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.
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 the three great branches of learning.
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?
Sociobiology is a hybrid discipline that incorporates knowledge from ethology to derive the principles of the biological properties of entire societies.
Is the wiring diagram of 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?
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.
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.
Human cultures value highly those who pay the “ultimate sacrifice”, more than most mammal species and only outperformed by the social insects where kin selection reigns.
Religion is one of the major categories of behavior undeniably unique to 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.
Much of contemporary intellectual and political strife is due to the conflict between three great mythologies: Marxism, traditional religion, and scientific materialism.
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 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).
"[3] The computer scientist Paul Brown in 2018 stated in Skeptical Inquirer that On Human Nature is "still brimful with ideas and insights about who we are, how we got here, and how to get wherever we want to go.
He compared 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).
[5] 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.
[7] 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.
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.