Is evolutionary psychology just a politically correct version of sociobiology?
Yes and no. Although evolutionary psychology does adopt most of the theoretical framework of sociobiology, it is actually both more and less general. Evolutionary psychology is the study of animal nervous systems from an evolutionary perspective. As such, it includes numerous aspects of cognition that have nothing to do with sociality per se, such as vision, navigation, memory, toxin avoidance, foraging, etc. By contrast, sociobiology is the biology of sociality in plants, animals, and other organisms. Although sociobiology often focuses on social behavior, it may also focus on aspects of sociality that are not products of the nervous system, like large peacock tails (which probably evolved to stimulate the nervous system of the opposite sex, however). Thus, neither evolutionary psychology nor sociobiology contains the other as a subfield. However, social cognition and behavior do indeed constitute an important subset of evolutionary psychology, and many evolutionary psychology studies
