A consumer's guide to superorganisms.

The organism, like the molecule, the cell, and the species, is one of the fundamental levels in our hierarchical classification of life and its components. The units ranked at these levels, being concrete, particular things, are individuals in the broadest philosophical sense. But in a much narrower and more familiar sense, individual means an individual organism. Like species, the term individual is hard to define, but in most biological discourse it has meant the unit of philosophical autonomy. Some authors have attempted to revise this terminology, restricting individual to organisms, and redefining organism to include families and other units. Such semantic surgery is unnecessary if the goal is merely to justify selection at more than one level. Analogies between levels may be interesting, but many of them do not deserve to be taken seriously.

Endangered species and a threatened discipline: behavioural ecology.

Behavioural ecologists often see little connection between the current conservation crisis and the future of their discipline. This view is myopic because our abilities to investigate and interpret the adaptive significance and evolutionary histories of behaviours are increasingly being compromised in human-dominated landscapes because of species extinctions, habitat destruction, invasive species, pollution, and climate change. In this review, we argue that many central issues in behavioural ecology will soon become prohibitively difficult to investigate and interpret, thus impeding the rapid progress that characterizes the field. To address these challenges, behavioural ecologists should design studies not only to answer basic scientific questions but also to provide ancillary information for protection and management of their study organisms and habitats, and then share their biological insights with the applied conservation community.

A defense of sociobiology.

To counter recent claims that sociobiology is in disarray or requires reformulation, I discuss the semantics, theory, and data that underlie the field. A historical perspective is used to identify the cause of current debates. I argue that semantic precision is required in discussing terms such as kin selection, group selection, and altruism, but once care is taken, the objections to the unity of theoretical sociobiology largely evaporate. More work is required, however, to understand group adaptation, which might be taken to be the process of optimizing phenotypes that is driven by group, rather than individual, context. From the empirical perspective, the eusocial insects with their fixed division between work and reproduction are often a sounding board in discussions. Here, one finds clear evidence for the role of kin selection and relatedness in both the origin of eusociality and its maintenance. Data from other systems including the social vertebrates, microorganisms, and even plants also support the role of relatedness and particularly family life in the evolution of cooperation and altruism. These data, however, in no way invalidate the claim that group selection is also a central process in social evolution and I discuss the empirical evidence for group selection. The foundations of sociobiology are solid and the future should build on these foundations. Exciting new areas include the importance of community and species-level selection in evolution and elucidating the molecular mechanisms that underlie social traits.

Rethinking the theoretical foundation of sociobiology.

Current sociobiology is in theoretical disarray, with a diversity of frameworks that are poorly related to each other Part of the problem is a reluctance to revisit the pivotal events that took place during the 1960s, including the rejection of group selection and the development of alternative theoretical frameworks to explain the evolution of cooperative and altruistic behaviors. In this article, we take a "back to basics" approach, explaining what group selection is, why its rejection was regarded as so important, and how it has been revived based on a more careful formulation and subsequent research. Multilevel selection theory (including group selection) provides an elegant theoretical foundation for sociobiology in the future, once its turbulent past is appropriately understood.

Are we born moral?

Reviews of: Hauser, Marc D. Moral minds: how nature designed our universal sense of right and wrong. (New York: Ecco, 2006); and Waal, F.B.M. de. Primates and philosophers: how morality evolved. (Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 2006).

Da herança à localização cerebral: sobre o determinismo biológico de condutas indesejadas / From heritage to cerebral localization: on the biological determinism of undesired conducts

Analisamos os argumentos utilizados, em dois momentos diferentes do século XX, para justificar o recurso a explicações biológicas de condutas consideradas como socialmente indesejadas. Referimo-nos, inicialmente, aos estudos realizados pelos higienistas de início do século, cujas explicações estavam centradas no caráter orgânico e inato dos desvios, para continuar logo com os recentes estudos da neurociência que se propõem a localizar as condutas nas sinapses inadequadas e nas explicações referidas a deficiências químicas do cérebro.

The article analyzes the arguments used in two distinct moments of the 20th century, to justify the use of biological explanations for conducts considered as socially undesirable. Firstly we refer to studies of hygienists in the early century, whose explanation were centered on the organic and innate character of deviations, then we analyze the recent studies in the neurosciences which try to locate these conducts in inadequate synapses and in explanations related to chemical cerebral deficiencies.

Hormônios pré-natais e a idéia de sexo cerebral: uma análise das pesquisas biomédicas sobre gênero e sexualidade / Prenatal hormones and the brain sex: an analysis of gender and sexuality in biomedical research

Este trabalho teve como objetivo analisar concepções de gênero e sexualidade na produção biomédica contemporânea e no processo de construção do conhecimento científico. Para isso, analisamos artigos científicos contemporâneos selecionados a partir de um levantamento na base de dados PubMed. Focamos em pesquisas sobre a teoria dos hormônios pré-natais, que propõe que comportamentos e características consideradas "femininas" ou "masculinas" são determinados, de modo inato, pelo "sexo" cerebral dos indivíduos, e que homossexuais e transexuais – por exemplo – possuiriam cérebros com um sexo discordante ao seu sexo biológico, sendo uma espécie de "hermafrodita" cerebral. Assim, através da análise dessas publicações, procuramos refletir sobre a relação entre ciência e senso comum, além dos ideais em torno da "masculinidade", "feminilidade" e "heterossexualidade" subjacentes ao conhecimento científico. Buscamos refletir também sobre a relação entre gênero, orientação sexual e desvio, e a importância concedida ao "biológico" e "inato" na sociedade contemporânea.

The aim of this study was to analyze the conceptions surrounding gender and sexuality in contemporary biomedical research and in the construction of scientific knowledge. We performed a PubMed search, focusing on papers that discussed the theory of pre-natal hormones. According to this theory, some behaviors and characteristics considered as "female" or "male" are innately determined by the individual‘s brain "sex", and homosexuals and transsexuals, for instance, have a different brain sex than their biologic sex, being a kind of a brain hermaphrodite. Therefore, through the analysis of these publications, we reflected on the relationships between science and common sense, and on the ideals of "masculinity", "feminility" and "heterossexuality" that form the basis of scientific knowledge. We also discussed the relationship between gender, sexual orientation and deviation, and the importance of the "biological" and "innate" given by contemporary society.