On Sociological Biophobia

Abstract

Letters from: [ Andrew Abbott ][1] [ John H. Gagnon ][1] The idea that sociologists are somehow afraid of biological ideas is indeed a “random sample” (Random Samples, 23 Aug., p. 1049). It is probable that for any arbitrary pair of disciplines there is at least one person in each of those disciplines who attributes decline in his or her own discipline to ignorance of the other. Sociology, however, is probably the most catholic of the social sciences at the present time. It has a postmodern corner, but it also has a rational choice corner, a Marxist corner, an ethnographic corner, a “grand theory” corner, a conversational analysis corner, and so on. After all, isn't it one of the basic insights of modern biology that variation is a key to evolutionary development? It is true that sociology, with its broad range of interests and methods, has indulged in more than its share of social scientific foolishness. It is also true that the same broad range has given sociology more than its share of social scientific successes. When people have money to invest in social research, they tend to spend it on methods invented by sociologists; modern demographic methods and modern market research are two obvious examples. Most of the decent social data on the United States and its population has been gathered by sociologists or by people using methods that sociology pioneered. After a decade of applying to social data the dynamic algorithms that were originally developed for the analysis of DNA, I am somewhat surprised to discover that I am afraid of biology. Should I expect a delayed reaction? Will I recant? Are there colleagues out there in biophilic social scientific disciplines who have already done this work and published it where my research assistants and I can't find it? # {#article-title-2} If sociologists do not know much biology, so biologists do not know much sociology. Otherwise the former head of the Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration would not have compared the U.S. inner cities to the jungle and researchers would be looking at guns, not genes, for the origins of the homicide rate. [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.273.5283.1781b