For several years I have been teaching a course called "Human Nature & Human Values." It explores biological and particularly Darwinian explanations for social and political behavior. One of the topics I begin with is the resistance in the field of sociology to any engagement with biology. Most sociologists, I suspect, still cling to Franz Boas' prime imperative: you shall explain one social fact only by reference to another social fact. For example: if more men than women are imprisoned for murder (say, about 9 to 1), that might be explained by reference to the fact that parents give their little boys toy guns to play with, and their little girls dolls. That's one social fact explained by another. What you can't do is point out that males are more aggressive in almost every mammalian species. The latter is a natural fact, and in sociology, that is verboten.
This willful ignorance of nature seems to be slowly crumbling. From Christopher Shea in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
If sociologists ignore genes, will other academics — and the wider world — ignore sociology? Some in the discipline are telling their peers just that. With study after study finding that all sorts of personal characteristics are heritable — along with behaviors shaped by those characteristics — a see-no-gene perspective is obsolete.
Nor, these scholars argue, is it reasonable to concede that genes play some role but then to loftily assert that geneticists and the media overstate that role and to go on conducting studies as if genes did not exist. How, exactly, do genes shape human lives, interact with environmental forces, or get overpowered by those forces? "We do ourselves a disservice if we don't engage in those arguments," says Jason Schnittker, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. "If we stay on the ropes, people from a different perspective, with a more extreme view, will be making them."
Been there, done that. I have started my class quoting from sociology texts that acknowledge biological and even Darwinian explanations in their introductions, and then go on to ignore them in the rest of the text. That won't do.
In fact, a lot of sociologists are as offended by Darwin as your average Creationist.
Just two years ago, in his presidential address to the American Sociological Association, Troy Duster, an eminent sociologist at New York University, went so far as to suggest that any sociologist who embraced genetic approaches was a traitor to the discipline. Two of the biggest problems facing sociology, he argued, were the "increasing authority of reductionist science" and "the attendant expansion of databases on markers and processes 'inside the body.'" If anything defined sociology, Duster said, it was its role as "century-long counterpoint" to such efforts to connect the roots of social problems to biology.
Yeah, that's about it. "If anything defined sociology," and it's not clear that anything does, it's a kind of dualism that builds an impenetrable wall between human culture and human nature. This is goofy. Human beings are animals. They may be more than animals (I believe that is true), but they are at least animals. You can't understand human societies without considering human biology any more than you can understand an Elk harem without understanding sexual selection.
That sociologists resist this is evidence that their ideology is an obstacle to good science.
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