Abstract
Emile Durkheim considered Alfred Espinas’ 1878 book Animal Societies “the first chapter of sociology.” The present chapter is inspired by Espinas’ notion that societies are a phenomenon created by many different animals, humans being one, and that sociology ought to be the study of societies and their forms, wherever these societies are found. Herein, I attempt to define the field of sociology as the study of animal (not merely human) societies. Next, I acknowledge that, being humans ourselves, the study of human societies will often, quite understandably, preoccupy us. I then describe work by Jonathan Turner and Alexandra Maryanski and situate this work as an emblematic example of interdisciplinary approaches to human nature and culture. Third, I suggest that the common attempt to maintain an ontological distinction between “nature” and “nurture” is not only logically flawed but unhelpful for building interdisciplinary theory. Finally, I discuss some possibilities for linking sociological theory to the existing scholarship on both gene-culture coevolution and evolutionary psychology.
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