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131-412: On Human Nature (1978; second edition 2004) is a book by the biologist E. O. Wilson , in which the author attempts to explain human nature and society through sociobiology . Wilson argues that evolution has left its traces on characteristics such as generosity, self-sacrifice, worship and the use of sex for pleasure, and proposes a sociobiological explanation of homosexuality . He attempts to complete

262-578: A "Section of Animal Behavior and Sociobiology" of the Ecological Society of America was created in 1956, which became a Division of Animal Behavior of the American Society of Zoology in 1958. In 1956, E. O. Wilson came in contact with this emerging sociobiology through his PhD student Stuart A. Altmann, who had been in close relation with the participants to the 1948 conference. Altmann developed his own brand of sociobiology to study

393-406: A 1979 Pulitzer Prize . Sociobiology Sociobiology investigates social behaviors such as mating patterns , territorial fights , pack hunting , and the hive society of social insects . It argues that just as selection pressure led to animals evolving useful ways of interacting with the natural environment , so also it led to the genetic evolution of advantageous social behavior. While

524-576: A corresponding fellow of the British Academy . In the late 1970s and 1980s, Chomsky's linguistic publications expanded and clarified his earlier work, addressing his critics and updating his grammatical theory. His political talks often generated considerable controversy, particularly when he criticized the Israeli government and military. In the early 1970s Chomsky began collaborating with Edward S. Herman , who had also published critiques of

655-693: A full professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics. He was appointed plenary speaker at the Ninth International Congress of Linguists , held in 1962 in Cambridge, Massachusetts , which established him as the de facto spokesperson of American linguistics. Between 1963 and 1965 he consulted on a military-sponsored project to teach computers to understand natural English commands from military generals. Chomsky continued to publish his linguistic ideas throughout

786-482: A mechanical translation project and half teaching a course on linguistics and philosophy. He described MIT as open to experimentation where he was free to pursue his idiosyncratic interests. MIT promoted him to the position of associate professor in 1957, and over the next year he was also a visiting professor at Columbia University . The Chomskys had their first child, Aviva , that same year. He also published his first book on linguistics, Syntactic Structures ,

917-470: A sheep population might encourage the expansion of a wolf population, an expansion of altruistic traits within a gene pool may also encourage increasing numbers of individuals with dependent traits. Studies of human behavior genetics have generally found behavioral traits such as creativity, extroversion, aggressiveness, and IQ have high heritability . The researchers who carry out those studies are careful to point out that heritability does not constrain

1048-500: A catalyst for connecting what in Hjelmslev 's and Jesperson 's time was the beginnings of structural linguistics , which has become cognitive linguistics . Transformational grammar was the dominant research paradigm through the mid-1970s. The derivative government and binding theory replaced it and remained influential through the early 1990s, when linguists turned to a "minimalist" approach to grammar. This research focused on

1179-492: A correlation between the gene frequencies predicted by the strategy, and those expressed in a population. Altruism between social insects and littermates has been explained in such a way. Altruistic behavior, behavior that increases the reproductive fitness of others at the apparent expense of the altruist, in some animals has been correlated to the degree of genome shared between altruistic individuals. A quantitative description of infanticide by male harem-mating animals when

1310-405: A double-column, 697-page account of theory based on an encyclopedic review of all known social organisms. In a 1989 poll the officers and fellows of the international Animal Behavior Society ranked it the most important book on animal behavior of all time. Many scientists and others believed it would have been better if I had stopped before the last chapter on Homo sapiens . There could not have been

1441-570: A fear of biological determinism , accusing among others Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin of being "radical scientists", whose stance on human nature is influenced by politics rather than science, while Lewontin, Steven Rose and Leon Kamin , who drew a distinction between the politics and history of an idea and its scientific validity, argue that sociobiology fails on scientific grounds. Gould grouped sociobiology with eugenics , criticizing both in his book The Mismeasure of Man . When Napoleon Chagnon scheduled sessions on sociobiology at

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1572-465: A fellow soldier. This example raises the question of how altruistic genes can be passed on if this soldier dies without having any children. Within sociobiology, a social behavior is first explained as a sociobiological hypothesis by finding an evolutionarily stable strategy that matches the observed behavior. Stability of a strategy can be difficult to prove, but usually, it will predict gene frequencies. The hypothesis can be supported by establishing

1703-427: A greater chance of surviving and/or reproducing in the past are more likely to survive in present organisms. That inherited adaptive behaviors are present in nonhuman animal species has been multiply demonstrated by biologists, and it has become a foundation of evolutionary biology . However, there is continued resistance by some researchers over the application of evolutionary models to humans, particularly from within

1834-433: A history of intergroup conflict for resources between men have led to differences in violence and aggression between men and women. The novelist Elias Canetti also has noted applications of sociobiological theory to cultural practices such as slavery and autocracy. Genetic mouse mutants illustrate the power that genes exert on behavior. For example, the transcription factor FEV (aka Pet1), through its role in maintaining

1965-412: A human baby and a kitten are both capable of inductive reasoning , if they are exposed to exactly the same linguistic data, the human will always acquire the ability to understand and produce language, while the kitten will never acquire either ability. Chomsky referred to this difference in capacity as the language acquisition device , and suggested that linguists needed to determine both what that device

2096-413: A language. Chomsky is commonly credited with inventing transformational-generative grammar, but his original contribution was considered modest when he first published his theory. In his 1955 dissertation and his 1957 textbook Syntactic Structures , he presented recent developments in the analysis formulated by Zellig Harris , who was Chomsky's PhD supervisor, and by Charles F. Hockett . Their method

2227-640: A peacekeeping force; Chomsky was critical of this, believing it was designed to secure Australian access to East Timor's oil and gas reserves under the Timor Gap Treaty . Chomsky was widely interviewed after the September 11 attacks in 2001 as the American public attempted to make sense of the attacks. He argued that the ensuing War on Terror was not a new development but a continuation of U.S. foreign policy and concomitant rhetoric since at least

2358-714: A pivotal role in the decline of linguistic behaviorism , and was particularly critical of the work of B. F. Skinner . An outspoken opponent of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War , which he saw as an act of American imperialism , in 1967 Chomsky rose to national attention for his anti-war essay " The Responsibility of Intellectuals ". Becoming associated with the New Left , he was arrested multiple times for his activism and placed on President Richard Nixon 's list of political opponents . While expanding his work in linguistics over subsequent decades, he also became involved in

2489-576: A public dissident. This essay and other political articles were collected and published in 1969 as part of Chomsky's first political book, American Power and the New Mandarins . He followed this with further political books, including At War with Asia (1970), The Backroom Boys (1973), For Reasons of State (1973), and Peace in the Middle East? (1974), published by Pantheon Books . These publications led to Chomsky's association with

2620-431: A result of selective pressures in the history of a species. Thus, they are often interested in instinctive , or intuitive behavior, and in explaining the similarities, rather than the differences, between cultures. For example, mothers within many species of mammals – including humans – are very protective of their offspring . Sociobiologists reason that this protective behavior likely evolved over time because it helped

2751-530: A significant figure in linguistics with his landmark work Syntactic Structures , which played a major role in remodeling the study of language. From 1958 to 1959 Chomsky was a National Science Foundation fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study . He created or co-created the universal grammar theory, the generative grammar theory, the Chomsky hierarchy , and the minimalist program . Chomsky also played

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2882-402: A system that relates meaning and sound using the minimum possible faculties, Chomsky dispenses with concepts such as "deep structure" and "surface structure" and instead emphasizes the plasticity of the brain's neural circuits, with which come an infinite number of concepts, or " logical forms ". When exposed to linguistic data, a hearer-speaker's brain proceeds to associate sound and meaning, and

3013-500: A tabula rasa but rather an autonomous decision-making instrument. The threat to our free will is that someone may be able to calculate exactly how our brain works. But the extraordinary complexity and difficulty of exact measurement may mean that that is never the case. The cardinal mystery of neurobiology is not self-love or dreams of immortality, but intentionality . The compromise between Russian dolls and vitalism lies in recognizing plans, or schemata. These can create patterns in

3144-437: A very small and finite subset of the allowable syntactic variants within their first language, they somehow acquire the highly organized and systematic ability to understand and produce an infinite number of sentences , including ones that have never before been uttered, in that language. To explain this, Chomsky proposed that the primary linguistic data must be supplemented by an innate linguistic capacity . Furthermore, while

3275-427: A work that radically opposed the dominant Harris– Bloomfield trend in the field. Responses to Chomsky's ideas ranged from indifference to hostility, and his work proved divisive and caused "significant upheaval" in the discipline. The linguist John Lyons later asserted that Syntactic Structures "revolutionized the scientific study of language". From 1958 to 1959 Chomsky was a National Science Foundation fellow at

3406-426: A worse time than the mid-1970s for the inauguration of human sociobiology. The Vietnam War had created a student protest movement of the revolutionary left. Race was a radioactive issue. Talk of the inheritance of IQ and human behavior were punishable offenses. The blank-slate interpretation of the brain sheltered the social sciences and humanities from the storms of biology and vouchsafed their independence as two of

3537-519: Is "still brimful with ideas and insights about who we are, how we got here, and how to get wherever we want to go." On Human Nature was discussed by Gregory Hanlon in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History . Hanlon credited Wilson with helping to establish that human behavior could not be understood solely in terms of "learned cultural values", that the behavioral sciences could help to explain "the interpersonal actions in past societies." He compared

3668-484: Is a broad theory used to model, encode, and deduce a native speaker's linguistic capabilities. These models, or " formal grammars ", show the abstract structures of a specific language as they may relate to structures in other languages. Chomsky developed transformational grammar in the mid-1950s, whereupon it became the dominant syntactic theory in linguistics for two decades. "Transformations" refers to syntactic relationships within language, e.g., being able to infer that

3799-467: Is a hybrid discipline that incorporates knowledge from ethology to derive the principles of the biological properties of entire societies. It attempts to view humanity simultaneously with an array of other social experiments. Societies are not infinitely malleable. We share certain traits with the majority of great apes and monkeys, however less with birds or rodents. And there are a huge number of social traits that occur in every human society. He examines

3930-476: Is an American professor and public intellectual known for his work in linguistics , political activism , and social criticism . Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science . He is a laureate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona and an institute professor emeritus at

4061-426: Is and what constraints it imposes on the range of possible human languages. The universal features that result from these constraints would constitute "universal grammar". Multiple researchers have challenged universal grammar on the grounds of the evolutionary infeasibility of its genetic basis for language, the lack of crosslinguistic surface universals, and the unproven link between innate/universal structures and

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4192-670: Is commonly substituted for the term sociobiology in order to avoid the public controversy. Sociobiologists maintain that human behavior , as well as nonhuman animal behavior, can be partly explained as the outcome of natural selection. They contend that in order to fully understand behavior, it must be analyzed in terms of evolutionary considerations. Natural selection is fundamental to evolutionary theory. Variants of hereditary traits which increase an organism's ability to survive and reproduce will be more greatly represented in subsequent generations, i.e., they will be "selected for". Thus, inherited behavioral mechanisms that allowed an organism

4323-414: Is defined as "a concern for the welfare of others". If altruism is genetically determined, then altruistic individuals must reproduce their own altruistic genetic traits for altruism to survive, but when altruists lavish their resources on non-altruists at the expense of their own kind, the altruists tend to die out and the others tend to increase. An extreme example is a soldier losing his life trying to help

4454-692: Is derived from the work of the Danish structural linguist Louis Hjelmslev , who introduced algorithmic grammar to general linguistics. Based on this rule-based notation of grammars, Chomsky grouped logically possible phrase-structure grammar types into a series of four nested subsets and increasingly complex types, together known as the Chomsky hierarchy . This classification remains relevant to formal language theory and theoretical computer science , especially programming language theory , compiler construction, and automata theory . Chomsky's Syntactic Structures became, beyond generative linguistics as such,

4585-419: Is partially inborn, implying that children need only learn certain language-specific features of their native languages . He bases his argument on observations about human language acquisition and describes a " poverty of the stimulus ": an enormous gap between the linguistic stimuli to which children are exposed and the rich linguistic competence they attain. For example, although children are exposed to only

4716-465: Is therefore seen as an effort to preserve one's genes in the population. Inherent in sociobiological reasoning is the idea that certain genes or gene combinations that influence particular behavioral traits can be inherited from generation to generation. For example, newly dominant male lions often kill cubs in the pride that they did not sire. This behavior is adaptive because killing the cubs eliminates competition for their own offspring and causes

4847-492: Is widely recognized as having helped to spark the cognitive revolution in the human sciences , contributing to the development of a new cognitivistic framework for the study of language and the mind. Chomsky remains a leading critic of U.S. foreign policy , contemporary capitalism , U.S. involvement and Israel's role in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict , and mass media . Chomsky and his ideas are highly influential in

4978-419: The 2014 Scottish independence referendum , Chomsky supported Scottish independence. Chomsky retired from MIT in 2002, but continued to conduct research and seminars on campus as an emeritus . That same year he visited Turkey to attend the trial of a publisher who had been accused of treason for printing one of Chomsky's books; Chomsky insisted on being a co-defendant and amid international media attention,

5109-592: The Cambodian genocide and the Bosnian genocide also generated controversy. Since retiring from active teaching at MIT, he has continued his vocal political activism, including opposing the 2003 invasion of Iraq and supporting the Occupy movement . An anti-Zionist , Chomsky considers Israel's treatment of Palestinians to be worse than South African–style apartheid , and criticizes U.S. support for Israel. Chomsky

5240-595: The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey . Chomsky's provocative critique of B. F. Skinner , who viewed language as learned behavior, and its challenge to the dominant behaviorist paradigm thrust Chomsky into the limelight. Chomsky argued that behaviorism underplayed the role of human creativity in learning language and overplayed the role of external conditions in influencing verbal behavior. He proceeded to found MIT's graduate program in linguistics with Halle. In 1961, Chomsky received tenure and became

5371-523: The Maoris in New Zealand . Sex has evolved because it creates diversity which can cope with a changing environment. The differing roles of the two sexes creates a conflict of interest which varies between species. But how far are the observed cultural differences innate or environmental? Some indication is given by considering the effects of hormone treatments during pregnancy and the equal treatment in

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5502-556: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Among the most cited living authors, Chomsky has written more than 150 books on topics such as linguistics, war, and politics. In addition to his work in linguistics, since the 1960s Chomsky has been an influential voice on the American left as a consistent critic of U.S. foreign policy , contemporary capitalism , and corporate influence on political institutions and

5633-553: The Nicaraguan Contra War —in which the U.S. supported the contra militia against the Sandinista government—Chomsky traveled to Managua to meet with workers' organizations and refugees of the conflict, giving public lectures on politics and linguistics. Many of these lectures were published in 1987 as On Power and Ideology: The Managua Lectures . In 1983 he published The Fateful Triangle , which argued that

5764-722: The Russian Empire in 1913 to escape conscription and worked in Baltimore sweatshops and Hebrew elementary schools before attending university. After moving to Philadelphia, William became principal of the Congregation Mikveh Israel religious school and joined the Gratz College faculty. He placed great emphasis on educating people so that they would be "well integrated, free and independent in their thinking, concerned about improving and enhancing

5895-743: The Security Courts dropped the charge on the first day. During that trip Chomsky visited Kurdish areas of Turkey and spoke out in favor of the Kurds' human rights. A supporter of the World Social Forum , he attended its conferences in Brazil in both 2002 and 2003, also attending the Forum event in India. Chomsky supported the 2011 Occupy movement , speaking at encampments and publishing on

6026-653: The University of Arizona in 2017 and was later hired as a part-time professor in the linguistics department there, his duties including teaching and public seminars. His salary was covered by philanthropic donations. After a stroke in June 2023, Chomsky moved to Brazil full-time; this was not publicly reported until June 2024. What started as purely linguistic research ... has led, through involvement in political causes and an identification with an older philosophic tradition, to no less than an attempt to formulate an overall theory of man. The roots of this are manifest in

6157-550: The University of California, Berkeley , in 1966. These lectures were published as Language and Mind in 1968. In the late 1960s, a high-profile intellectual rift later known as the linguistic wars developed between Chomsky and some of his colleagues and doctoral students—including Paul Postal , John Ross , George Lakoff , and James D. McCawley —who contended that Chomsky's syntax-based, interpretivist linguistics did not properly account for semantic context ( general semantics ). A post hoc assessment of this period concluded that

6288-569: The University of Cambridge , Columbia University ( Woodbridge Lectures ), and Stanford University . His appearance in a 1971 debate with French continental philosopher Michel Foucault positioned Chomsky as a symbolic figurehead of analytic philosophy . He continued to publish extensively on linguistics, producing Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar (1972), an enlarged edition of Language and Mind (1972), and Reflections on Language (1975). In 1974 Chomsky became

6419-460: The University of Chicago and Yale University . He had not been registered as a student at Pennsylvania for four years, but in 1955 he submitted a thesis setting out his ideas on transformational grammar ; he was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree for it, and it was privately distributed among specialists on microfilm before being published in 1975 as part of The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory . Harvard professor George Armitage Miller

6550-413: The alpha male is displaced as well as rodent female infanticide and fetal resorption are active areas of study. In general, females with more bearing opportunities may value offspring less, and may also arrange bearing opportunities to maximize the food and protection from mates. An important concept in sociobiology is that temperament traits exist in an ecological balance. Just as an expansion of

6681-613: The anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements. Since 2017, he has been Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in the Agnese Nelms Haury Program in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona . Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928, in the East Oak Lane neighborhood of Philadelphia , Pennsylvania. His parents, William Chomsky and Elsie Simonofsky, were Jewish immigrants. William had fled

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6812-466: The kibbutz movement . The theoreticians of Judaism and Christianity have misinterpreted the biological significance of sex, with the insistence that its primary role is procreation, and particularly in its treatment of homosexuals. Homosexuality is common in many species and may be normal in a biological sense as a form of bonding. Human cultures value highly those who pay the “ultimate sacrifice”, more than most mammal species and only outperformed by

6943-600: The linguistics wars . In collaboration with Edward S. Herman , Chomsky later articulated the propaganda model of media criticism in Manufacturing Consent , and worked to expose the Indonesian occupation of East Timor . His defense of unconditional freedom of speech , including that of Holocaust denial , generated significant controversy in the Faurisson affair of the 1980s. Chomsky's commentary on

7074-403: The principles and parameters framework, which explained children's ability to learn any language by filling open parameters (a set of universal grammar principles) that adapt as the child encounters linguistic data. The minimalist program, initiated by Chomsky, asks which minimal principles and parameters theory fits most elegantly, naturally, and simply. In an attempt to simplify language into

7205-429: The serotonergic system in the brain, is required for normal aggressive and anxiety -like behavior. Thus, when FEV is genetically deleted from the mouse genome, male mice will instantly attack other males, whereas their wild-type counterparts take significantly longer to initiate violent behavior. In addition, FEV has been shown to be required for correct maternal behavior in mice, such that offspring of mothers without

7336-527: The 1976 American Anthropological Association convention, other scholars attempted to cancel them with what Chagnon later described as "Impassioned accusations of racism, fascism and Nazism"; Margaret Mead 's support caused the sessions to occur as scheduled. Noam Chomsky has expressed views on sociobiology on several occasions. During a 1976 meeting of the Sociobiology Study Group , as reported by Ullica Segerstråle , Chomsky argued for

7467-615: The 1980s, Chomsky's students had become prominent linguists who, in turn, expanded and revised his linguistic theories. In the 1990s, Chomsky embraced political activism to a greater degree than before. Retaining his commitment to the cause of East Timorese independence, in 1995 he visited Australia to talk on the issue at the behest of the East Timorese Relief Association and the National Council for East Timorese Resistance. The lectures he gave on

7598-481: The American New Left movement, though he thought little of prominent New Left intellectuals Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm and preferred the company of activists to that of intellectuals. Chomsky remained largely ignored by the mainstream press throughout this period. Chomsky also became involved in left-wing activism. Chomsky refused to pay half his taxes, publicly supported students who refused

7729-533: The Darwinian revolution by bringing biological thought into social sciences and humanities. Wilson describes On Human Nature as a sequel to his earlier books The Insect Societies (1971) and Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975). The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1979. The conundrum of human nature, as I and a few others saw it in 1978, can be solved only if scientific explanations embrace both

7860-493: The FEV factor do not survive unless cross-fostered to other wild-type female mice. A genetic basis for instinctive behavioral traits among non-human species, such as in the above example, is commonly accepted among many biologists; however, attempting to use a genetic basis to explain complex behaviors in human societies has remained extremely controversial. Steven Pinker argues that critics have been overly swayed by politics and

7991-516: The Jewish leftists who frequented his New York City newspaper stand to debate current affairs. Chomsky himself often visited left-wing and anarchist bookstores when visiting his uncle in the city, voraciously reading political literature. He became absorbed in the story of the 1939 fall of Barcelona and suppression of the Spanish anarchosyndicalist movement, writing his first article on the topic at

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8122-812: The Reagan era. He gave the D.T. Lakdawala Memorial Lecture in New Delhi in 2001, and in 2003 visited Cuba at the invitation of the Latin American Association of Social Scientists. Chomsky's 2003 Hegemony or Survival articulated what he called the United States' "imperial grand strategy " and critiqued the Iraq War and other aspects of the War on Terror. Chomsky toured internationally with greater regularity during this period. During

8253-529: The U.S. had continually used the Israeli–Palestinian conflict for its own ends. In 1988, Chomsky visited the Palestinian territories to witness the impact of Israeli occupation. Chomsky and Herman's Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988) outlines their propaganda model for understanding mainstream media. Even in countries without official censorship, they argued,

8384-790: The U.S. war in Vietnam. Together they wrote Counter-Revolutionary Violence: Bloodbaths in Fact & Propaganda , a book that criticized U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia and the mainstream media's failure to cover it. Warner Modular published it in 1973, but its parent company disapproved of the book's contents and ordered all copies destroyed. While mainstream publishing options proved elusive, Chomsky found support from Michael Albert 's South End Press , an activist-oriented publishing company. In 1979, South End published Chomsky and Herman's revised Counter-Revolutionary Violence as

8515-452: The Vietnam War. There has since been a wide-ranging debate about what effects Chomsky's employment at MIT had on his political and linguistic ideas. Chomsky's anti-war activism led to his arrest on multiple occasions and he was on President Richard Nixon's master list of political opponents . Chomsky was aware of the potential repercussions of his civil disobedience, and his wife began studying for her own doctorate in linguistics to support

8646-514: The age of 10. That he came to identify with anarchism first rather than another leftist movement, he described as a "lucky accident". Chomsky was firmly anti-Bolshevik by his early teens. In 1945, at the age of 16, Chomsky began a general program of study at the University of Pennsylvania , where he explored philosophy, logic, and languages and developed a primary interest in learning Arabic . Living at home, he funded his undergraduate degree by teaching Hebrew. Frustrated with his experiences at

8777-583: The application of sociobiology to people". The sociologist Ullica Segerstråle described On Human Nature as essentially a development of Wilson's earlier ideas. She commented that, unlike opponents of sociobiology, Wilson saw it as having liberal political implications, and tried to develop these suggestions in On Human Nature . The psychologist David P. Barash and Ilona A. Barash called On Human Nature , "A wide-ranging, thoughtful, and controversial classic of human sociobiology". On Human Nature won

8908-449: The attempt to explain the evolutionary mechanics behind social behaviors such as altruism , aggression , and nurturance, primarily in ants (Wilson's own research specialty) and other Hymenoptera , but also in other animals. However, the influence of evolution on behavior has been of interest to biologists and philosophers since soon after the discovery of evolution itself. Peter Kropotkin 's Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution , written in

9039-554: The book to the ethnologist Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt 's Human Ethology (1989) and the historian Daniel Lord Smail 's Deep History and the Brain (2008). The anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy argued that a reading of On Human Nature refutes the accusation that Wilson aims to use sociobiology to reinforce traditional sex roles. The philosopher Roger Scruton criticized Wilson's sociobiological explanations of human social behavior, arguing that because of Wilson's "polemical purpose" he

9170-516: The brain of a newborn baby an all-purpose device, adaptable through learning to any mode of social existence as those who believe in a tabula rasa assume? Does sociobiology imply that development is deterministic , producing insect-like behavior? His view is that genetic factors act as a set of biases in development, nudging it one way or another with a potentially large cumulative change. He comments on Chomsky’s view of grammar and Skinner’s of learning, and prefers Piaget ’s approach. The mind isn’t

9301-505: The complex relationship between nature and nurture . Among sociobiologists, the controversy between laying weight to different levels of selection was settled between D.S. Wilson and E.O. Wilson in 2007. E. O. Wilson defined sociobiology as "the extension of population biology and evolutionary theory to social organization". Sociobiology is based on the premise that some behaviors (social and individual) are at least partly inherited and can be affected by natural selection . It begins with

9432-653: The conflict between three great mythologies: Marxism , traditional religion, and scientific materialism . Which of those mythologies gives us hope for the future? He accepts that the humanisms of Huxley , Pauli and others have achieved less than their purpose. But he still looks to the Promethean spirit of science as a cause of hope. The biologist Jerry Coyne accused Wilson of trying to use evolutionary psychology to control social science and social policy in The New Republic , arguing that On Human Nature

9563-430: The conservative-dominated political science department. When student activists campaigned to stop weapons and counterinsurgency research at MIT, Chomsky was sympathetic but felt that the research should remain under MIT's oversight and limited to systems of deterrence and defense. Chomsky has acknowledged that his MIT lab's funding at this time came from the military. He later said he considered resigning from MIT during

9694-569: The core of the research on animal social behavior and by drawing alliances with emerging research methodologies, at a time when "biology in the field" was threatened to be made old-fashioned by "modern" practices of science (laboratory studies, mathematical biology, molecular biology). Once a specialist term, "sociobiology" became widely known in 1975 when Wilson published his book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis , which sparked an intense controversy. Since then "sociobiology" has largely been equated with Wilson's vision. The book pioneered and popularized

9825-640: The couple moved to the Allston area of Boston and remained there until 1965, when they relocated to the suburb of Lexington . The couple took a Harvard travel grant to Europe in 1953. He enjoyed living in Hashomer Hatzair 's HaZore'a kibbutz while in Israel, but was appalled by his interactions with Jewish nationalism, anti-Arab racism and, within the kibbutz's leftist community, Stalinism . On visits to New York City, Chomsky continued to frequent

9956-506: The crimes of their own states". Chomsky had long publicly criticized Nazism , and totalitarianism more generally, but his commitment to freedom of speech led him to defend the right of French historian Robert Faurisson to advocate a position widely characterized as Holocaust denial . Without Chomsky's knowledge, his plea for Faurisson's freedom of speech was published as the preface to the latter's 1980 book Mémoire en défense contre ceux qui m'accusent de falsifier l'histoire . Chomsky

10087-679: The decade, including in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), Topics in the Theory of Generative Grammar (1966), and Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought (1966). Along with Halle, he also edited the Studies in Language series of books for Harper and Row . As he began to accrue significant academic recognition and honors for his work, Chomsky lectured at

10218-426: The different disciplines that explore human nature interact? Those working at a lower level often assume that those at a higher level should eventually be reformulated in their own terms: they form an antidiscipline for the next level, but with the passage of time they become fully complementary. Reduction is only half the scientific process: the recognition of novel emergent phenomena is as important. Sociobiology

10349-548: The draft , and was arrested while participating in an anti-war teach-in outside the Pentagon. During this time, Chomsky co-founded the anti-war collective RESIST with Mitchell Goodman , Denise Levertov , William Sloane Coffin , and Dwight Macdonald . Although he questioned the objectives of the 1968 student protests , Chomsky regularly gave lectures to student activist groups and, with his colleague Louis Kampf, ran undergraduate courses on politics at MIT independently of

10480-481: The early 1890s, is a popular example. The final chapter of the book is devoted to sociobiological explanations of human behavior, and Wilson later wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning book, On Human Nature , that addressed human behavior specifically. Edward H. Hagen writes in The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology that sociobiology is, despite the public controversy regarding the applications to humans, "one of

10611-417: The ease of understanding what he writes and says—is his work on sociopolitical analysis; political, social, and economic history; and critical assessment of current political circumstance. In Chomsky's view, although those in power might—and do—try to obscure their intentions and to defend their actions in ways that make them acceptable to citizens, it is easy for anyone who is willing to be critical and consider

10742-629: The facts to discern what they are up to. —James McGilvray, 2014 Chomsky is a prominent political dissident. His political views have changed little since his childhood, when he was influenced by the emphasis on political activism that was ingrained in Jewish working-class tradition. He usually identifies as an anarcho-syndicalist or a libertarian socialist . He views these positions not as precise political theories but as ideals that he thinks best meet human needs: liberty, community, and freedom of association. Unlike some other socialists, such as Marxists, Chomsky believes that politics lies outside

10873-686: The family in the event of Chomsky's imprisonment or joblessness. Chomsky's scientific reputation insulated him from administrative action based on his beliefs. In 1970 he visited southeast Asia to lecture at Vietnam's Hanoi University of Science and Technology and toured war refugee camps in Laos . In 1973 he helped lead a committee commemorating the 50th anniversary of the War Resisters League . Chomsky's work in linguistics continued to gain international recognition as he received multiple honorary doctorates . He delivered public lectures at

11004-423: The how (neurosciences) and why (evolutionary biology) of brain action, with the two axes of explanation fitted together. In The Insect Societies (1971), I proposed that a coherent branch of biology might be constructed from a synthesis of social behavior and population biology. In 1975 I expanded the conception of the discipline outlined to include vertebrate animals. The result was Sociobiology: The New Synthesis ,

11135-401: The human species and is above all the process by which individuals are persuaded to subordinate their immediate self-interest to the interests of the group. There is myth : the narratives by which the tribe’s special place in the world is explained in rational terms consistent with the listener’s understanding of the physical world. Much of contemporary intellectual and political strife is due to

11266-422: The idea that behaviors have evolved over time, similar to the way that physical traits are thought to have evolved. It predicts that animals will act in ways that have proven to be evolutionarily successful over time. This can, among other things, result in the formation of complex social processes conducive to evolutionary fitness. The discipline seeks to explain behavior as a product of natural selection. Behavior

11397-403: The importance of a sociobiologically informed notion of human nature. Chomsky argued that human beings are biological organisms and ought to be studied as such, with his criticism of the " blank slate " doctrine in the social sciences (which would inspire a great deal of Steven Pinker's and others' work in evolutionary psychology), in his 1975 Reflections on Language . Chomsky further hinted at

11528-441: The influence that environmental or cultural factors may have on those traits. Various theorists have argued that in some environments criminal behavior might be adaptive. The evolutionary neuroandrogenic (ENA) theory , by sociologist/criminologist Lee Ellis , posits that female sexual selection has led to increased competitive behavior among men, sometimes resulting in criminality. In another theory, Mark van Vugt argues that

11659-451: The interactions between organisms and their environments. Accordingly, Chomsky argues that language is a unique evolutionary development of the human species and distinguished from modes of communication used by any other animal species. Chomsky argues that his nativist , internalist view of language is consistent with the philosophical school of " rationalism " and contrasts with the anti-nativist, externalist view of language consistent with

11790-551: The kind of normal skepticism and willingness to apply one's analytical skills that almost all people have and that they can exercise. —Chomsky on the Vietnam War Chomsky joined protests against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War in 1962, speaking on the subject at small gatherings in churches and homes. His 1967 critique of U.S. involvement, " The Responsibility of Intellectuals ", among other contributions to The New York Review of Books , debuted Chomsky as

11921-705: The language of sociobiology readily slips from "is" to "ought", an instance of the naturalistic fallacy . Pinker has argued that opposition to stances considered anti-social, such as ethnic nepotism, is based on moral assumptions, meaning that such opposition is not falsifiable by scientific advances. The history of this debate, and others related to it, are covered in detail by Cronin (1993) , Segerstråle (2000) , and Alcock (2001) . Informational notes Citations Bibliography Noam Chomsky Active Defunct Publications Works Avram Noam Chomsky ( / n oʊ m ˈ tʃ ɒ m s k i / nohm CHOM -skee ; born December 7, 1928)

12052-614: The language. Chomsky revised this thesis for his MA , which he received from the University of Pennsylvania in 1951; it was subsequently published as a book. He also developed his interest in philosophy while at university, in particular under the tutelage of Nelson Goodman . From 1951 to 1955, Chomsky was a member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University , where he undertook research on what became his doctoral dissertation. Having been encouraged by Goodman to apply, Chomsky

12183-505: The leftist journal Politics , which furthered his interest in anarchism, and the council communist periodical Living Marxism , though he rejected the Marxist orthodoxy of its editor, Paul Mattick . Chomsky befriended two linguists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)— Morris Halle and Roman Jakobson —the latter of whom secured him an assistant professor position there in 1955. At MIT, Chomsky spent half his time on

12314-408: The linguistic theory ... The discovery of cognitive structures common to the human race but only to humans (species specific), leads quite easily to thinking of unalienable human attributes. — Edward Marcotte on the significance of Chomsky's linguistic theory The basis of Chomsky's linguistic theory lies in biolinguistics , the linguistic school that holds that the principles underpinning

12445-629: The media. Born to Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants in Philadelphia , Chomsky developed an early interest in anarchism from alternative bookstores in New York City . He studied at the University of Pennsylvania . During his postgraduate work in the Harvard Society of Fellows , Chomsky developed the theory of transformational grammar for which he earned his doctorate in 1955. That year he began teaching at MIT, and in 1957 emerged as

12576-453: The mind that aren’t altogether present in reality and can form the physical basis of will. Yet our behavior is determined in a weaker sense: we can make broad predictions with confidence. Cultural evolution is Lamarckian and much faster than Darwinian . But culture cannot diverge too far from its biological base. For example, slavery has existed in much of history but humans ultimately refuse to act like slave ants . We need to bear in mind

12707-527: The movement, which he called a reaction to a 30-year class war . The 2015 documentary Requiem for the American Dream summarizes his views on capitalism and economic inequality through a "75-minute teach-in ". In 2015 Chomsky and his wife purchased a residence in São Paulo , Brazil , and began splitting their time between Brazil and the U.S. Chomsky taught a short-term politics course at

12838-503: The news is censored through five filters that greatly influence both what and how news is presented. The book received a 1992 film adaptation . In 1989, Chomsky published Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies, in which he suggests that a worthwhile democracy requires that its citizens undertake intellectual self-defense against the media and elite intellectual culture that seeks to control them. By

12969-410: The nursing females to come into heat faster, thus allowing more of his genes to enter into the population. Sociobiologists would view this instinctual cub-killing behavior as being inherited through the genes of successfully reproducing male lions, whereas non-killing behavior may have died out as those lions were less successful in reproducing. The philosopher of biology Daniel Dennett suggested that

13100-483: The occupation, and meetings with refugees in Lisbon . Marxist academic Steven Lukes most prominently publicly accused Chomsky of betraying his anarchist ideals and acting as an apologist for Cambodian leader Pol Pot . Herman said that the controversy "imposed a serious personal cost" on Chomsky, who considered the personal criticism less important than the evidence that "mainstream intelligentsia suppressed or justified

13231-751: The office of the Yiddish anarchist journal Fraye Arbeter Shtime and became enamored with the ideas of Rudolf Rocker , a contributor whose work introduced Chomsky to the link between anarchism and classical liberalism . Chomsky also read other political thinkers: the anarchists Mikhail Bakunin and Diego Abad de Santillán , democratic socialists George Orwell , Bertrand Russell , and Dwight Macdonald , and works by Marxists Karl Liebknecht , Karl Korsch , and Rosa Luxemburg . His politics were reaffirmed by Orwell's depiction of Barcelona 's functioning anarchist society in Homage to Catalonia (1938). Chomsky read

13362-627: The offspring of the individuals which had the characteristic to survive. This parental protection would increase in frequency in the population. The social behavior is believed to have evolved in a fashion similar to other types of nonbehavioral adaptations , such as a coat of fur, or the sense of smell. Individual genetic advantage fails to explain certain social behaviors as a result of gene-centred selection. E.O. Wilson argued that evolution may also act upon groups . The mechanisms responsible for group selection employ paradigms and population statistics borrowed from evolutionary game theory . Altruism

13493-418: The opposing programs ultimately were complementary, each informing the other. [I]t does not require very far-reaching, specialized knowledge to perceive that the United States was invading South Vietnam. And, in fact, to take apart the system of illusions and deception which functions to prevent understanding of contemporary reality [is] not a task that requires extraordinary skill or understanding. It requires

13624-403: The philosophical school of " empiricism ", which contends that all knowledge, including language, comes from external stimuli. Historians have disputed Chomsky's claim about rationalism on the basis that his theory of innate grammar excludes propositional knowledge and instead focuses on innate learning capacities or structures. Since the 1960s, Chomsky has maintained that syntactic knowledge

13755-514: The political philosopher Thomas Hobbes was the first proto-sociobiologist, arguing that in his 1651 book Leviathan Hobbes had explained the origins of morals in human society from an amoral sociobiological perspective. The geneticist of animal behavior John Paul Scott coined the word sociobiology at a 1948 conference on genetics and social behavior, which called for a conjoint development of field and laboratory studies in animal behavior research. With John Paul Scott's organizational efforts,

13886-442: The possible reconciliation of his anarchist political views and sociobiology in a discussion of Peter Kropotkin 's Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution , which focused more on altruism than aggression, suggesting that anarchist societies were feasible because of an innate human tendency to cooperate. Wilson has claimed that he had never meant to imply what ought to be, only what is the case. However, some critics have argued that

14017-530: The remit of science, but he still roots his ideas about an ideal society in empirical data and empirically justified theories. In Chomsky's view, the truth about political realities is systematically distorted or suppressed by an elite corporatocracy , which uses corporate media, advertising, and think tanks to promote its own propaganda. His work seeks to reveal such manipulations and the truth they obscure. Chomsky believes this web of falsehood can be broken by "common sense", critical thinking, and understanding

14148-500: The roles of self-interest and self-deception, and that intellectuals abdicate their moral responsibility to tell the truth about the world in fear of losing prestige and funding. He argues that, as such an intellectual, it is his duty to use his social privilege , resources, and training to aid popular democracy movements in their struggles. Although he has participated in direct action demonstrations—joining protests, being arrested, organizing groups—Chomsky's primary political outlet

14279-420: The rules of grammar we observe are in fact only the consequences, or side effects, of the way language works. Thus, while much of Chomsky's prior research focused on the rules of language, he now focuses on the mechanisms the brain uses to generate these rules and regulate speech. The second major area to which Chomsky has contributed—and surely the best known in terms of the number of people in his audience and

14410-427: The scientific triumphs of the twentieth century." "Sociobiology is now part of the core research and curriculum of virtually all biology departments, and it is a foundation of the work of almost all field biologists. " Sociobiological research on nonhuman organisms has increased dramatically and continuously in the world's top scientific journals such as Nature and Science . The more general term behavioral ecology

14541-412: The similarities and differences with chimpanzees in more detail. He then discusses the incest taboo (cultural) with possible underlying genetic explanations. There is no reason to suppose that all genetic variability for behavior has been exhausted. In fact the opposite is true. The chapter concludes with a discussion of identical twin studies and possible racial differences. Is the wiring diagram of

14672-617: The social behavior of rhesus macaques, using statistics, and was hired as a "sociobiologist" at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in 1965. Wilson's sociobiology is different from John Paul Scott 's or Altmann's, insofar as he drew on mathematical models of social behavior centered on the maximization of the genetic fitness by W. D. Hamilton , Robert Trivers , John Maynard Smith , and George R. Price . The three sociobiologies by Scott, Altmann and Wilson have in common to place naturalist studies at

14803-436: The social insects where kin selection reigns. One needs to distinguish this from “soft-core” altruism where the giver expects something in return. Hard-core altruism is the enemy of civilization. But in humans soft-core altruism has been carried to elaborate extremes. Loyalty to close kin is emotionally important but doesn’t always override other issues. Religion is one of the major categories of behavior undeniably unique to

14934-564: The social sciences, where culture has long been assumed to be the predominant driver of behavior. Sociobiology is based upon two fundamental premises: Sociobiology uses Nikolaas Tinbergen 's four categories of questions and explanations of animal behavior. Two categories are at the species level; two, at the individual level. The species-level categories (often called "ultimate explanations") are The individual-level categories (often called "proximate explanations") are Sociobiologists are interested in how behavior can be explained logically as

15065-403: The structure of language are biologically preset in the human mind and hence genetically inherited. He argues that all humans share the same underlying linguistic structure, irrespective of sociocultural differences. In adopting this position Chomsky rejects the radical behaviorist psychology of B. F. Skinner , who viewed speech, thought, and all behavior as a completely learned product of

15196-546: The structures of specific languages. Michael Tomasello has challenged Chomsky's theory of innate syntactic knowledge as based on theory and not behavioral observation. The empirical basis of poverty of the stimulus arguments has been challenged by Geoffrey Pullum and others, leading to back-and-forth debate in the language acquisition literature. Recent work has also suggested that some recurrent neural network architectures can learn hierarchical structure without an explicit constraint. Transformational-generative grammar

15327-577: The subject between two sentences is the same person. Chomsky's theory posits that language consists of both deep structures and surface structures : Outward-facing surface structures relate phonetic rules into sound, while inward-facing deep structures relate words and conceptual meaning. Transformational-generative grammar uses mathematical notation to express the rules that govern the connection between meaning and sound (deep and surface structures, respectively). By this theory, linguistic principles can mathematically generate potential sentence structures in

15458-510: The subject were published as Powers and Prospects in 1996. As a result of the international publicity Chomsky generated, his biographer Wolfgang Sperlich opined that he did more to aid the cause of East Timorese independence than anyone but the investigative journalist John Pilger . After East Timor attained independence from Indonesia in 1999, the Australian-led International Force for East Timor arrived as

15589-520: The term "sociobiology" originated at least as early as the 1940s; the concept did not gain major recognition until the publication of E. O. Wilson 's book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis in 1975. The new field quickly became the subject of controversy . Critics, led by Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould , argued that genes played a role in human behavior, but that traits such as aggressiveness could be explained by social environment rather than by biology. Sociobiologists responded by pointing to

15720-469: The three great branches of learning. In the popular media, sociobiology came to mean the theory that human behavior is determined by genes. The final chapter of Sociobiology should have been a book-length exposition. As a species we have no particular place to go. Human emotional responses have been programmed to a substantial degree by natural selection over thousands of generations but which should be obeyed and which ones might be better curtailed? And how do

15851-666: The two-volume The Political Economy of Human Rights , which compares U.S. media reactions to the Cambodian genocide and the Indonesian occupation of East Timor . It argues that because Indonesia was a U.S. ally, U.S. media ignored the East Timorese situation while focusing on events in Cambodia, a U.S. enemy. Chomsky's response included two testimonials before the United Nations' Special Committee on Decolonization , successful encouragement for American media to cover

15982-621: The typical behaviors of people in the last few million years. But with the emergence of Homo sapiens, brain size increase leveled off being replaced by cultural expansion. Humans are innately aggressive. Even the most peaceful tribes have a more violent past and probably future. But the Freudian concept of an innate aggressive drive, adapted by Konrad Lorenz , is incorrect. Wilson identifies seven types of situation in which aggression occurs, such as territorialism. But people are also capable of learning from their mistakes and changing, as happened to

16113-521: The university, he considered dropping out and moving to a kibbutz in Mandatory Palestine , but his intellectual curiosity was reawakened through conversations with the linguist Zellig Harris , whom he first met in a political circle in 1947. Harris introduced Chomsky to the field of theoretical linguistics and convinced him to major in the subject. Chomsky's BA honors thesis, "Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew", applied Harris's methods to

16244-495: The world, and eager to participate in making life more meaningful and worthwhile for all", a mission that shaped and was subsequently adopted by his son. Elsie, who also taught at Mikveh Israel, shared her leftist politics and care for social issues with her sons. Noam's only sibling, David Eli Chomsky (1934–2021), was born five years later, and worked as a cardiologist in Philadelphia. The brothers were close, though David

16375-486: Was attracted to Harvard in part because the philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine was based there. Both Quine and a visiting philosopher, J. L. Austin of the University of Oxford , strongly influenced Chomsky. In 1952, Chomsky published his first academic article in The Journal of Symbolic Logic . Highly critical of the established behaviorist currents in linguistics, in 1954, he presented his ideas at lectures at

16506-696: Was forced to oversimplify the facts. However, he granted that sociobiological explanations of the sort favored by Wilson might possibly be correct. The anthropologist Donald E. Brown commented that he at first failed to read Wilson's book because his views were still conditioned by the "sociocultural perspectives" in which he had been trained. However, Brown concluded that "sociobiologists might be more convincing if they confined their explanations to universals rather than attempting to show that virtually everything that humans do somehow maximizes their reproductive success." Science writers John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin described On Human Nature as an "accessible account of

16637-415: Was impressed by Chomsky's thesis and collaborated with him on several technical papers in mathematical linguistics . Chomsky's doctorate exempted him from compulsory military service , which was otherwise due to begin in 1955. In 1947, Chomsky began a romantic relationship with Carol Doris Schatz , whom he had known since early childhood. They married in 1949. After Chomsky was made a Fellow at Harvard,

16768-622: Was more easygoing while Noam could be very competitive. They were raised Jewish, being taught Hebrew and regularly involved with discussing the political theories of Zionism ; the family was particularly influenced by the Left Zionist writings of Ahad Ha'am . He faced antisemitism as a child, particularly from Philadelphia's Irish and German communities. Chomsky attended the independent, Deweyite Oak Lane Country Day School and Philadelphia's Central High School , where he excelled academically and joined various clubs and societies, but

16899-726: Was similar in this respect to Wilson's subsequent book Consilience (1998) and to the biologist Randy Thornhill and the anthropologist Craig Palmer's A Natural History of Rape (2000). Bryan Walsh in 2011 named On Human Nature as one of the "100 best and most influential" books written in English since 1923 in Time . He considered Wilson's "real achievement" to be to "show how a sociobiological view of humanity could still have grandeur." The computer scientist Paul Brown in 2018 stated in Skeptical Inquirer that On Human Nature

17030-505: Was troubled by the school's hierarchical and domineering teaching methods. He also attended Hebrew High School at Gratz College, where his father taught. Chomsky has described his parents as "normal Roosevelt Democrats " with center-left politics , but relatives involved in the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union exposed him to socialism and far-left politics . He was substantially influenced by his uncle and

17161-658: Was widely condemned for defending Faurisson, and France's mainstream press accused Chomsky of being a Holocaust denier himself, refusing to publish his rebuttals to their accusations. Critiquing Chomsky's position, sociologist Werner Cohn later published an analysis of the affair titled Partners in Hate: Noam Chomsky and the Holocaust Deniers . The Faurisson affair had a lasting, damaging effect on Chomsky's career, especially in France. In 1985, during

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