. If scientificity is not reduced to a decoy or arrogance, this collective resignation is partly catastrophic and partly unforgivable.

In such a context, the objective of this book goes further than a desire to reopen the debate by bringing it back to its legitimate form. We certainly present a criticism of essential arguments of sociobiology, with clear rebuttals and, for each of them, an assessment of its scope. Nevertheless, it is no longer sufficient. We must ask ourselves how and why a theory managed to adorn itself with the attire of a discipline, including the proven existence that it entails and despite blatant abuse. We should also ask ourselves how and why a discussion, whose challenges were not minimized by anyone, managed to unravel up to the point of ending in an exchange of non-receiving purposes. And finally, we should ask ourselves what means would allow us to guarantee a durable debate that does not mask its momentary insufficiencies or its illicit prevarications. Some sociobiologists blame their adversaries for behaving like “epistemological policemen”: an acknowledgment of weakness bearing something symptomatic. Our statement will indeed aim to improve multidisciplinary communication. There is nothing shocking about the implementation of an epistemological police “fining” the methodological improprieties, on which all the sciences concerned should in principle agree, even though they are not always used to uncover them.

The content of this book will progress accordingly from the exercise of strict refutation (Chapters 1–3) to the exercise of counterproposition, with this secondary divergence that the critical phase will focus on the assertions of sociobiology, while the positive part will focus on essential method points: Chapter 4 does not intend to give an idea of multidisciplinary socioecology, but rather an illustration of the way anthropology could take part in it, outside the effective control of sociobiologists on this field of investigation, and also without biology feeling irremediably “polluted”.

In fact, our will is not directed toward the elaboration of a competing theory, or even a draft: as it would come to confirm the potential relevance of the adverse construction. One of the most serious mistakes committed by the scientific contestation of sociobiology was to restrict controversy by attacking such or such explanation supported by such or such author in order to ridicule its content. In the long run, the perverse effect of this repeated strategy imperceptibly amplified: we lost sight that the greatest danger of sociobiology resided in the idea that a general understanding of the relations between societies and their environment was already accessible. Research on the subject was barely starting, and lo and behold a miraculous key from elsewhere, an authentic deus ex machina, was giving the big picture in order to take control of the program of future analyses.

The main thesis that this book will defend, must then appear straight away, so that the reader keeps it in mind through all the pages to come: beyond their subconscious or non-subconscious ideological purposes, sociobiology represents before all an extraordinary inertial force against an authentic scientific project dedicated to socioecological interactions in nature, including human species. Through a clandestine creation, “behavioral ecology”, it involves a will that is indeed ideological and that curiously remains unnoticed: preventing the installation and progress of a priority sector of research, despite the numerous adjoining emergencies, under the pretext of the dazzling promises of a brilliant intuition.

In order to prevent our words from being misused, we should clarify two points. By ideology, we mean here a pattern of thought external (or anterior) to a scientific ambition, which is attacked head-on (denial of existence), or which is surreptitiously infiltrated in order to parasitize it. The rejection of Darwinism by creationism illustrates this first way: denial. The preorientated transformation of species, with the hunch of a hierarchy guiding the action of natural selection via a hidden constant, represents the second way. As to the possibility of scientific revolutions and surprising discoveries that unexpectedly disrupt the state of knowledge, we by no means dismiss them. In the case we are dealing with, reluctance is developed at another level: a conjecture, which was legitimate as an assumption to be assessed through different angles, was honored as a theory, and then crowned as a discipline through secular conviction, which had yet been destroyed at the end of the 19th Century.

This arbitrary transformation of a speculation into a “law” ruined the rise of the field of socioecology, which could have claimed to be a scientific necessity, but which, unfortunately, did not yet rely on any founding vision: only on a need. An a priori stifled this research.

This is why our first chapters will deal with emblematic cases put forward by sociobiology, 40 years ago: bypassing and accepting voids would come to endorse the vice of a credibility built on nothing: the harmfulness of non-revealed faults increases with time and they, so to speak, “reproduce”. What would be the point of scrutinizing the details of an entomologic or primatological article in this wake, if it relies on triggers whose questionable making was not consolidated, nor disqualified? We refuse resignation in the face of abuse from the beginning, since the sophistications of the present depend on it. Before starting this re-examination, we glanced through the recent bibliography – starting with a key journal, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology – and we found that the contemporary works that are clearly affiliated to sociobiology make progress only by specializing past significant “blows”. Therefore, if a current author is criticized, they can simply transfer the responsibility on its predecessors, whose contributions were approved by the whole community: they themselves, in most cases, did not add any additional error. Sociobiology remains then under the protection of native faults that escaped discredit. The current followers will accuse us of fighting in the past and of ignoring the progress accumulated over 40 years, but we will see that these achievements come down to a decoy: in its refreshing naivety, the brief and fierce sparring of 2012 that we will mention in the following chapter between the emblematic figures, Richard Dawkins and Edward O. Wilson, utterly confirmed it.

Moreover, it is a symptomatic dispute, in that it seems to spell the end of an era. Not only did lassitude increase before the tremendous breakthrough promised by sociobiology was put off, but a fearsome competition is waking, which would quickly render the allegory of the Selfish Gene obsolete: the results obtained by epigenetics attract more and more supporters of biological determinism, with possibly, a much larger range of action. And some sociologists already find the perspective exciting [MEL 14, MEL 16]. In 1977, when the anthropologist Marhall Sahlins published his brief diatribe against the new version of the biological reductionism produced by Harvard [SAH 77], he mocked his own speed to react in fear of seeing the incriminated theory deflating like a balloon in the near future: premonition obviously misguided. Today, the concern of ethologists in this respect would be more justified, because their ambitions are running the risk of passing under the control of an authoritative and fastidious technoscience: molecular biology.

Yet, contrary to what the reader will sense, the likely redistribution of cards that would marginalize “classic” sociobiology does not in any way reduce the interest of our work: it reinforces it. The theory here incriminated once caught off guard, a socioecology willing to incorporate, as of right, social sciences: the lessons to be drawn from it in connection with the technical and tactical recombination that is looming on the horizon will allow us to firmly grasp an opportunity to bring to light the vital challenges that targeted the smothered field. First, it implies to not make the same mistakes with geneticists today as with ethologists yesterday. It then implies an ability to clearly and shamelessly denounce the distortions of the scientific method that determinism “temporarily” legitimizes “because of practical constraints”: the medium is going to change, phrasing too, but not the way of acting of sophisms. Finally, it implies becoming aware of what our society can lose and what it can gain in this “case”. Who will dare to publicly wish that ecology and sociology refrain forever from cooperating in order to jointly understand countless interactions associating societies and environments, which are both equally fragile structures? Probably, no one. But, on the contrary, who will have the patience that will require to overcome the obstacles?

Re-examining the past and non-disqualified faults of the sociobiology established for 40 years is a crucial condition in order to prevent a neo-sociobiology in the making – which is discreetly developed from new “laws” devoid of any link with the former ones – from benefitting from the institutional achievements of the version in distress in order to uphold without any resistance the favorable situation of biological reductionism. Throughout the coming pages, we will therefore insist, when we get the opportunity, on the contradictions regarding the inspiration in place of the “Selfish Gene” and the one of a possible social Lamarckism revitalized by epigenetics. It would be sinister and indecent to see biological determinism shape shifting, while keeping the property of the “sociobiology” mark, for the sole purpose of inheriting the university powers reaped because of the victorious sophisms of a past idea.