Whither the Blank Slate? A Report on the Reception of Evolutionary Biological Ideas among Sociological Theorists (original) (raw)
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Sociology and evolutionary biology: A troubled past, a promising future
International Sociology, 2020
The New Evolutionary Sociology offers a comprehensive review of the history of evolutionary analysis in sociology that demonstrates its present value 'once old biases and prejudices are mitigated and, eventually, eliminated' (p. 14). In the book's first part, the authors highlight the prominence of evolution in the theorizing of sociology's founders and the reaction against this approach when it was used to support ethnocentrism, racism, and fascism. The second part describes nonsociologists' attempts to reconnect evolutionary biology and social science through sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. The book's last part presents new evolutionary approaches within sociology, focusing primarily on comparative research with primates and a neurosociological explanation of the evolution of the human brain.
Sociology-the Journal of The British Sociological Association, 2007
Evolutionary psychology represents a major challenge to sociology, since it claims to provide an alternative, more 'objective' account of the human condition and of social problems. It receives widespread media coverage and has a firm hold on the popular imagination. In comparison, sociological accounts of society and identity play only a minor role in public debates. We argue that, as 'public intellectuals', it is the responsibility of sociologists to contest these impoverished representations of social life. In order to do so successfully, it is necessary first to examine the popular appeal of evolutionary psychology, which rests on the narrative strategies employed to link human origins with contemporary social problems, and second, to take up the challenge of engaging with less reductionist scientific accounts of the potential biological basis of society.
Biology and American Sociology, Part II: Developing a Unique Evolutionary Sociology
The American Sociologist
In sociology's formative period between 1830 and 1930, evolutionary analysis organized much theorizing and research. This line of work ended abruptly in the 1920s but, over the last decades, has come back into the discipline somewhat piecemeal with the reintroduction of more sophisticated stage models of societal evolution, functional analysis, human ecological analysis, and other new lines of evolutionary inquiry outlined in this paper. Our goal is to demonstrate that revitalized paradigms of the past can still be useful with modest reconceptualization, while at the same time new intellectual movements in the other social sciences, especially economics and psychology, incorporating evolutionary ideas from biology provide sociology with an opportunity to develop its own approach to evolutionary analysis that avoids the problems that let to the demise of this line of inquiry in the 1920s, as well as the problems of other social sciences applying their more narrowly focus models to sociological problems. Indeed, sociology can become a leader in the social sciences in developing more sophisticated theoretical and methodological approaches to incorporating biology and evolutionary analysis into the social sciences. When presented in a new, more sophisticated guise, old approaches like functionalism, stage models of societal evolution, and ecological models can be seen as still having a great deal of explanatory power, while revealing a progressive and future orientation that should appeal to all contemporary sociologists. It is time, then, for sociology to remember its past in order to move into the future.
Discounting of Evolutionary Explanations in Sociology Textbooks and Curricula
Frontiers in Sociology
Despite being internally fragmented by clashes of paradigms, sociology textbooks and introductory courses show a remarkable similarity in their content, while they share a peculiar neglect of small scale societies, non-human social relations, as well as evolutionary explanations. The mistreatment is explained by the strong position of sociology in the nature vs. nurture debate, by paradigmatic and ideologically motivated condemnations, by the later misuse of Social Darwinism, by certain unresolved issues of evolutionary explanations of human sociality, and by epistemological critiques of evolutionary explanations. The current study assesses the extent of this avoidance in sociology by three methods: a review of major sociology textbooks, a descriptive quantitative text analysis of introductory course outlines at top ranked universities, and a keyword search in the all-time most emblematic classical books in sociology. In reaction to this mistreatment, the benefits of synthesis of sociological explanations with evolutionary thinking are discussed.
Sociology can no longer avoid engagement with biological ideas, but it can incorporate them where they are useful. Most biologically inspired explanations of sociological processes from outside the discipline are simple and, moreover, too reliant on biological rather than sociological models of social processes. Yet, it is possible to engage these efforts by developing sociological concepts and theories that meet those using evolutionary theory from biology. This paper argues that the heavy reliance on Darwinian natural selection limits sociological explanations, although this approach can help sociologists understand the evolved behavioral propensities of humans as evolved apes. These behavioral propensities cannot, however, explain the evolution and dynamics of the layers of sociocultural phenomena studied by sociologists, and efforts to do so with Darwinian notions of natural selection on individual organisms will always be inadequate. As an alternative, we propose that there are other types of natural selection inherent in the organization of what Herbert Spencer termed superorganisms. We label these Durkheimian, Spencerian, and Marxian selection, and they explain what Darwinian selection cannot: the dynamics and evolution of sociocultural phenomena.