Biosociology Essay ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

This Biosociology Essay example is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic, please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.

In their broadest senses sociobiology and biosociology refer to the modern study of biology as it relates -within a Darwinian framework – to social behavior. Sociobiology is the better known term, made famous when the New York Times gave prominence to controversy surrounding a 1975 book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, by Harvard entomologist E. O. Wilson. Here biosociology is the preferred term because, etymologically, it refers to a sub-discipline within sociology, and it avoids some negative connotations of sociobiology.

Sociobiology introduced two theoretical problems that annoyed traditional sociologists. First is its focus on ultimate causes of human nature, ignoring those proximate mechanisms through which behavior operates. A well-known example is the selectionist theory of sex differences in mating strategy. Males produce offspring with an ejaculation; females must invest a prolonged period of pregnancy and nursing. Therefore, males maximize genetic fitness (i.e., the representation of their genes in succeeding generations) by indiscriminately spreading their seed among many females, whereas females are selective, devoting their limited pregnancies to the finest sires and, if feasible, withholding sexual favors until they receive from the male a commitment for child support. The theory speaks of evolution long ago, ignoring those proximate influences – our psychology and culture – that are the explanatory currency of the social sciences. Thus it cannot explain or even query why one culture is polygamous, another monogamous; why marriages in some societies are arranged by parents and in others by romantic attraction; why divorce and birth rates are sometimes high, sometimes low.

Also, some of sociobiology’s claims defy common observation. Most sociologists do not maximize their genetic fitness, instead limiting their children to two or less, and some ”waste resources by adopting unrelated infants.

The development of ”evolutionary psychology eliminated some of these annoyances. Its most important innovation has been to re-introduce proximate causation in the form of a thinking brain with specialized modules for parenting, emotional communication, kinship, mate choice, sex, aggression, child care, and so on.

Evolutionary psychologists emphasize that it is our minds that have evolved, not our disembodied behaviors. This is an ingenious corrective to socio-biology’s exclusive focus on ultimate causes. With our mind as a proximate mechanism, it is easy to incorporate learning, socialization, and cultural differences. But evolutionary psychology introduces problems of its own. Its modular mind is a postulation that lacks empirical verification.

Also, evolutionary psychology usually ignores our nonhuman primate cousins. Consider, for example, the theory of male and female mating strategies, which should apply to apes as well as humans. But the hypothesized sex difference is not apparent in most apes, casting doubt on the theory s underlying reasoning.

Biosociology largely abjures speculations about ultimate causes, evolved in the unknowable past. Instead the focus is on proximate causes, e.g., the neurohormonal mechanisms underlying human behavior. Biosociology emphasizes that human behavior follows a primate pattern and therefore values comparative studies of other primate species, whereas analogs with insects, birds, and fish are regarded as too distant to be useful. Biosociology s research methods are diverse but usually have a tight link to theory. Biosocial hypotheses should be falsifiable by practical empirical means.

Few sociologists have requisite training in biology, so most relevant research is conducted in neighboring disciplines including psychology, primatology, anthropology, genetics, and experimental economics. Primatology has had the greatest impact, leaving no doubt that human behavior in face-to-face groups fits the general pattern of higher primates – with the supremely important addition of language-based cultures. The human body surface (facial appearance and expressions, physique, and postures) is now known to be an important component of social interaction and a powerful influence on life course. Beneath the body surface, the neurohormonal system affects, and is affected by, social interaction. Testosterone and cortisol have become important variables in studies of dominance and antisocial behavior. Neuroimaging pinpoints areas of the brain that are activated during certain tasks, showing, for example, that putting one’s negative feelings of sadness or anger into words, as occurs in talk therapy, lessens the response of the amygdala, damping down the emotional distress. Behavioral genetics demonstrates that some personality traits, long thought to be determined by early childhood socialization, are strongly inherited and highly correlated in identical twins raised apart. Population geneticists, tracing specific variants of the Y chromosome in men, and mitochondrial DNA in women, infer the migratory paths of major ancestral groups of Homo sapiens during the past 50,000 years. This sampling of findings barely suggests the potential of biology to revise our understanding of human interaction.

Bibliography:

Barkow, J., Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J. (1992) The Adapted Mind. Oxford University Press, New York.
Goodall, J. (1986) The Chimpanzees of Gombe. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Mazur, A. (2005) BiosociologyofDominance and Deference. Rowman & Littlefield, Boulder, CO.
Walsh, A. (1995) Biosociology: An Emerging Paradigm. Praeger, Westport, CT.