“If sociologists ignore genes, will other academics — and the wider world — ignore sociology?“
23 Replies to “Sounds Like A Sensible Solution To Me”
One can only hope that sociology will fall into the category of junk science were it belongs. Then maybe we won’t have our schools trying to turn little boys into little girls.
My oldest daughter graduated with degree in Sociology. Big deal! No one would hire her. One of the more useless fields, that.
Can sociologists even explain societal phenomena, such as the survival of their discipline after its prime function (obtaining a student deferment to avoid selective service) became obsolete? How can we expect them to cope with biology, too?
Franz Boas was responsible for the lies and self-deceptions of his daft disciple Margaret Mead, one of the people who made a joke out of anthropology.
Sociology is the rigorous study of “what liberals wish was true.”
I’ve learned more about humans from cursory readings in evolutionary biology than I learned from years of formal sociology courses in college and university. I’m dumbfounded that more people in the sociology profession aren’t studying up on EB.
I learned more about human behavior from watching the animals on my Grandfather’s farm than I ever did at university.
I fully agree; in Canada, for example, the social sciences reject any link to the physical and biological sciences. When I’ve put together research teams, I’ve always had to go to Europe, Japan, Brazil and the US for colleagues on the team. The Canadian researchers – and funding for this type of work – are non-existent.
Of course human behaviour is affected by human biology. But, to me, that doesn’t mean genetic, for genes affect individuals not whole populations. But human biology is connected to how a population adapts to its environment, develops an economy so that it can survive, develops a political and legal system so that it can organize this continuity of itself. Finally, it will develop an ideology that states and affirms the more basic systems: the environmental adaptation required, the economy possible in that environment, the political and legal and family structures that support it.
Oh, and this isn’t Darwinian. I’m opposed to the simplicity of neo-Darwinism which posits a random mutation..followed by Natural Selection as the judge. As an experienced loser of lotteries, random selection of Winners doesn’t work. By the time a Good Solution randomly appeared the species would be long extinct.
But I strongly support the examination of human beings using an awareness of their physical and biological realities. That includes an awareness of such things as the ‘carrying capacity of the environment’; the ‘carrying capacity of a social organization..ie, the political system..which functions in a certain way according to population size. (Democracy is suitable only for large populations; smaller ones are tribal).
But remember, our species is not determined by biological or physical constraints. We are the only species with the capacity to think and to change our knowledge base and so change how we interact with our environment and with each other. We can’t ignore this capacity, so determinism of any type (physical, biological or cultural) is invalid.
But but but ET, how can you say there is no determinism?!!! Everybody knows its the Root Causes (TM)that are to blame for all the bad behavior in the world! And guns cause murder too!
How can you call yourself an academic when you mock the holy determinism? Sinner! ~:D
very funny, phantom. Of course there is causality, which can be understood as ‘deterministic’.
If I put a roast in the oven and turn on the heat, the result will be ‘cooked meat’, so to speak. That’s a pretty linear deterministic path from raw to cooked because of heat.
But, sad to say, physical and biological and social realities are complex rather than linear. So, you can’t really determine ONE linear cause; there’s lots of causes. Some are more important than others; some are more basic than others. I think the economy will affect a population more than its family structure for example.
BUT, there are still causes. I’m not into acausal events. And by ‘determinism’ I mean that I reject linear causality except for machines.
Ah yes, sin. That’s another fascinating topic. I have somewhere in my library (can’t find it) a book on the development of the notion of sin in the western mind (due in large part to the sainted Augustine). I debate this; I’m not a fan of Augustine and wonder about the Pelagian free will.
I’ll stick with Aristotle and his four causes; at least they involve complexity rather than simple linear determinism.
Oh, right, that’s Miller and his ‘guns cause murder’. Incredible, just incredible. Removing the person who holds the gun – that’s quite a feat on Miller’s part.
Sociology is to Global Warming what Transgendered Aggrieved Victim Minority Women’s studies is to Climate Change.
Just cut off the funding and think of all the graduates who won’t have to learn the phrase “Would you like fries with that order” in order to bet a job and be a contributing member of society.
Sociology is an interesting field of study. Unfortunately, too many of its students think it qualifies them to positions in government, academe, MSM etc. where they can “practice” on the rest of us.
ET, Miller is the inheritor of a noble academic tradition I have traced all the way back to the 1970’s Rushforth et al paper in New England Journal of Medicine. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/4447111?ordinalpos=11&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum
This is the farthest back I was able to trace the whole “bullet as pathogen” concept. (It may go back farther, but I’m to old and lazy to dig any more. Its an idea whose time has come and gone with Algore’s defeat in 1999.)
Guns-cause-murder went hand in hand with correlation-equals-causation in the medical journals from the 1970’s until the US Congress cut the CDC research budget in the 1990’s during the Clinton administration. That was to spank them for the egregious waste of money on lots of crappy gun control studies.
But, I digress. In order to believe in bullet-as-pathogen, you first have to believe in the idea that things can “make” people do stuff. The “things” category includes sacred objects or places, cursed objects or places, in this case guns, then there’s the ever popular TV and video games “making” kids violent.
In my humble estimation a person would have to be an idiot to believe that, because it is so easily disproven. But there’s Mayor Dave out there bashing away.
Sociologists fall into the broad category of idiots by this test, because they believe people mechanistically interact with environmental and cultural factors. Which is easily disproven.
I’m with you, humans are problem solvers. Stick an average human in a tight spot and he/she will figure a way out PDQ. This includes tight spots created by cultural/economic forces.
Most people are smart enough to figure out when their religion/culture/personal preference or whatever is screwing them up. Then they INNOVATE, make up some new thing from whole cloth that defies prediction. This is so common you’d think these guys would notice, but nuh uh.
Genetics vs. memetics or memetics of genetics, but what’s the point? No one should attempt to observe human behavior in groups? Only a single subject is worth taking on as in psychology or philosophy? Should we do away with marketing, polling or parts of economics?
The only problem with sociology is that it has been politicized and that has happened to almost every science in different times in history. Perhaps for the sake of science we should do away with politics.
Memetics? That’s a problem solved right there.
Some grad student had a problem getting a grant, so he invented a way to get funding for surfing up the progress of “All your base are belong to us”.
See? Problem solved!
memetics is junk, junk, junk. As a semiotician, and one who works particularly in the information dynamics of physical and biological systems – and societal systems as embedded in the physico-biological constraints…I’ll repeat: memetics is junk. Pure junk.
The problem with the ‘floating’ sociology and anthropology, ie, with their theories that are ungrounded in reality and consisting only of ‘what people think’…is that people don’t and can’t operate that way. Reality interferes with one’s self-definition that if I step off the 20th floor of a building that I will be able to fly. When you research the narratives, self-definitions and cultural patterns of people, you’ll find, somewhere, somehow, that these emerged as practical solutions to real situations. They aren’t just ‘all in the mind’.
The postmodernist entrapment of sociology and anthropology, separating it from biology and physics, has made them useless in understanding our societies.
I actually took a sociology class winter 2008, and it is the most close-minded field of study I have encountered in university. I can’t wait for this garbage to be dumped from the university system.
Sociology is another pseudo-science like anthropology that has been politized by lefty academics. Margaret Meade, icon to feminists, was a fraud and like the fraud of Marxism it doesn’t really matter to them.
I notice that her wikipedia entry doesn’t even mention all of the controversy surrounding her, especially the Derek Freeman study, he lived in Samoa longer, that repudiated her. Her page has been carefully sanitized as is common at wikipedia when anyone messes with lefty truths. http://www.stpt.usf.edu/~jsokolov/314mead1.htm http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=44968
I have no sympathy for oblivious parents whose kids emerges from college with mush for brains after being given free rein to indulge in the swill that’s so much a part of higher education anymore.
they should stick to the three R’s
readin
ritin
and
rithamtic
:-))))))
I happened into a coffee shop this afternoon where I overheard two young ladies discussing their academic achievements. One boasted of her degree in anthropology while the other bragged about her degree in sociology.
I wonder what their theory(s) were about me rolling on the floor laughing like a mad man.
I see that I have been well ahead of the curve in yet another matter!
Figured that one out in 1973 when forced to take arts electives in engineering program.
It’s a long messy story where I managed to survive the ordeal of being harangued by a lefty feminist for a term … then they allowed economics to qualify as an “Non-Technical” subject.
All was right in the world after that.
“Sociology is the rigorous study of “what liberals wish was true.”
Posted by: Tim in Vermont at January 6, 2009 10:14 AM
Short,sweet,succient,and SOOOOOO true.
Sociology over the past forty years has morphed into something that’s unrecognizable because of the loons who have taken over the academy. There are a number of properly trained sociologists who have done valuable work in demography, economics, industrial relations,urban planning, and rehabilitation. What can be expected when SDS, the Weathermen, and other progressives form the base of an academuc discipline? Where does everyone think the radicals went after they took over many universities in the 1960s? Many didn’t go anywhere; they stayed and made a mess of everything, and we haven’t seen anything yet!
One can only hope that sociology will fall into the category of junk science were it belongs. Then maybe we won’t have our schools trying to turn little boys into little girls.
My oldest daughter graduated with degree in Sociology. Big deal! No one would hire her. One of the more useless fields, that.
Can sociologists even explain societal phenomena, such as the survival of their discipline after its prime function (obtaining a student deferment to avoid selective service) became obsolete? How can we expect them to cope with biology, too?
Franz Boas was responsible for the lies and self-deceptions of his daft disciple Margaret Mead, one of the people who made a joke out of anthropology.
Sociology is the rigorous study of “what liberals wish was true.”
I’ve learned more about humans from cursory readings in evolutionary biology than I learned from years of formal sociology courses in college and university. I’m dumbfounded that more people in the sociology profession aren’t studying up on EB.
I learned more about human behavior from watching the animals on my Grandfather’s farm than I ever did at university.
I fully agree; in Canada, for example, the social sciences reject any link to the physical and biological sciences. When I’ve put together research teams, I’ve always had to go to Europe, Japan, Brazil and the US for colleagues on the team. The Canadian researchers – and funding for this type of work – are non-existent.
Of course human behaviour is affected by human biology. But, to me, that doesn’t mean genetic, for genes affect individuals not whole populations. But human biology is connected to how a population adapts to its environment, develops an economy so that it can survive, develops a political and legal system so that it can organize this continuity of itself. Finally, it will develop an ideology that states and affirms the more basic systems: the environmental adaptation required, the economy possible in that environment, the political and legal and family structures that support it.
Oh, and this isn’t Darwinian. I’m opposed to the simplicity of neo-Darwinism which posits a random mutation..followed by Natural Selection as the judge. As an experienced loser of lotteries, random selection of Winners doesn’t work. By the time a Good Solution randomly appeared the species would be long extinct.
But I strongly support the examination of human beings using an awareness of their physical and biological realities. That includes an awareness of such things as the ‘carrying capacity of the environment’; the ‘carrying capacity of a social organization..ie, the political system..which functions in a certain way according to population size. (Democracy is suitable only for large populations; smaller ones are tribal).
But remember, our species is not determined by biological or physical constraints. We are the only species with the capacity to think and to change our knowledge base and so change how we interact with our environment and with each other. We can’t ignore this capacity, so determinism of any type (physical, biological or cultural) is invalid.
But but but ET, how can you say there is no determinism?!!! Everybody knows its the Root Causes (TM)that are to blame for all the bad behavior in the world! And guns cause murder too!
How can you call yourself an academic when you mock the holy determinism? Sinner! ~:D
very funny, phantom. Of course there is causality, which can be understood as ‘deterministic’.
If I put a roast in the oven and turn on the heat, the result will be ‘cooked meat’, so to speak. That’s a pretty linear deterministic path from raw to cooked because of heat.
But, sad to say, physical and biological and social realities are complex rather than linear. So, you can’t really determine ONE linear cause; there’s lots of causes. Some are more important than others; some are more basic than others. I think the economy will affect a population more than its family structure for example.
BUT, there are still causes. I’m not into acausal events. And by ‘determinism’ I mean that I reject linear causality except for machines.
Ah yes, sin. That’s another fascinating topic. I have somewhere in my library (can’t find it) a book on the development of the notion of sin in the western mind (due in large part to the sainted Augustine). I debate this; I’m not a fan of Augustine and wonder about the Pelagian free will.
I’ll stick with Aristotle and his four causes; at least they involve complexity rather than simple linear determinism.
Oh, right, that’s Miller and his ‘guns cause murder’. Incredible, just incredible. Removing the person who holds the gun – that’s quite a feat on Miller’s part.
Sociology is to Global Warming what Transgendered Aggrieved Victim Minority Women’s studies is to Climate Change.
Just cut off the funding and think of all the graduates who won’t have to learn the phrase “Would you like fries with that order” in order to bet a job and be a contributing member of society.
Sociology is an interesting field of study. Unfortunately, too many of its students think it qualifies them to positions in government, academe, MSM etc. where they can “practice” on the rest of us.
ET, Miller is the inheritor of a noble academic tradition I have traced all the way back to the 1970’s Rushforth et al paper in New England Journal of Medicine.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/4447111?ordinalpos=11&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum
This is the farthest back I was able to trace the whole “bullet as pathogen” concept. (It may go back farther, but I’m to old and lazy to dig any more. Its an idea whose time has come and gone with Algore’s defeat in 1999.)
Guns-cause-murder went hand in hand with correlation-equals-causation in the medical journals from the 1970’s until the US Congress cut the CDC research budget in the 1990’s during the Clinton administration. That was to spank them for the egregious waste of money on lots of crappy gun control studies.
But, I digress. In order to believe in bullet-as-pathogen, you first have to believe in the idea that things can “make” people do stuff. The “things” category includes sacred objects or places, cursed objects or places, in this case guns, then there’s the ever popular TV and video games “making” kids violent.
In my humble estimation a person would have to be an idiot to believe that, because it is so easily disproven. But there’s Mayor Dave out there bashing away.
Sociologists fall into the broad category of idiots by this test, because they believe people mechanistically interact with environmental and cultural factors. Which is easily disproven.
I’m with you, humans are problem solvers. Stick an average human in a tight spot and he/she will figure a way out PDQ. This includes tight spots created by cultural/economic forces.
Most people are smart enough to figure out when their religion/culture/personal preference or whatever is screwing them up. Then they INNOVATE, make up some new thing from whole cloth that defies prediction. This is so common you’d think these guys would notice, but nuh uh.
Genetics vs. memetics or memetics of genetics, but what’s the point? No one should attempt to observe human behavior in groups? Only a single subject is worth taking on as in psychology or philosophy? Should we do away with marketing, polling or parts of economics?
The only problem with sociology is that it has been politicized and that has happened to almost every science in different times in history. Perhaps for the sake of science we should do away with politics.
Memetics? That’s a problem solved right there.
Some grad student had a problem getting a grant, so he invented a way to get funding for surfing up the progress of “All your base are belong to us”.
See? Problem solved!
memetics is junk, junk, junk. As a semiotician, and one who works particularly in the information dynamics of physical and biological systems – and societal systems as embedded in the physico-biological constraints…I’ll repeat: memetics is junk. Pure junk.
The problem with the ‘floating’ sociology and anthropology, ie, with their theories that are ungrounded in reality and consisting only of ‘what people think’…is that people don’t and can’t operate that way. Reality interferes with one’s self-definition that if I step off the 20th floor of a building that I will be able to fly. When you research the narratives, self-definitions and cultural patterns of people, you’ll find, somewhere, somehow, that these emerged as practical solutions to real situations. They aren’t just ‘all in the mind’.
The postmodernist entrapment of sociology and anthropology, separating it from biology and physics, has made them useless in understanding our societies.
I actually took a sociology class winter 2008, and it is the most close-minded field of study I have encountered in university. I can’t wait for this garbage to be dumped from the university system.
Sociology is another pseudo-science like anthropology that has been politized by lefty academics. Margaret Meade, icon to feminists, was a fraud and like the fraud of Marxism it doesn’t really matter to them.
I notice that her wikipedia entry doesn’t even mention all of the controversy surrounding her, especially the Derek Freeman study, he lived in Samoa longer, that repudiated her. Her page has been carefully sanitized as is common at wikipedia when anyone messes with lefty truths.
http://www.stpt.usf.edu/~jsokolov/314mead1.htm
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=44968
I have no sympathy for oblivious parents whose kids emerges from college with mush for brains after being given free rein to indulge in the swill that’s so much a part of higher education anymore.
they should stick to the three R’s
readin
ritin
and
rithamtic
:-))))))
I happened into a coffee shop this afternoon where I overheard two young ladies discussing their academic achievements. One boasted of her degree in anthropology while the other bragged about her degree in sociology.
I wonder what their theory(s) were about me rolling on the floor laughing like a mad man.
I see that I have been well ahead of the curve in yet another matter!
Figured that one out in 1973 when forced to take arts electives in engineering program.
It’s a long messy story where I managed to survive the ordeal of being harangued by a lefty feminist for a term … then they allowed economics to qualify as an “Non-Technical” subject.
All was right in the world after that.
“Sociology is the rigorous study of “what liberals wish was true.”
Posted by: Tim in Vermont at January 6, 2009 10:14 AM
Short,sweet,succient,and SOOOOOO true.
Sociology over the past forty years has morphed into something that’s unrecognizable because of the loons who have taken over the academy. There are a number of properly trained sociologists who have done valuable work in demography, economics, industrial relations,urban planning, and rehabilitation. What can be expected when SDS, the Weathermen, and other progressives form the base of an academuc discipline? Where does everyone think the radicals went after they took over many universities in the 1960s? Many didn’t go anywhere; they stayed and made a mess of everything, and we haven’t seen anything yet!