Starting a new research project means the ever so dreaded literature review and depending on how much you already know about your topic depends on how much information you start out with as you continue on your search for sources. The amount of information you know can make your reading of articles simplier or harder. In my case, since I do not know a good deal of the scholarly conversation on the topic I choose to pick, it will not particularly aid me so to start off I need to start familiarizing myself with the conversation they are having in this sub field.
In reviewing biological models and what the crossover of sociology and biology means for this subfield I have uncovered a dark past that I have heard about in various classes but never really knew the origins of. Sociobiology formed as a field within evolutionary biology where darwianian ideas had crossed over into a sociology context and created a space for scholarly justification of racism, sexism, classism, and ableism (Wilson 2019). The National Human Genome Research Institute talks more in detail about the impacts on the Eugenics movement, the history and how it’s existence in today’s society (2023). This provided spaces and had direct correlations for the eugenics movement, legalized segregation and possibly other historical events that we now know are unethical. Many of these ideas used in the eugenics movement came from Darwin’s theory of natural selection and that applied to social behaviors such as crime, intelligence, etc. which particularly impacted people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals and people with disabilities which created discourse on who should or should not be able to reproduce.
As sociology moves forward, scholars are starting to try to fit how sociology fits in with the other fields but are understandably hesitant in bringing up this conversation. Hearing about this past, I too am put off by this conversation as I was simply interested in both biology and sociology separately and decided to dive into what topics the subfield was having, never knowing the weight of its historic past until now. Two scholars, Jonathan Turner and Seth Abrutyn, point out that the past darwinian ideas that led to these scientific inaccuracies are too simple for the intricacies of society and are inadequate in it’s analysis of how biology and sociology intertwine and rather favor an analysis that would take the theories of Spencer, Durkheim and Mark into consideration (2017).
Ecology, however, is leading in conversations regarding gender and environment as there is a lot of literature pertaining to feminism or what they call ecofeminism as well as conversations that include women of color, people with disabilities, and queer people as well. I hope to continue to learn from the discourse of the ecology field as I piece together the literature in front of me.
Returning the “social” to evolutionary sociology: Reconsidering Spencer, Durkheim, and Mark’s models of Natural Selection by Turner and Abrutyn
Sociobiology by Robert Wilson 2019
Eugenics and Scientific Racism by The National Human Genome Research Institute 2023