Why Sociology Should Incorporate Biology
Rosemary L. Hopcroft
Oxford Handbook of Evolution, Biology, and Society
Edited by Rosemary L. Hopcroft
Sociology, Social Theory
10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190299323.013.38
The Oxford Handbook of Evolution, Biology, and Society
Introduction: Evolution, Biology, and Society
Divergence and Possible Consilience Between Evolutionary Biology and Sociology
Sociology's Contentious Courtship with Biology: A Ballad
Edward Westermarck: The First Sociobiologist
Discovering Human Nature Through Cross-Species Analysis
The Neurology of Religion: An Explanation from Evolutionary Sociology
Reward Allowances and Contrast Effects in Social Evolution: A Challenge to Zygmunt Bauman's Liquid Modernity
Sex Differences in the Human Brain
The Savanna Theory of Happiness
How Evolutionary Psychology Can Contribute to Group Process Research
The Genetics of Human Behavior: A Hopeless Opus?
DNA Is Not Destiny
On the Genetic and Genomic Basis of Aggression, Violence, and Antisocial Behavior
Genetics and Politics: A Review for the Social Scientist
Genes and Status Achievement
Peer Networks, Psychobiology of Stress Response, and Adolescent Development
Stress and Stress Hormones
Social Epigenetics of Human Behavior
Physiology of Face-to-Face Competition
Evolutionary Behavioral Science: Core Principles, Common Misconceptions, and a Troubling Tendency
Evolutionary Family Sociology
Evolution and Human Reproduction
Evolution, Societal Sexism, and Universal Average Sex Differences in Cognition and Behavior
Evolutionary Theory and Criminology
The Biosocial Study of Ethnicity
Human Sociosexual Dominance Theory
From Paganism to World Transcendence: Religious Attachment Theory and the Evolution of the World Religions
The Evolutionary Approach to History: Sociocultural Phylogenetics
Abstract and Keywords
Sociology has long been dominated by descriptive studies of social phenomenon, and theory in sociology has been characterized by myriad small theories of limited scope. Incorporation of method and theory from biology can change that. Theory from evolutionary biology has the potential to unify much sociological theory and become the central paradigm of sociology, much as it has unified biology, and to unify all the disparate threads of the current discipline of sociology into a fully fledged science. This chapter explains why sociologists should be doing more research that incorporates biology and biological theory into sociology. Although disentangling the social and biological is difficult because of the complex interactions between them, the fact that the interactions exist is indisputable, and sociology can benefit from examining them.
Keywords: evolution, evolutionary sociology, biosociology, evolutionary social psychology, biosocial processes, sociology
Rosemary L. Hopcroft is Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She has published widely in the areas of evolutionary sociology and comparative and historical sociology in journals that include the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Evolution and Human Behavior, and Human Nature. She is the author of Evolution and Gender: Why it matters for contemporary life, Routledge 2016).
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