who is credited with coining the term sociobiology
Sociobiology The ethologist John Paul Scott coined the word sociobiology at a 1948 conference on genetics and social behaviour,[4] and it became widely used after it was popularized by Edward O. Wilson in his 1975 book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. 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 the early 1890s, is a popular example. Antecedents of modern sociobiological thinking can be traced to the 1960s and the work of such biologists as Richard D. Alexander, Robert Trivers and William D. Hamilton. The idea of the inheritance of behaviour arose from J. B. S. Haldane's idea about how "altruistic behaviour" (see Altruism) could be passed from generation to generation.[5] Wilson's book pioneered and popularized 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.[6] 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.[7]
Social fact French sociologist Émile Durkheim defined the term, and argued that the discipline of Sociology should be understood as the empirical study of social facts. For Durkheim, social facts "...consist of manners of acting, thinking and feeling external to the individual, which are invested with a coercive power by virtue of which they exercise control over him."[1]