Biophobia in Social Theory
Discussion
Arnold Schroder:
"Social theories which are based on schismatic nature-nurture oppositions are characterized by a general lack of integrated thinking, by a tendency to conflate what is different and segregate what is the same. In 1995, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, two early contributors to evolutionary psychology, wrote an often-cited essay describing the lack of progress in social sciences throughout the 20th century, caused by what they referred to as biophobia. In it, they noted precisely this broader legacy, of a tendency toward experiential and conceptual fragmentation, in which biophobic social theory operated.
- Humans, like every other natural system, are embedded in the contingencies of a larger principled history, and explaining any particular fact about them requires the joint analysis of all the principles and contingencies involved. To break this seamless matrix of causation—to attempt to dismember the individual into “biological” vs. “nonbiological” aspects—is to embrace and perpetuate an ancient dualism endemic to the Western cultural tradition: material/spiritual, body/mind, physical/mental, natural/human, animal/human, biological/social, biological/cultural. This dualistic view expresses only a premodern version of biology, whose intellectual warrant has vanished.
So prevalent was the rejection of human nature in the academy at the time they wrote, they called it the Standard Social Sciences Model (SSSM). They were eager to note the term standard was not meant to imply that the myriad theories within the SSSM were in any sense consistent with one another. On the contrary, the very lack of any overarching framework into which the far-flung adventures of various social scientists could be integrated was a central point.
- Disconnection from the rest of science has left a hole in the fabric of our organized knowledge of the world where the human sciences should be. After more than a century, the social sciences are still adrift, with an enormous mass of half-digested observations, a not inconsiderable body of empirical generalizations, and a contradictory stew of ungrounded, middle-level theories expressed in a babel of incommensurate technical lexicons."