Certainly the promise of E.O. Wilson’s ‘new synthesis’ ( Wilson, 1975) remains very much with us, and individual sociobiologists have contributed a great deal in recent years to their parent discipline of evolutionary biology .At the same time, however, as the continuing debate about sociobiology has made clear, the promise of the new discipline has been compromised by its special problems. We propose to examine some of these in light of Shaw’s article, “Humanity’s Propensity for Warfare: A Sociobiological Perspective;” in particular, three issues come to the fore: 1) the explanatory status of sociobiology; 2) its relation to general evolutionary theory; and 3) the need to expand existing arguments in the direction of a Darwinian psychology.
