Piecing together a new discussion that I have never indulged in has proven to be a little complicated and the topic of the discussion is a little daunting as I have stated in the last post that I made. This is because the topic is something that professional researchers in the field are arguing about and don’t necessarily have a huge grip on just yet however so far in my reading, focusing on ecology has been the way to go and I believe feminist ecology theories can provide me with the context that I need to bring more to this discussion.
The first scholarly article I am reading is a discussion on sociobiology and the issue of exclusively using Darwianian ideas to discuss evolution. Darwin’s ideas are specifically relating to one’s phenotypes and genetic make up, this is a problem for sociology as you cannot base social contexts and ideas in the sense of biology. Social Darwinism does not work because one’s status and social settings are not based on their genetics, lower class society does not equal inferior genes. As sociologists, we have a baseline understanding of how complex society is and how intricate the intersectionality of one’s social status can be (whether it be class, race, gender, etc.). Turner and Abrutyn both acknowledge that fields outside of sociology tend to ignore sociology (2017).
Many biological approaches do not take into consideration sociological theories and focus on a biological base but human behavior has become too complex for these ideas as culture has a huge impact on group and individual behavior and the dynamics that come from it. While Darwin’s ideas work for certain aspects of nature and they do explain a good portion as to how humans have adapted the way they have , it is also important to factor in that humans have used their capabilities to purposely create social structures due to goal making and the ability to act with agency. These goals are not biologically written into humans and collective action of groups, organizations, communities, institutional domains, societies, and intersectional systems all interact with their environment and are capable of changing it as it changes them.
The researchers also point out that these organizational systems in communities interact similarly to Darwin’s idea of natural selection in the sense that they seek resources, change due to their competitive environment, compete with other organizational systems which then produces the “sociocultural phenotype” of what works best in that social environment. These organizations are made up of individuals that have the capacity for change and will change their environment to see success which means they can remake themselves and create variations. This is in line with Durkheim and Durkheimian ideas as he recognized that competition does not always equal death and that specialization, diversification, and the construction of a new resource expands the capacity of environments. In summary, organizational/corporate units can create both new resources and new environments to which the whole population of organization/corporate units have to adapt to in return creating a capitalistic selection which produces new ideas. What these researchers characterized Durkheimian selection as:
- “The units on which selection works are organizations or, more generically, corporate unites revealing internal divisions of labor”
- “Emphasis on the evolution of the population resources niche.”
- “The dynamics driving selection are much more like those specified by Darwin: population growth, increased density, escalating competition, selection, and death to less fit organizations” even though they can avoid this by creating new resources to survive.
- “Competition and Durkheimian selection always occurs within the boundaries of an institutional framework, to some degree, shapes and limits how competition manifests itself”.
This is just one idea of how selection plays a role in social settings as this is not the only way societies interact within each other and Turner and Albrutyn argue that it is actually multi-leveled and calls for more theoretical analysis which they do with their ideas of Spencerian selection and Marxian selection which I will have to discuss later on. However, this is a snippet of what is being discussed and how sociology needs to be added to other conversations as society plays a huge role in how we interact and grow.
The second article I have been reading is about eco-feminism and how some fields are coming to conclusions that eco-feminists had discussed decades ago such as interspecies theory and standpoint theory. Gaard points out a scholar named Griffin that discusses how a feminized status can and has created a space of inferiority in a male-dominate society (2011). And how another scholar named Merchant identifies that roots of subordination of woman and nature lies in the logic of science and capitalism. Looking deeper into what these scholars are pointing out, I want to compare them to the conversations that Turner and Abrutyn are having as they discuss competition and how their ideas might refer to the hegemonic ideas of society while possibly leaving out important populations’ dialogue regarding gender, class, and capitalism. With that possible analysis, does selection operate on social hegemony and how will it affect the discussion? Is the analysis viable? I still have a lot of information to process but I am closer to where I need to be for my project and to where the conversations will navigate me.
Articles Cited:
Returning the “Social” to Evolutionary Sociology: Reconsidering Spencer, Durkheim, and Marx’s Models of “Natural” Selection by Johnathan Turner and Seth Abrutyn
Ecofeminism Revisited: Rejecting Essentialism and Re-Placing Species in a Material Feminist Environmentalism (PDF) by Greta Gaard