Toward a Biosocial Science

Evolutionary Theory, Human Nature, and Social Life

Alexander Riley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000376210
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Neuroscience & Neuropsychology
• Index: Psychology

Sociology is in crisis. While other disciplines have taken on board the revolutionary discoveries driven by evolutionary biology and psychology, genomics and behavioral genetics, and the neurosciences, sociology has ignored these advances and embraced a biophobia that threatens to drive the discipline into marginality. This book takes its place in a rich tradition of efforts to integrate sociological thinking into the world of the biological sciences that can be traced to the origins of the discipline, and that took on modern form beginning a generation ago in the works of thinkers such as E.O. Wilson, Richard Alexander, Joseph Lopreato, and Richard Machalek. It offers an accessible introduction to rethinking sociological science in consonance with these contemporary biological revolutions. From the standpoint of a biosociology rooted in the single most important scientific theory touching on human life, the Darwinian theory of natural selection, the book sketches an evolutionary social science that would enable us to properly attend to basic questions of human nature, human behavior, and human social organization. Individual chapters take on such topics as: The roots and nature of human sociality; the origins of morality in human social life and an evolutionary perspective on human interests, reciprocity, and altruism; the sex difference in our species and what it contributes to an explanation of sociological facts; the nature of stratification, status, and inequality in human evolutionary history; the question of race in our species; and the contribution evolutionary theory makes to explaining the origins and the importance of culture in human societies.

Part 1
The Problem with Sociology and its Solution

In these first four chapters of the book, my goal is to briefly lay out the basic theoretical principles that must direct a scientific sociology. This task has both negative and positive components.

The negative component involves an examination of the failing of contemporary mainstream sociology to adopt the elements of the theoretical framework I describe here. Why is this the case? The problem has multiple aspects, to be sure, but at its root, it is a failure by sociologists to understand what a science of the human requires. The very great majority of contemporary sociological research in every mainstream methodological and theoretical tradition consists of intense focus on what are at best proximate cause explanations for social phenomena. This is when there is any effort to explain anything or posit causes at all—much of this work contents itself with description and explicitly eschews any effort at explanation, which is seen as an illicit or undesirable move. So, for example, sociologists who study inequality write endlessly about all the traditional sociological variables that correlate with positions in social hierarchies—e.g., levels of education, racial and ethnic identity, gender—and about the ways in which subjects understand their status and class positions and their opportunities to change their positions according to cultural narratives. But they seldom broach any questions of the contributions evolutionary science and behavioral genetics make to explaining what behavioral predilections and patterns produce social hierarchies and the inequalities they represent in the first place and what factors lead particular individuals to wind up occupying specific locations in such hierarchies. Ultimate causal explanations require a significant attempt to understand the contribution these fields make to the topic, and traditional biophobic sociology generally condemns itself to circular, irredeemably moralizing and ideological discussions of important disciplinary topics as a consequence of its theoretical and empirical myopia.

The positive component in the next four chapters involves a description of the Darwinian theory of natural selection, or evolutionary theory as I will frequently interchangeably refer to it in shorthand, a brief look at its presence in the founding generation of sociological thinkers, and an effort to show what it contributes to two fundamental questions about humankind: Why and how we are social animals, and why and how we develop moral systems to guide our sociality. I borrow freely and in some cases extensively from other scholars in presenting this framework. I am inventing nothing here, but instead am merely cobbling together in a new bricolage a number of the already-existing materials that I see as most productive for understanding human nature, behavior, and social life.

The position of this book is that the central reason for the decline of the discipline has to do with its refusal to come to terms with research and theoretical models of human behavior and social structure coming out of evolutionary biology and psychology, genomics and behavioral genetics, and neuroscience. Laying out the critique of the existing discipline, then, requires a presentation of the basics of what these areas of scholarship contribute to our knowledge. Such a presentation cannot but be restricted in a book of this kind, intended for a broad readership, and I limit myself to sketching out only the broadest parameters of these enormous and complex fields as they are applicable specifically to the understanding of human behaviors and social organization.

1 What’s Wrong with Sociology?

In 1978, E.O. Wilson predicted, in an essay that has been an inspiration to my own thinking, the imminent merging of biology and social science. In elegant prose and rigorous logic, Wilson extended the breathtakingly ambitious effort he had made just a few years earlier to present sociobiology as a unified science of social systems in all life on Earth. In that dense 1975 book, he had dedicated but one—the final—chapter to Homo sapiens. But there he presented the bare bones of the much fuller case he made a few years later. The social sciences¹ would inevitably have to recognize that the insights into human nature and psychology made possible by modern biological science would have to form the basis of any systematic and scientific understanding of how humans behave and organize themselves socially. If this did not happen, Wilson suggested, sociology and the other social sciences would simply cease to have anything scientifically meaningful to say about their subject matter.

Forty years on from the publication of On Human Nature, there is almost no evidence to indicate that we are any closer to the moment Wilson hoped was in the offing. Let us not then beat around the bush in getting to the bad news. Sociology has lost its way, and it is now very deeply lost indeed. It is sufficiently astray that there is a significant risk that at some point soon virtually all serious people will simply stop paying attention to it, and it will only be attended to by people who in their attention reveal themselves as uninterested in scientific knowledge about human behavior and social organization.

Sociology is sometimes caricatured as “easy.” It certainly is the case that, in the way it is currently taught in many institutions of higher learning, it is just that. In this incarnation, learning sociology means learning a few basic dogmatic principles. Two of the central of these principles can be summarized as follows: “Any disparity between groups is de facto evidence of and fully explicable by domination and injustice” and “Human beings are, because of our cognitive abilities, completely different from all other life on the planet and therefore it is not useful to apply the scientific theory most useful for understanding life—Darwinian evolutionary theory—to humans.” Once you have mastered these basic dogmas, you are well on your way to being about as educated on how human societies work as any sociology major. What could be simpler? And what better explains why, in still more simplistic forms, the dogmas of mainstream sociology are so often bandied about as obvious truths in much of American media and popular culture?

Properly conceived, though, social science is hardly simple or simple-minded. In fact, in Wilson’s view, the social sciences are considerably more difficult than physics and chemistry, and they therefore merit the term “hard sciences” more than those latter endeavors. What fools people into misunderstanding sociology as easy is that we all of us are human, so we have an implicit sense that we understand them—that is to say, us—well innately and without much effort. We believe we understand why we think and act, and why others do too, in relying on common sense and the ubiquitous expertise that accrues to every competent human member of a human culture just by virtue of socialization. This is, alas, a deception. It is the difficulty of cutting through that misleading sense that we know what humans are and what makes them tick to often hidden realities that creates the work for the sociologist.

At the time of Wilson’s writing, sociology had only reached what he referred to as its natural history stage. Here, social science activity is entirely description of facts, with little reliable theory in which to ground them. To make matters worse, many of the facts of sociology are badly described and poorly contextualized, but the real problem is that sociological theory is so anemically weak and misguided. The building of real sociological theory will require sociology to recognize its familial relationship to related sciences. In its contemporary form, sociology has restricted itself to the study of modern human societies, claiming as the justification for this narrowing of its purview the necessary and ever-increasing professional division of labor in the contemporary university. Anthropology has a slightly larger purview, that of all human societies. But the justification for the dividing of these two sciences is intellectually wholly invalid. Human being are human beings everywhere, whether they are living in contemporary New York or in an isolated stretch of Brazilian jungle. These two sciences need to be combined, but that is only the start. Homo sapiens is a species of primate, and though we differ in important ways from all other existing primate species, even minimal observation reveals how much we share with them in basic behavioral predilections and social organization. And though it is still more obvious how we differ from lions, wolves, prairie dogs, dolphins, jays, and ants, enough basic principles of social life and organization unite us with them in our social natures to make it essential that sociology include knowledge about their societies in our efforts to understand our own. Sociology must also be brought together with primatology—the study of primate behavior and social organization—and sociobiology—the study of all animal social systems, as well as their biological roots—in the effort to build scientific theory.

An understanding of the proper theoretical framework within which to orient human action, Wilson argues, permits us to transform the sea of facts into a systemized body of testable propositions. In this way, a scientific sociology, while complex in the ways just noted, winds up being simpler than we might imagine, and the human animal is in at least some important ways much less complicated than some of us, in our prideful self-admiration, might prefer to be the case. What principles should a proper sociology be based on, and what should it seek to accomplish? It must start with the belief that reality can be understood objectively, although this requires considerable effort on the part of creatures like Homo sapiens, who are powerfully driven by emotional desires and very skilled at deceiving ourselves and others. Such effort includes not only, at the individual level, concentrated labor to be aware of biases and emotional investments in particular results and hypotheses, but also, at the collective level, structures and institutions that will allow for collective evaluation and revision of work to test, correct, and vet individual observations and studies of the human world. The goal of social science is not only description but ultimately explanation of social phenomena. So not simply: What do humans do and what do their societies look like? Instead: Why do humans do what they do? Why are societies organized in the specific ways that they are, and not in other ways? And when we see some phenomena repeatedly in many different societies, as we do, what precisely is the cause of that regularity?

Three conceptual struts hold up the edifice of a scientific sociology. We need a baseline theory rooted in systematic knowledge of human nature, that is, of the most basic principles that drive human action in the world. Darwin gave us just such a theory, and it has been developed and augmented in powerful ways in the century and a half since its initial production. Such a theory must be empirically falsifiable. Darwin’s theory is, and it has been empirically tested repeatedly over time with an impressive record of passing those tests. The goal of sociological research should be to pursue reductionism wherever it is scientifically validated. We presume in advance, given our knowledge of life on the planet, that a very good deal if not all of human behavior will be reducible to the level of the psychological, or at least that much behavior will not be fully comprehensible without an understanding of basic human psychology and its origins. Finally, we seek consilience. There is nothing in the nature of human social life that leads us to believe in advance that it cannot be explained according to a basic logic that is operative in other domains of science.

This is the starting point from which a rigorous sociology ought to begin. Yet introductory texts in sociology and cultural anthropology are nearly always virtually devoid of any useful information on the evolutionary theoretical perspective on human behavior and social organization. I looked at a selection of recent such texts that are held in a student library in my own department—which is a hybrid sociology/cultural anthropology department—and found that none of them in either discipline contained more than perfunctory allusions to the study of human life as I advocate for it in this book. The sociology texts (Ritzer and Murphy 2019; Giddens, Duneier, et al. 2019) did not even have index items for “evolution,” “evolutionary theory,” “sex difference,” or “genes.” One of the sociology texts briefly mentions sociobiology, and even acknowledges that it is becoming a more common framework in some fields, but then dismisses it as inapplicable to sociology (Giddens et al. 2019:50–1). Similarly, one of the anthropology texts I examined (Nanda and Warms 2020) introduces sociobiology, in an appendix at the book’s conclusion, but dismisses it flatly: “The vast majority of cultural anthropologists believe that culture is almost completely independent of biology” (Nanda and Warms 2020:383). “Cultural adaptation,” this same text argues, “has freed humans from the slow process of biological evolution” (ibid.:3).

An Object Lesson from the Literature and My Classroom

Perhaps some readers believe that I unfairly caricature and criticize a sociology that does not actually exist, producing an exaggeration of what is really being done in sociology departments around the country. Allow me an illustrative example then to better make the point. In the course on sociological theory I have taught at Bucknell University for nearly two decades, I have for some years been using an article from a flagship journal in the discipline to illustrate to students just how badly sociology has gone wrong, and what dire consequences this has for the analyses it can produce of important questions about human behavior. The article in question, “Her Support, His Support” (Munsch 2015), is on the causes of marital infidelity in heterosexual relationships. The author, Christin Munsch, wields an impressive apparatus of tables chockablock with variables and their means and standard deviations, purporting therewith to bolster the claim that couples who make roughly equal incomes have the lowest rates of marital infidelity. It is not said directly in the paper, but the obvious insinuation that accompanies the analysis is an ideological one: This is the most desirable model for coupledom, which produces the most happiness for all involved.

Munsch notes in the article’s introduction that infidelity seems unpopular, as most people define it negatively, and yet a fair amount of it nonetheless happens. How to explain that? She assumes that human beings of both sexes are interested in economically equitable sexual relationships. They desire for their earnings to be in approximate equity with their partner’s earnings, and they are unhappy when there is an imbalance, especially when they earn less than their partner does. But it is not at all made clear why we should take this as a normative assumption of most people, even most people in advanced industrial societies like this one, and no effort is made to justify this assumption. The professional readership of this mainstream scholarly journal of sociology is unlikely to need justification of the assumption, but its absence says much about Munsch’s—and mainstream sociology’s—axiomatic presumptions.

It is asserted that men and women are driven for the most part in their relationships with one another by a rigid and universally applicable social gender identity, and those men and women who are in relationships in which their gender identity is most atypical will respond by engaging in behavior designed to better conform to the typical gender identity. It is then, in this analysis, the social pressure to fit comfortably into a gender stereotype that drives the dynamics of cheating. Men who feel strain with respect to their stereotypical gender identity of the breadwinner male because they are in relationships with women who earn more than they do engage in cheating to shore up their maleness. Women who feel strain in their stereotyped identity of the homemaker female because their male partners earn less than they do will be more inclined to avoid cheating precisely to better approximate the passive, sexually unaggressive female. We should therefore expect more cheating from men who make less than their partners and less cheating from women who make more than theirs. And, we are told, the data neatly show just this.

But, again, what is the evidence that men and women are motivated by what Munsch claims motivates them? It is no strength of the argument that the study omits several variables that one can safely predict would have done much to demarcate the sex difference still further along lines not traceable to socialization into gender roles. It would be interesting to see, for example, how sexual attractiveness of the subjects, evaluated simply by physical appearance, affected their propensities to cheating. Sexual selection theory—which I will discuss more in the next chapter–indicates that sexual attractiveness as evaluated by members of the opposite sex is highly likely to affect mating opportunities. Munsch also does not categorize subjects by their personal gender politics ideology, instead presuming all males and all females think uniformly about gender roles and uniformly pursue partners according to their ability to contribute materially.

Munsch inexplicably downplays an important element of the analysis that rather confounds her axiom that it is the relative relationship of male and female incomes in a couple that matters for likelihood of cheating and that the objective income has no effect on infidelity. In fact, she admits early in the article, in a one sentence statement to which she never returns or alludes again anywhere else in the course of the analysis, that this is true only for female income. As male income rises in a relationship, female infidelity goes down, regardless of the relationship of male to female income. This aspect of the reality of sex difference demonstrates with crushing clarity that the mainstream sociological theoretical model Munsch brings to bear on the data is hopelessly incomplete, and probably wrong-headed in basic ways. What does it mean that objective income level for men drives down female infidelity? It means the claim that what both sexes are fundamentally pursuing in coupledom is the same thing—income egalitarianism—is exceedingly unlikely to be true.

It is axiomatic for Munsch, and for most mainstream sociology, that men and women pursue the same goods in a long-term sexual relationship. But most people know, anecdotally in their own experience if not through an understanding of large-scale data, that men and women typically do not have precisely the same hierarchy of goods that they are pursuing in relationships. It is demonstrably true that in a small part of the globe—basically, the West and a few parts of Asia—and for a very small chunk of the time our species has been on the planet, an increasing number of women from at least a small class subset of the broader societal group pursues external employment and its rewards with as much avidity as men do. But we must not forget how exceptional this pattern is, not just historically, but even in the context of the entire global population today. In deep evolutionary time, and for reasons having to do with the sex difference itself ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface: The Dismal Science of Human Nature
• Part 1 The Problem with Sociology and its Solution
• Part 2 Basic Categories of Human Differentiation
• Epilogue: The Evolutionary End of Sociology?
• Index