The person who created this website (“Hey Students, Considering Majoring in Sociology? Don’t Do It!”) points me to this interview with philosophy professor Stephen Turner, who writes:
1986 was the nadir of the granting of US Sociology bachelor’s degrees, and also represented a change in direction. That was the last year I taught Sociology in my own institution. . . . I had never been part of the graduate program and had taught graduate sociological theory as a visiting professor at Notre Dame and BU but not at my own institution. Department politics were pretty brutal.
The experiences I had the few times I returned to the department didn’t make me miss sociology. I was called back to teach a course on Comparative and Historical Sociology which I had originally designed, and took over the reading list the professor, who sadly was dying, had already created for it. One of the books on it was Hobsbawn’s Primitive Rebels. Hobsbawn, a Marxist, said that the (Italian) rebels in question lacked the appropriate class consciousness: that is what made them “primitive” rebels. The female student–and by this time the program was almost all female–who was assigned to discuss it objected to it because she thought it said Italian people were stupid, and she was Italian. The other students had their own complaints about life that they could associate with their identities.
That’s kind of funny! A battle of the grievances.
Turner continues:
I had been writing on philosophy of social science my whole career, including a comment on a ludicrous paper on “logic” that was published in the ASR in 1971 during a brief fashion for theory construction. I had thought that knowing some philosophy of science would both give me some intellectual leverage in sociology and point to ways of improving sociology. . . .
I did a paper for an Australian journal called “De-intellectualizing Sociology,” and that is probably a good label for what happened. Sociology was at some point in the past was a lively place with interests in big picture questions and big ideas, and a desire to bring facts to bear on contentious matters of policy. I trace it to the Labor Statistics movement of the 19th century. The bulletins of the Bureaus of Labor Statistics of the era make great reading. They managed to engage in questions like the relation of the fall of the Roman Empire and inequality. But they were resolutely factual and even-handed. For many reasons, some of which had to do with ideological conflicts, that kind of factual discourse became unacceptable, especially in the seventies. The protests against James Coleman and Edward Banfield represented a refusal to deal with anything that went against or even complicated the narrative of oppression that became increasingly dominant. What had attracted me to the field in the first place was no longer there, and the new way of doing sociology had no need for ideas or theory–they had the answers they wanted and didn’t care to debate them.
Interesting. As an outsider to sociology, I focus on the good stuff, for example this paper from 2020 and various work of Duncan Watts. I’ve also collaborated with sociologists and published other papers that I like in sociology journals.
I like sociology for the same reason I like political science: it’s an open field with all sorts of different approaches. There’s been some highly publicized bad work done in sociology, as there has been in economics, political science, psychology, and other areas of social science,
The notorious beauty-and-sex-ratio guy was trained as a sociologist and then promoted by an economist who also promoted some junk psychology.
The big problem that I see is a passive corruption whereby people just accept bad work and unsubstantiated claims, whether these be bogus evolutionary psychology published in scientific journals, discredited and fake anti-vax research promoted by the Department of Health and Human Services, unsupported NPR and Ted-bait, etc.
But . . . I don’t see sociology as standing out here. Turner’s stories are interesting, and I think they speak to his experience. It’s gotta be different at other places. The culture of academic departments can be terrible–I know, as my first academic job was in a snakepit full of liars, lazy faculty, and sex pests–but I don’t think all sociology departments would be like that! I guess the challenge is to throw out the baby without losing all that valuable bathwater.
It’s not clear to me why this critique should be taken particularly seriously. Either the interviewee or interviewer can’t spell the name of a major figure in the discipline (Hobsbawm, with an M) and the criticism is anecdotal and one-sided. To an outsider, this seems like a crotchety old person complaining about “the youth” and not offering up much solid evidence. The substantive point they are making here is not well argued.
At least he seems to have gotten rid of the places where he was attacking graduate students by name.
But what a weird thing to be obsessed with — that it’s a discipline that has a lot of women.
Elin:
I agree. I thought that was weird too.
Elin, Andrew. I don’t find it weird. And I don’t think mentioning this is ‘obsessing’. It is worth asking these questions, e.g. why in a field that like psychology, that used to be dominated by men, are 80 percent of the Ph.D’s awarded to women. White men, the supposedly most privileged segment of society, are barely represented in sociology (grad students and junior faculty). For facts and an explanation see Section Six ‘Dominated by the White Man’s Gaze’ https://www.ihatesociology.com/todays-sociology
It’s worth asking that as a social science question. Likewise why biology and medicine are increasingly female. There are lots of theories about that as well as research on what the impact is. He is not offering this. He’s just complaining that he has to put up with so many women in the field, that they don’t like being called girls and that they insist on equal salaries and credit for their research.
Oh I see that he does still have the section where he makes fun of individual graduate students. I just find that so needlessly cruel.
Yeah, I thought it was interesting to see his perspective but it wasn’t the same as mine.
I don’t have a problem with the discipline as much as I do with the undergraduate major. I’m sure that there are some schools with difficult undergrad sociology programs, but I’m not sure if I’ve seen one. Although others may have different experiences.
And I don’t conflate difficulty with mathed-up fields. History programs can be pretty rigorous, for instance. Philosophy is a notoriously tough major. Organic chemistry has zero math, but is the pons asinorum for medical school. Etc.
In my crustier moments, I tend to agree with the rabbis–Kabbalah (or many other things) is not a fit subject for those of tender age.
Yes, sociology is a soft major. I heard once (indirectly) that a sociology professor (and later university president) said that sociology attracted (in its 1970s heydey) the best and the worst students. Indeed sociology used to be an important and valuable field. Today a fair percentage of the most prominent mid and early career sociologists have undergraduate and advanced degrees in fields like econ and statistics, etc. The sociology undergrad doesn’t cut it for the best empirical work today which is quite mathy and suble. I think Duncan Watts is a physics Ph.D who (like Andy) has an honorary or secondary appointment in the social sciences.
“The protests against James Coleman and Edward Banfield represented a refusal to deal with anything that went against or even complicated the narrative of oppression that became increasingly dominant. ”
I don’t know anything beyond what a quick check on Google tells me about these protests, but the claim about the refusal to look beyond the “narrative of oppression” seems consistent with silly post-modernist stuff I’ve seen even in Science. As an old progressive, I agree with a lot of what the post-modernists say, but I take it as things you are supposed to back up with evidence, not as a given that provides the basis for criticizing what other people think.
I really dont know what the “Narrative of Oppression” is, but, theres a shit ton of real actual oppression in the world, from the slave trade to the Indian wars, in eastern Europe the slavic groups are literally named after “Slave”. Youve got the entire history of the USSR, the Pinkertons, the Coal Wars.back in time theres Serfs and hereditary lords, the warring states in Japan… Plenty of oppression to go around without needing to invent any questionable kind.
“in eastern Europe the slavic groups are literally named after “Slave”.”
Do you have a reference for that? Wikipedia says it is derived from a term meaning “people who speak the same language”, and Wiktionary has it round the other way (i.e., “slave” possibly being derived from “Slav”).
Additional wikipedia reading (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavs_(ethnonym)) reveals the set of sources–as well as those disputing those sources–for the etymological connection between “slav” and slavery:
According to the widespread view, which has been known since the 18th century, the Byzantine Σκλάβινοι (Sklábinoi), Έσκλαβηνοί (Ésklabēnoí), borrowed from a Slavic tribe self-name *Slověne, turned into σκλάβος, εσκλαβήνος (Late Latin sclāvus) in the meaning ‘prisoner of war slave’, ‘slave’ in the 8th/9th century, because they often became captured and enslaved.[25][26][27][28] However this version has been disputed since the 19th century.[29][30]
An alternative contemporary hypothesis states that Medieval Latin sclāvus via secondary form *scylāvus derives from Byzantine σκυλάω (skūláō, skyláō) or σκυλεύω (skūleúō, skyleúō) with the meaning “to strip the enemy (killed in a battle)”, “to make booty / extract spoils of war”.[31][32][33][34] This version is criticised as well.[35]
Thanks gec, very interesting!
Yes the oppression of people who were full professors at University of Chicago and who is usually considered one of the most important contributors to the field. Does he talk about how bad statistics is because Andrew criticizes some of Heckman’s work? Yes, as a field, sociology tends not to be hero worship. Being critiqued is a sign of respect.
The Old Progressives (Old Left) were hard headed empiricists. Marx promoted ‘scientific socialism’
There is plenty of bad work that goes on in Sociology just like in other social ‘sciences.’ My own experience with sociology is a colleague of mine whose expertise was in health care – I also have some background in that area and was teaching health care economics at the time. Her insights concerned the prolonged power struggle in health care between insurers and owners and clinicians. In particular, she documented the long term “deprofessionalization” of doctors – something I immediately identified with as I saw similar efforts to deprofessionalize academics (and continue to see). Those ideas would never have appeared in economics journals (I can’t speak to whether this has changed more recently). I’m not saying her insights were correct, but it is an example where a different disciplinary view is important. I suspect there are many more examples. My biggest complain about sociology is that they use so many words. Every time I’ve tried to read a sociology book, I’ve found myself longing for an equation or two to replace endless dense pages of writing (sociologists probably feel the opposite about economists’ work).
Good point, Dale. The example you provide sounds like a solid quantitative investigate journalist would be more reliable than a sociologist. But I accept your larger point. Healthcare and related areas, particularly those that are not contentious or politicized and blend into public health, are areas where value-neutral non politicized sociology can contribute. Peter Davis in New Zealand is a retired applied sociologist who worked in a hospital setting and does outstanding work.
https://peterdavisnz.com/
One of my core memories is coming into the living room while my dad was watching a news program – it was probably 60 Minutes – where they had a feature on something called Sociology. I was 8 or 9 and it would have been 1984 or 1985. They made out Sociology to be something so evil and insidious – or at least that’s how I took it – that I ran out of the room somewhat scared and definitely perplexed. It’s my earliest memory of being frightened but curious, feeling that if I asked any questions, I would be opening the door into a forbidden, adult world. The revulsion was planted so deep – irrationally so – that I forever avoided the social sciences and became a biologist.
Sociology reached its nadir in the mid-80s (there was even a Punch cartoon of a hitchhiker holding up sign which said “Not studying sociology!”) and I can easily supply the list of the usual suspects. It got so bad that I used to tell my students that “Sociology is the one discipline – if we can call it that at all – where theory outnumbers collected data by an order of magnitude!”.
Since then, the situation has greatly improved! (T’was just a phase – these things happen).
Andrew; Is there any work in evolutionary psychology that you like? You so often include a ‘blanket condemnation’ of it in passing remarks…… that I searched the blog for + article on it and could not find any.
There are other uses of evolutionary ecology thinking in social science, perhaps most notably Human Evolutionary/Behavioral Ecology.
I wonder how you view them? Or if they even register on your radar.
Eric:
I’m not sure what are the borders of evolutionary psychology. Unfortunately it does seem that I hear about the bad stuff in this field and not the good stuff. I’d very much appreciate some references to evolutionary psychology that you like!
https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/life-sciences/biological-anthropology-and-primatology/human-behavioral-ecology?format=HB&isbn=9781108421836#content
Hi Andrew; try the above book
I am retired and have not looked at the literature for a decade.
I am, of course, partial to the work of my close colleagues in Anthropology, Kristen Hawkes and Jim O’connell, including our joint work on the Grandmother Hypothesis.
See https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=YqBhezoAAAAJ
It’s funny but statistics does not seem to play a big role here and I see evolutionary ecology as providing some novel hypotheses. Hypotheses well grounded in theory. Yes, sexual selection, Kin selection , cooperation schemes ,sex ratio, foraging theory, etc are a very useful framework; even if (simple) sex ratio theory fails badly when applied to humans [ actually most mammals].
Your blog partly interests me because statistics plays such a big role in advances [ or not!] in social science, and especially the bread and butter questions that dominate the various fields. I can see where the questions come from, even if they seem rather mundane. They pay the bills.
But where have all the big questions gone?
Why not try the work of Randy Thornhill and Steve Gangestad; They are more to the psychological side , as opposed to the anthroplogical.
https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=f8Q2LccAAAAJ
Eric wrote:
“But where have all the big questions gone?”
A scant few of the big questions are still contentious in evolution, but those are fully orthogonal to evo psych.
The biggest question has persisted from the beginning, which is how the species we see actually diverged from each other, even if many evolutionists will fly into a rage when I make that claim. Specifically, you really have to look hard to find examples of what Darwin claimed, the slow accumulation of differences. Maybe cichlids in large African lakes? Questions about the utility of grandmothers seem so far down in the weeds. (Does it really make sense to think of early menopause as an adaptation within a selfish-gene paradigm? Adaptations are about having more kids, not so much about healthy societies.)
And as for some of the landmark findings in evo psych, such as kin selection, well…
Why do animals ranging from plankton to Monarch butterflies to salamanders produce slow-acting poisons in their bodies? That is not the work of selfish genes and kin selection – which works fine with gregarious marmots – doesn’t work either. Salamanders are solitary and the neo-Darwinian paradigm casts other nearby salamanders not related to you as your competitors, yet the poison in your body protects them as much as it protects your kin. There is no question that being toxic is useful for salamanders, but there is no Darwinian evolutionary framework for how they got there.
I’m actually intrigued by some of the grandmother ideas, but from a social perspective and not an evolutionary one. Not when I can’t figure out how salamanders were gradually selected for their toxicity.
Summing it up, there is a yawning gulf between evolution theory and evolutionary psychology theory, and for perfectly valid reasons on both sides, no one has much interest in bridging that gulf.
Hi Matt; your negative reply is all over the map.
For an overview of Behavioral Ecology as evolutionary biology I suggest the following very recent paper
https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=WkrOMEoAAAAJ&sortby=pubdate&citation_for_view=WkrOMEoAAAAJ:xGWFX6Gbr9MC
eric
Eric,
Interesting. I like this sort of thing when good data are available to back up or to refute theories. Without good data, just about every possibility can be theorized (men should prefer women with symmetrical faces; men should prefer women with asymmetrical faces; we should be more favorably disposed to strangers who look like us; we should be more favorably disposed to strangers who look different; beautiful parents should have more sons; beautiful parents should have more daughters; etc. These “just so stories” are flexible enough to go in any direction, which should be no surprise, given that the stories are often sold as being simultaneously obvious and counterintuitive. When experiments and serious data are added to the picture, we can make progress, as with the examples that you link to.
From the linked behavior ecology paper (edited for brevity):
“A key factor for all the contributions from behavioural ecology has been active choices about what to focus on and what to ignore. All scientific studies involve trade-offs between different approaches or questions. Behavioural ecologists usually choose to focus at the phenotypic level, examining the fitness consequences of phenotypic variation, in response to the ecological conditions. They deliberately ignore factors such as the underlying genetics
(the ‘phenotypic gambit’), using approaches such as game theory to model the outcome of evolution, and black box the underlying mechanisms that control behaviour. Behavioural ecologists make these active choices time and time again because their use has facilitated the interplay between theory and data, helping them understand adaption in natural populations. Indeed, broad across- species generalisations have generally only been possible by assuming the phenotypic gambit, while ignoring the underlying proximate mechanisms.”
I don’t disagree with the last sentence. But I am not so interested in those generalizations.
The phenotypic gambit begins with the assumption that a given ecotype will be better adapted than other ecotypes of the same species, so necessarily that ecotype will prevail and replace other ecotypes. We can then look at the cost/benefit ratios of the traits found in the prevailing ecotype at any time and be certain that it is either already better adapted than any other or it is on its way there, no genetics required.
Richard Goldschmidt thought differently:
Microevolution by the accumulation of micromutations – we may also say neo-Darwinian evolution – is a process that leads to diversification strictly within the species, usually, if not exclusively, for the sake of adaptation of the species to specific conditions within the area it is able to occupy. This is the case for microevolution on the subspecific level of formation of geographical races or ecotypes. [….] Subspecies are actually, therefore, neither incipient species nor models for the origin of species. They are more or less diversified blind alleys within the species.”
It might not be clear from this quote, but Goldschmidt is directly refuting the basic assumptions that underly any assignment of meaning to a cost/benefit analysis of an adaptation within a large, sexually-outcrossing population. Nearly every one of these “microtraits” will end up being blind alleys.
Anyone interested in the topic needs to read Oliver Sacks’ book “The Island of the Colorblind.” It is an anecdotal story about a particular group of people, but it makes a very generalizable point. The point is that you cannot look at ecotypes and guess the history of an adaptation based upon costs and benefits. Achromatopsia is a very debilitating disease that not only renders people nearly blind but also makes it impossible to function in sunlight. On the island, this meant that males with the condition had to stay home with the females while the other males went out in the fishing fleet. And when a surprise storm wiped out the fishing fleet and the fit males with it, few men were left without the condition. And now we have a population where the prevalence of the condition could not possible be fit into a cost/benefit ratio. The phenotypic gambit gives the wrong answer, here and very probably a lot of other places as well.
It feels a bit juvenile to throw your words back at you, but the same metaphor you used came to me when I read that behavioral ecology overview you linked. It is “all over the place” with weak assumptions about underlying evolutionary mechanisms.
I’m not Andrew, but there is nothing about the evodevopsycho drivel I could ever get myself to respect – the whole nonsense was flawed, both conceptually and methodologically, from the very beginning, but became fashionable nonsense. The usual suspects lept onto the bandwagon.
Hint:
1) spend some time in zoos.
2) then spend – your physical resiliance permitting – some time out in the wild
3) spend some time in far-off lands (and I’m not talking about business lounge, taxi to the hotel, taxi to the office, and back)
4) go back to the (supposedly relevant) literature, and you’ll likely find yourself at TED-level.
I find little difference between Gladwell, Peterson, and Pinker, when it comes to this. They might merit the efforts of a sociological study (i.e. how to become a pop star), but that’s just about it.
(BTW: anthropology is hard graft – but thanks to a tradition inaugurated by Lévi-Strauss, the mere visit to a museum was apparently good enough for some, for a while.)
https://research.fi/en/results/publication/0697847825
https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=1JmtIa8AAAAJ&sortby=pubdate&citation_for_view=1JmtIa8AAAAJ:txeM2kYbVNMC
Hi Matt; I certainly will not dispute that ignoring genetics and concentrating on Darwinian Fitness, and all that we can lump under ‘cost/benefit analysis’ will fail for lots of traits. Ignoring the developmental mechanisms, and the underlying physiology may also doom the enterprise. But maybe it will work often enough to be useful…for the right kind of traits.
I attach 2 paper links here, both by Geoff Parker and friends. One is behind a pay wall, sorry..for me too, and one is free. The free one is about the early days of evolutionary game theory, and how we dealt with the ‘problem of whether the genetics will allow it to work. The other is a recent overview of the whole enterprise, including population genetics. Sometimes we did both the phenotypic Gambit and real population genetics for the traits. This was particularly true for sex ratio evolution. I know because I did a lot of it.
As Stu West and colleagues show in the review paper, the enterprise has been very productive for the kind of traits BEs work with, and sex ratio is the poster child for the success. You can read the summary in the review article or go all out and read the 2 basic books , one by me ,1982- and one by stu West, 2009.
Perhaps you should consider just what kids of traits the phenotypic gambit will work for; we certainly have.
I wont reply any more in this discussion thread.
Eric,
Yes, time to wind this down. I do think that some progress can be made on identifying important adaptations by working through Sewall Wright’s adaptive landscape approach. And I see that this approach is being exploited in the field of behavioral ecology, like here:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8687433/
I also noticed that the article you most recently linked has a perfect summation of my argument about the phenotypic gambit:
“Using Alan Grafen’s provocative turn of phrase, EGT/optimality procedures are based on a ‘phenotypic gambit’ [99]: they study
adaptations ‘as if there were a haploid locus at which each distinct strategy was represented by a distinct allele, as if [relative payoffs] gave the number of offspring for each allele, and as if enough mutation occurred to allow each strategy the opportunity to invade’.”
Matt.
Sex ratio evolution has always been based on diploid pop genetics, and we often elect to put the complexity in the environmental states, instead of the genetics. We know perfectly well that our equilibrial answers will generalize to a great many autosomal genetic models, so we find our phenotypic answers using single locus theory. This is discussed in the Parker history of Evol Game theory paper, as a general principle. Sam Karlin wrote a whole book on this for sex ratio!
Our interest is more in environmental states: see for an example: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1032&context=biol_fsp
That’s such a sad website. I feel sorry for the guy. I hope he gets the help he needs.