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Biology What Should Sociology do About Darwin; Evaluating by Jeremy Freese

By Jeremy Freese

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A few behavior geneticists do so, typically searching for correlations between alleles and behavioral traits—these are the correlations that are often reported in the media as the finding of a gene “for” anxiety or homosexuality or alcoholism, etc. (for a popularization of the field by a practitioner, see Hamer and Copeland 1998). S. Wilson 1994). David Buller (2000) writes: “How have Evolutionary Psychologists dealt with Wilson’s critique? They have chosen to pretend that it doesn’t exist. Tooby and Cosmides have never cited—let alone responded to—the article.

Lamarckism was also applied toward more conservative ends, most notably as an integral plank of Herbert Spencer’s theory that the natural course of social change was an evolutionary progression towards the ideal society. Indeed, when August Weismann began his attacks on Lamarckism—including his demonstration that one could cut the tails off an indefinite number of generations of rats without affecting one bit the probability that new offspring would be born without tails— Spencer debated vigorously for the Lamarckian side, insisting that “either there has been the inheritance of acquired characteristics or there has been no evolution” (Bowler 1983: 71).

2 Something like this is presumably what happened 5-6 million years ago, when an ancestral species of ape split off into two distinct lines, one of which evolved into chimpanzees and the other of which evolved into us (Boyd and Silk 1997). Over time and through differences in rates of reproduction, variation in traits within a species comes to be transformed into variation between species. The constraints on environmental resources and reproduction that made Malthus’s portrayal of the social world seem so bleak turn out to be preconditions of the very process that brought humans (and every other complex species) into being.

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