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Sociobiology involves the application of Darwinian theories of natural and sexual selection to the study of social behavior. Popularized largely by E.O. Wilson in his 1976 book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, he describes the filed as “the systematic study of the biological basis of all forms of social behavior, including sexual and parental behavior, in all kinds of organisms, including man” (Wilson 1978). It relies on an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on fields as diverse as anthropology , zoology, evolutionary biology, population genetics, archaeology, and others. Though Wilson’s work was met with controversy in regards to his application of his theory to human behavior, scholarship on the subject continues. Today sociobiology continues on as the fields of human behavior ecology, evolutionary psychology , evolutionary anthropology, and their subsets.
A young maasia warrior-in-training (left) and american soldiers in iraq (right).
In his 1968 paper “Youth as a force in the Modern World,” Herbert Moller observed that instances of violence in a society correlate with a large population of young adults within that society, and proposed that the presence of young people is thus a precursor to societal-level violence (Moller 1968). However, Moller failed to differentiate between the presence of young males and young females since males are the major perpetuators of coalitionary aggression; in fact, no historical or anthropological records exist of females forming groups to commit violent acts against other groups of females (Buss 1997). Theories now suggest that sexual selection explains the differences in aggressive behavior between the sexes (Archer 2009; Geary, Byrd-Craven, Hoard, Vigil, and Numtee 2003; etc.). Researchers Mesquida and Wiener expanded upon Moller’s hypothesis to account for sex differences in acts of intercoalitionary aggression, proposing that it is the ratio of young males , aged 15 to 29 years, to males over the age of 30 years, within a society that can better account for occurrences of intergroup violence (Mesquida and Wiener 1995, Mesquida and Wiener 1999).
In a 1995 study, Mesquida and Wiener use data for 88 countries comparing the 1986 population ratio of males aged 15 to 29 years to males aged over 30, versus severity of conflict, measured as the number of conflict-related deaths from the period 1980 to 1993 (see [link] ). The researchers found a significant relationship between the two variables (F = 79.25, p = .0001, r^2 = 0.47) (Mesquida and Wiener 1995). In addition, the researchers examined population and severity data from 15 republics during the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and again found a significant relationship (r = 0.63, p = .0112) (Mesquida and Wiener 1995) (see [link] ). The researchers concluded that the presence of a large number of young males represents a situation in which engaging in coalitionary aggression is an advantageous strategy for this demographic (Mesquida and Wiener 1995). A later study offers additional support for this conclusion. By analyzing population and conflict-death data from additional samples, both from national and tribal levels, the researchers found that the prevalence of young men may account for approximately one-third of the variance in conflict-related deaths (Mesquida and Wiener 1999).
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