when did sociologists (as opposed to social thinkers) first appear
History of sociology Sociology as a scholarly discipline emerged primarily out of the Enlightenment thought, shortly after the French Revolution, as a positivist science of society. Its genesis owed to various key movements in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of knowledge. Social analysis in a broader sense, however, has origins in the common stock of philosophy and necessarily pre-dates the field. Modern academic sociology arose as a reaction to modernity, capitalism, urbanization, rationalization, secularization, colonization and imperialism. Late 19th century sociology demonstrated a particularly strong interest in the emergence of the modern nation state; its constituent institutions, its units of socialization, and its means of surveillance. An emphasis on the concept of modernity, rather than the Enlightenment, often distinguishes sociological discourse from that of classical political philosophy.[1]
Sociobiology The ethologist John Paul Scott coined the word sociobiology at a 1948 conference on genetics and social behaviour,[4] and it became widely used after it was popularized by Edward O. Wilson in his 1975 book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. However, the influence of evolution on behavior has been of interest to biologists and philosophers since soon after the discovery of evolution itself. Peter Kropotkin's Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, written in the early 1890s, is a popular example. Antecedents of modern sociobiological thinking can be traced to the 1960s and the work of such biologists as Richard D. Alexander, Robert Trivers and William D. Hamilton. The idea of the inheritance of behaviour arose from J. B. S. Haldane's idea about how "altruistic behaviour" (see Altruism) could be passed from generation to generation.[5] Wilson's book pioneered and popularized the attempt to explain the evolutionary mechanics behind social behaviors such as altruism, aggression, and nurturance, primarily in ants (Wilson's own research specialty) and other Hymenoptera, but also in other animals.[6] The final chapter of the book is devoted to sociobiological explanations of human behavior, and Wilson later wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning book, On Human Nature, that addressed human behavior specifically.[7]