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

这个项目探讨了社会生物学的出现，以及由此产生的学术和公众辩论，这发生在20世纪的最后三十年。在这样做的过程中，该项目旨在为科学史做出贡献，其次是为（美国）当代史做出贡献。此外，它还寻求加强“竞争文化”研究协会慕尼黑分会。社会生物学的争论是作为学术文化竞争的一个有指导意义的案例来研究的。在这场辩论中，不同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。随着E.O.威尔逊的《社会生物学》的出版。1975年，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”被一些人理解为过度贬低了社会科学，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、心理学或人类学所研究的“社会”原因更重要。这引发了一场激烈的辩论，并演变成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，并分析这些策略如何随着时间的推移而变化。边界工作的动态将被调查，以及在20世纪后期科学和公众之间复杂的相互作用。

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.