Competing Disiplines. How Biological and Social Sciences competed to be the Academic Authority on Human Social Behaviour, ca. 1970-1990

这个项目探索了社会生物学的出现以及由此引起的学术和公共辩论，发生在20世纪的最后30年。通过这样做，该项目的目的是为科学史做出贡献，其次是为(美国)当代史做出贡献。此外，它还寻求加强慕尼黑研究协会“竞争文化”(Konkurrenzkulturen)的网站。社会生物学的辩论被视为学术文化竞争的一个有启发性的案例研究。在这场辩论中，不同的学科试图将自己定位为负责解释人类社会行为的学术权威。1975年，随着E.O.威尔逊的《社会生物学：一种新的综合》的出版，传统社会科学对这一特定主题的主张受到了挑战。“社会生物学”被一些人理解为不适当地贬低社会科学，夸大了进化生物学的相关性和范围：它断言生物原因是人类行为的主要原因，因此比社会学、心理学或人类学研究的“社会”原因更重要。这引发了一场激烈的辩论，变成了不同学科之间争夺公众关注和认可的竞争。该项目的目标是确定采用了哪些不同的学术竞争行为策略，并分析这些策略是如何随着时间的推移而变化的。将研究边界工作的动态，以及20世纪末科学与公众之间的复杂互动。

This project explores the emergence of sociobiology and the resulting academic and public debate, which took place in the last thirty years of the 20th century. In doing so, the project aims to contribute to the history of science and, secondarily, to the contemporary history (of the United States). In addition, it seeks to strengthen the Munich site of the research association "Konkurrenzkulturen" (Cultures of Competition). The sociobiology debate is examined as an instructive case study for competition in academic culture. In this debate, different disciplines attempted to position themselves as the academic authority responsible for explaining human social behavior. With the publication of E.O. Wilson's "Sociobiology. A New Synthesis" in 1975, the claim of the traditional social sciences to this particular subject matter was challenged. "Sociobiology" was understood by some to unduly devalue the social sciences and overstate the relevance and scope of evolutionary biology: It asserted that biological causes were the primary causes of human behavior and, therefore, more important than the "social" causes, which sociology, psychology or anthropology investigate. This sparked a fierce debate that transformed into a competition between disciplines for public attention and approval. The objective of the project is to identify which different strategies of academic competitive behavior were employed and to analyze how these strategies changed over time. Dynamics of boundary work will be investigated as well as the complex interactions between science and the public in the late 20th century.