<P> The discipline seeks to explain behavior as a product of natural selection . Behavior is therefore seen as an effort to preserve one's genes in the population . Inherent in sociobiological reasoning is the idea that certain genes or gene combinations that influence particular behavioral traits can be inherited from generation to generation </P> <P> For example, newly dominant male lions often kill cubs in the pride that they did not sire . This behavior is adaptive because killing the cubs eliminates competition for their own offspring and causes the nursing females to come into heat faster, thus allowing more of his genes to enter into the population . Sociobiologists would view this instinctual cub - killing behavior as being inherited through the genes of successfully reproducing male lions, whereas non-killing behavior may have died out as those lions were less successful in reproducing . </P> <P> The ethologist John Paul Scott coined the word sociobiology at a 1948 conference on genetics and social behaviour, 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 . 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 . 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 . </P> <P> Edward H. Hagen writes in The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology that sociobiology is, despite the public controversy regarding the applications to humans, "one of the scientific triumphs of the twentieth century ." "Sociobiology is now part of the core research and curriculum of virtually all biology departments, and it is a foundation of the work of almost all field biologists" Sociobiological research on nonhuman organisms has increased dramatically and continuously in the world's top scientific journals such as Nature and Science . The more general term behavioral ecology is commonly substituted for the term sociobiology in order to avoid the public controversy . </P>

Who is credited with coining the term sociobiology