This article from The Chronicle Review (Chronicle of Higher Education) takes a look at the influence (finally) of genetics on sociology, which moves everything a little closer to integral (small, glacial increments, but things are shifting). It's all interconnected.
Of course, the risk is that genetics will do to sociology what neuroscience is doing to psychology - remove the human component and make it all about flatland, objective science.
The Nature-Nurture Debate, Redux
Genetic research finally makes its way into the thinking of sociologists
If sociologists ignore genes, will other academics — and the wider world — ignore sociology?
Some in the discipline are telling their peers just that. With study after study finding that all sorts of personal characteristics are heritable — along with behaviors shaped by those characteristics — a see-no-gene perspective is obsolete.
Nor, these scholars argue, is it reasonable to concede that genes play some role but then to loftily assert that geneticists and the media overstate that role and to go on conducting studies as if genes did not exist. How, exactly, do genes shape human lives, interact with environmental forces, or get overpowered by those forces? "We do ourselves a disservice if we don't engage in those arguments," says Jason Schnittker, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. "If we stay on the ropes, people from a different perspective, with a more extreme view, will be making them."
Schnittker is among the contributors to a special issue of the American Journal of Sociology, the field's flagship publication, devoted to "Genetics and Social Structure" — evidence that at least some sociologists are attempting to reckon with the genetic revolution. And not just in the AJS. Other top sociology journals, too, are publishing work incorporating genetic perspectives: The American Sociological Review in August published a much-discussed article on genes and delinquency by Guang Guo, of the University of North Carolina. (A couple of years ago, in an early foray on this front, Guo co-edited a special section of another top journal, Social Forces, titled "The Linking of Sociology and Biology.")
It is even possible to identify sociology departments in which gene-environment interactions amount to a subfield: Chapel Hill, for one. Its department boasts at least five tenured scholars who write on the subject, and it offers a graduate seminar on genes and society.
The idea for the special issue of AJS was hatched a couple of years ago at Columbia University, under the aegis of that campus's Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholars Program. Its fellows are encouraged to reach across disciplinary lines, and Peter Bearman, who co-directs the Columbia program, found that he and two young visiting fellows, Brandeis's Sara Shostak and Penn State's Molly Martin, shared an interest in responding to the flood of new information about heredity. The three sociologists ended up editing the special issue.
"There was a sense," Bearman says, "that there were two modes of thoughts about genetics and health. One was, 'Genetics causes everything.' Another was a refusal to think that anything related to genetic expression was worth studying.
"My view then, and my view now is that the embrace of genetic explanation and fear of genetic explanation were really the same phenomenon: an overemphasis on the role of genetics in shaping health outcomes." In short, sociologists may shun genes because they secretly fear that genes are more powerful than they actually are.
To concede that some people are genetically encoded to have shorter fuses than others or are more likely to gain weight if granted unlimited access to Oreos is hardly to embrace a view of humans as lumbering robots ruled by genes, contributors to the AJS issue argue. Admitting as much is just the first step in a rich inquiry into the biological and social forces shaping human lives — an inquiry that sociologists, like few others, are equipped to make.
But even the most gung-ho genetically minded sociologists will say that their first baby steps toward consilience, E.O. Wilson's term for the uniting of the biological and social sciences, don't match that lofty rhetoric. In general the genetic sociological work is highly statistical, often involving relatively new multivariable techniques. It is devoid of the narrative description that sociologists who immerse themselves in their subjects' lives can offer.
What has the work uncovered? In the AJS special issue, Schnittker rebuts the "set point" theory of happiness that has been espoused by some psychologists: the notion that there's not much we can do about our innate levels of jubilance or melancholy. He makes use of a data set of people ages 25 to 75, including fraternal twins, identical twins, and nontwin siblings (looking at twins and nontwins helps isolate heritable characteristics), and finds that the environment does, in fact, matter — but in unpredictable ways. Marriage, he finds, has almost no effect on adult contentment once other factors have been accounted for. Friendships, on the other hand, matter a great deal — a reversal of sociologists' usual ordering of these two sources of support. The explanation may be that we marry people who are much like us, while friendships are more random and labile, and thus more likely to bump us out of our habitual moods.
North Carolina's Guo looks at a gene that has been tied to levels of dopamine, a neurotransmitter linked to aggressiveness and sexual energy. One variant of the gene, which may tamp down dopamine levels, has a "robust protective effect" against early first-time sex among teenagers, he finds. The protective effect vanishes, however, when teenagers with that genotype find themselves in schools where early sex is the norm. Meanwhile, Bernice Pescosolido, of Indiana University at Bloomington — who, like Guo, has several co-authors — finds that a version of the gene Gabra2, implicated by other researchers in an increased risk for alcoholism, has no effect on women. Even among men, those with the risky version have no increased risk for alcoholism provided they have strong family bonds.
The idea that social theorists must account for genes sounds commonsensical. But those doing the work, of course, labor under some dark shadows. Social science has a history of misguided, or worse, attempts to link genes to crime, or to deviance, or to IQ; racial differences have often been either a subtext of this work or the researchers' main interest. Take your pick of flare-ups over the past 30 years: the reception of Crime and Human Nature (1985), written by the UCLA political scientist James Q. Wilson and the late Harvard psychologist Richard Herrnstein; comments, in 1992, by a National Institutes of Health official comparing inner cities to jungles and arguing that the breakdown of "social controls" in ghettos allowed genetic impulses to run free; a conference on crime and genes scheduled for 1992 and canceled after an uproar. (It was finally held in 1995.) Then, of course, there was the furor over The Bell Curve, in which Herrnstein and the political scientist Charles A. Murray, of the American Enterprise Institute, attributed social problems among racial minorities in part to low intelligence.
Sociologists spoke up during those controversies, but they have also criticized less obviously combustible genetic studies. Just two years ago, in his presidential address to the American Sociological Association, Troy Duster, an eminent sociologist at New York University, went so far as to suggest that any sociologist who embraced genetic approaches was a traitor to the discipline. Two of the biggest problems facing sociology, he argued, were the "increasing authority of reductionist science" and "the attendant expansion of databases on markers and processes 'inside the body.'" If anything defined sociology, Duster said, it was its role as "century-long counterpoint" to such efforts to connect the roots of social problems to biology.
Duster recalled sitting on various governmental review boards and watching as what he considered an inordinate amount of money flowed toward geneticists and other scientists who studied maladies like alcoholism. Why spend millions searching for a predisposition to alcoholism among Native Americans, he asked, when their mistreatment and oppression offered explanation enough?
In an interview, Duster mostly affirms those remarks. "While in theory, one should embrace this theory of environmental-genetic research," he says, "in actual practice, unless one is very, very sensitive to the stratification of the sciences, the table will be tilted in favor of genetics."
Jeremy Freese, of Northwestern University, frames his contribution to the AJS special issue as a direct rebuttal of Duster. An oppositional stance makes sense "for some highly charged areas," Freese grants, but it can't be the whole agenda. He brandishes a list of 52 characteristics that have been found to be partially heritable: cognitive ability, extroversion, aggressiveness, likeliness to marry, age at first sexual intercourse, support for the death penalty, and on and on. Indeed, by now one should assume that "genetic differences are partial causes of the overwhelming majority of outcomes" that sociologists study. Nevertheless, he says, social scientists still engage in "tacit collusion" to ignore the role of genetic differences.
Nothing makes it easier on "imperializing" fields that already disrespect sociology, Freese writes — he mentions economics and behavioral genetics — "than an incisive, significant, and easily explained flaw shared by an entire literature."
Ouch. Well, not an entire literature, not anymore. What has led to the new genetic turn in sociology, at least among a minority? In part it has to do with the availability of important new data sets. The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, aka Add Health, for example, at Chapel Hill, was designed from the start to incorporate both sociological and genetic information. It was begun, in 1994, by Bearman, J. Richard Udry, and Kathleen Mullan Harris. The idea was to capture as much information as possible about the social circumstances, friendship networks, and family conditions of 21,000 teenagers in 132 schools, from grades 7 through 12. The survey included a disproportionate number of twins, both fraternal and identical, full- and half-siblings, and adopted kids, allowing preliminary analyses of the heritability of traits. Follow-up interviews were conducted a year later.
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