Sociobiology and human nature : [an interdisciplinary critique and defense] / Michael S. Gregory, Anita Silvers, & Diane Sutch, editors.

Date:
1978
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Sociobiology and human nature : [an interdisciplinary critique and defense] / Michael S. Gregory, Anita Silvers, & Diane Sutch, editors. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    61/360 (page 35)
    Bridging the Paradigms 35 largely stagnant. Indicative of this are the inordinate publication lags in social science journals: It is not uncommon for a period of eighteen months or more to elapse between submission of an ar¬ ticle and its publication. Social scientists tolerate this because their enterprise is so uncumulative that claims for priority seldom arise. They manipulate great masses of dubious data but make few find¬ ings; they use a lot of jargon but their so-called concepts and the¬ ories are largely reiterations of old ideas, pretentious platitudes, or, worse yet, pompous nonsense. They are, however, very good at quoting classics, seeking academic ancestors, and establishing intellectual pedigrees. Their textbooks are tiresome commentaries on the gospels according to Saints Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and Pareto and on the epistles of Saints Parsons and Lévi-Strauss. During their half century of lofty isolation from the natural sci¬ ences, the social sciences have become, in short, a scholastic tra¬ dition rather than an evolving scientific discipline. Some social scientists have given up the pretense of doing science and claim affiliation with the humanities. They should be free to pursue their worthy calling unhindered. Here, however, I shall address the majority of social scientists who continue to claim affiliation with the scientific community, and I shall suggest to them that unless their disciplines return to their biological roots their claims to scientific status are going to become increasingly tenuous. More specifically, I shall suggest that the paradigm of so- ciobiology, while still very much in the formative stage, is the most promising. Finally, I shall make a few suggestions on how the pres¬ ent chasm between biology and the social sciences can be bridged. Before turning to that ambitious agenda, let me first briefly draw attention to the intellectual obstacles that social scientists erect between themselves and their comprehension of biological evolu¬ tionary thinking. The burden of establishing the rapprochement is squarely on the social scientists. It is they who have to rejoin the scientific fraternity. It is they who will have to throw off their self-imposed intellectual blinkers. Let me briefly examine a few of these: Resistance to Reductionism. In the natural sciences, reduction- ism is widely accepted as the only game in town. In the social sci¬ ences, it is a dirty word. In their attempt to establish their raison