Sociology and Evolutionary Biology:
From Competing to Complementary Explanations of Human Sociality
Russell K. Schutt, PhD, Professor of Sociology,
University of Massachusetts Boston
Monday, March 12, 2018
5:15 pm - 6:15 pm
S1-149
About the seminar
More than 150 years after Darwin's Origins, and in spite of several notable attempts at consilience, the discipline of sociology has neither integrated the insights of evolutionary biology nor overcome widespread resistance to transdisciplinary theorizing. Identifying the likelihood of and potential for such disciplinary engagement requires reviewing the history of sociologists' responses to evolutionary biology, evaluating the costs and benefits of disciplinary disengagement, and identifying developments in both disciplines that motivate reconnection. Theoretical debate over the social implications of Darwinism is therefore reviewed from sociology's classical period to the present, progressing from Herbert Spencer and Émile Durkheim to George Herbert Mead and Talcott Parsons and concluding with Jonathan S. Turner and Robert J. Sampson. The use and disuse of evolutionary biology in sociological research is explored in subfields ranging from health and group process to crime and social stratification. Modern developments in evolutionary biology, genetics, and social neuroscience are used to suggest a new foundation for connecting sociology and evolutionary biology and to highlight challenges that remain.
About the speaker
Russell K. Schutt, PhD is Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Boston, Research Associate in Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School (Massachusetts Mental Health Center, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center), and Research Associate at the Veterans Health Administration (Edith Nourse Rogers Veterans Hospital). His research and publications focus on the social environment and individual functioning, service preferences, and the organization and delivery of public programs, in relation to homelessness, mental illness, public health, and organizational and legal processes. His research has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Cancer Institute, the Veterans Health Administration, the Fetzer Institute, and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, and other sources. His recent scholarly books include Social Neuroscience: Brain, Mind, and Society (co-edited), and Homelessness, Housing and Mental Illness (both Harvard University Press), and he has authored and co-authored multiple research methods texts with SAGE. In 2007, he received the Chancellor's Distinguished Service Award at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
Website: http://rschutt.wikispaces.umb.edu/
FMI, contact:
David Sloan Wilson, EvoS Director