Sociobiology, Racism, and Australian Colonisation

Abstract

Sociobiology is a relatively modern science, but it is based on the very old premise that human beings are products of immutable laws of nature. For this reason, it can be shown that sociobiology is an idea that envelopes a family of biblical and scientific theories that have been shown to be ideologies for the justification of hierarchy and oppression over the course of recorded human history. This family of sociobiological theories depicts "race", and hierarchy based on race, as natural and inevitable. Here the argument is made that sociobiology is an ideology for the colonisation of Australia. Sociobiology is an ideology implicit in Australian legal doctrine and active in a continuing colonial process as a "justification" for the annexation of Australia in the late eighteenth century as well as the domination that took place after 1788 through dispossession, denial of sovereignty, and policies of assimilation and exploitation.