The biosocial: sociological themes and issues

Abstract

Biology: Scott and Marshall's authoritative and bestselling Dictionary of Sociology (2009) has no entry for it. There are entries for Wilfred Bion, the Kleinian psychoanalyst, or for sociometry, the almost-forgotten method of measuring social relationships. In place of biology, we find an entry for 'biological reduction-ism, or biologism', a pejorative term indicating the ideology of the deterministic application of biological findings to society. To make things more problematic, biologism has one reminder, Robert Ardrey, successful science-writer of stories of killer-ape human ancestors, very popular between the 1960s and the 1970s. Giants of the real history of biology, in contrast, such as August Weismann, or Theodosius Dobzhansky, are not even considered. And it is actually very difficult to imagine that Ardrey's speculation was somehow more relevant to the sociological imagination than Weismann's displacement of Lamarckism, or Dobzhan-sky's populational rethinking of race with its massive impact on post-1945 social sciences. We begin on this admittedly somewhat polemical note not to start a further fire on the already troubled sociology/biology border. So many wars have already been fought, so much hostility has already been displayed that we really don't feel the need. Rather, in introducing this collection dedicated to Sociology-Biology Relations in the Twenty-First Century we wanted to bring to focus at the outset something that seems to us one of the very sources of so many problems, namely: What do sociologists think of when they say the word 'biology' both as a way of conceiving vital processes (life as such in its manifold dynamics) and as a form of expert knowledge (biology as an academic discipline)? Furthermore, who do they cite as examples if not exemplars of this biology in question? As sociologists we have been rightly concerned at the caricatured view of the social that some biologists and evolutionary thinkers have put forward over more than a century. There is a long tradition of misrepresentations in conceptualizing the social and social sciences from Galton to Pinker. But have 'we' really done any better ourselves? Or have we shown similar tendencies towards caricature, lack of interest, and diffidence? To understand both diffidence and lack of attention amongst sociologists, we believe, historical and sociological explanations, rather than moralistic or