After a number of years reading History, I switched gears a while back and started looking at Sociology. For the most part I've read the major thinkers and not much else. I've enjoyed most of the titles I've picked up, but as I continued I started to notice a complete void of references to biology, evolution, and genetics in the work I was reading. After a while this stopped looking like a minor omission, and started looking like a serious gap in the theory of the field. How can we build coherent theory without reference to evolution, which is the central heuristic of living things?
So recently I fielded a question to some sociology graduates - how integrated is biology and evolution in the theory of the past few decades. It was an honest question, because I don't know much about the field post 2000. I had one person respond who came back to me with this book:
Crisis in Sociology
Apparently others have perceived this problem as well. From the description of the book:
It's an interesting problem. With technology being the way it is we feel like we know so much, but I think what we're discovering recently is how little we know, and how underdeveloped some of our major theories are.
So recently I fielded a question to some sociology graduates - how integrated is biology and evolution in the theory of the past few decades. It was an honest question, because I don't know much about the field post 2000. I had one person respond who came back to me with this book:
Crisis in Sociology
Apparently others have perceived this problem as well. From the description of the book:
Crisis in Sociology presents a compelling portrait of sociology's current troubles and proposes a controversial remedy. In the authors' view, sociology's crisis has deep roots, traceable to the over-ambitious sweep of the discipline's founders. Generations of sociologists have failed to focus effectively on the tasks necessary to build a social science. The authors see sociology's most disabling flaw in the failure to discover even a single general law or principle. This makes it impossible to systematically organize empirical observations, guide inquiry by suggesting falsifiable hypotheses, or form the core of a genuinely cumulative body of knowledge.
Absent such a theoretical tool, sociology can aspire to little more than an amorphous mass of hunches and disconnected facts. The condition engenders confusion and unproductive debate. It invites fragmentation and predation by applied social disciplines, such as business administration, criminal justice, social work, and urban studies. Even more dangerous are incursions by prestigious social sciences and by branches of evolutionary biology that constitute the frontier of the current revolution in behavioral science. Lopreato and Crippen argue that unless sociology takes into account central developments in evolutionary science, it will not survive as an academic discipline.
Crisis in Sociology argues that participation in the "new social science," exemplified by thriving new fields such as evolutionary psychology, will help to build a vigorous, scientific sociology. The authors analyze research on such subjects as sex roles, social stratification, and ethnic conflict, showing how otherwise disconnected features of the sociological landscape can in fact contribute to a theoretically coherent and cumulative body of knowledge.
It's an interesting problem. With technology being the way it is we feel like we know so much, but I think what we're discovering recently is how little we know, and how underdeveloped some of our major theories are.