Oxford Handbook of Evolution, Biology, and Society

About this book

Evolution, biology, and society is a catch-all phrase encompassing any scholarly work that utilizes evolutionary theory and/or biological or behavioural genetic methods in the study of the human social group, and The Oxford Handbook of Evolution, Biology, and Society contains a much-needed overview of research in the area by sociologists and other social scientists. The examined topics cover a wide variety of issues, including the origins of social solidarity; religious beliefs; sex differences; gender inequality; determinants of human happiness; the nature of social stratification and inequality and its effects; identity, status, and other group processes; race, ethnicity, and race discrimination; fertility and family processes; crime and deviance; and cultural and social change.

The scholars whose work is presented in this volume come from a variety of disciplines in addition to sociology, including psychology, political science, and criminology. Yet, as the essays in this volume demonstrate, the potential of theory and methods from biology for illuminating social phenomena is clear, and sociologists stand to gain from learning more about them and using them in their own work. The theory focuses on evolution by natural selection, the primary paradigm of the biological sciences, while the methods include the statistical analyses sociologists are familiar with, as well as other methods that they may not be familiar with, such as behavioral genetic methods, methods for including genetic factors in statistical analyses, gene-wide association studies, candidate gene studies, and methods for testing levels of hormones and other biochemicals in blood and saliva and including these factors in analyses.

Oxford Handbook of Evolution, Biology, and Society will be of interest to any sociologist with an interest in exploring the interaction of biological and sociological processes. As an introduction to the field, it is useful for teaching upper-level or graduate students in sociology or a related social science.

Contents

Part I: Introduction
1. Introduction: Evolution, Biology, and Society
      Rosemary L. Hopcroft
2. Divergence and Possible Consilience between Evolutionary Biology and Sociology
      Richard Machalek
3. Sociology's Contentious Courtship with Biology: A Ballad
      Douglas A. Marshall
4. Edward Westermarck: The First Sociobiologist
      Stephen K. Sanderson

Part II: Social Psychological Approaches
5. Discovering Human Nature through Cross-Species Analysis
      Jonathan H. Turner
6. The Neurology of Religion: An Explanation from Evolutionary Sociology
      Alexandra Maryanski and Jonathan H. Turner
7. Reward Allowances and Contrast Effects in Social Evolution: A Challenge to Zygmunt Bauman's Liquid Modernity
      Michael Hammond
8. Sex Differences in the Human Brain
      David D. Franks
9. The Savanna Theory of Happiness
      Satoshi Kanazawa and Norman P. Li
10. How Evolutionary Psychology Can Contribute to Group Process Research
      Joseph M. Whitmeyer

Part III: Biosociological Approaches
11. The Genetics of Human Behavior: A Hopeless Opus?
      Colter Mitchell
12. DNA is Not Destiny
      Rose McDermott and Peter K. Hatemi
13. On the Genetic and Genomic Basis of Aggression, Violence, and Antisocial Behavior
      Kevin M. Beaver, Eric J. Connolly, Joseph L. Nedelec, and Joseph A. Schwartz
14. Genetics and Politics: A Review for the Social Scientist
      Adam Lockyer and Peter K. Hatemi
15. Genes and Status Achievement
      François Nielsen
16. Peer Networks, Psychobiology of Stress Response, and Adolescent Development
      Olga Kornienko and Douglas A. Granger
17. Stress and Stress Hormones
      Jeff Davis and Kristen Damron
18. Social Epigenetics of Human Behavior
      Daniel E. Adkins, Kelli M. Rasmussen, and Anna R. Docherty
19. Physiology of Face-to-face Competition
      Allan Mazur

Part IV: Evolutionary Approaches
20. Evolutionary Behavioral Science: Core Principles, Common Misconceptions, and a Troubling Tendency
      Timothy Crippen
21. Evolutionary Family Sociology
      Anna Rotkirch
22. Evolution and Human Reproduction
      Martin Fieder and Susanne Huber
23. Evolution, Societal Sexism, and Universal Average Sex Differences in Cognition and Behavior
      Lee Ellis
24. Evolutionary Theory and Criminology
      Anthony Walsh and Cody Jorgensen
25. The Biosocial Study of Ethnicity
      Frank Salter
26. Human Sociosexual Dominance Theory
      Kristin Liv Rauch and Rosemary L. Hopcroft

Part V: Sociocultural Evolution
27. From Paganism to World Transcendence: Religious Attachment Theory and the Evolution of the World Religions
      Stephen K. Sanderson
28. The Evolutionary Approach to History: Sociocultural Phylogenetics
      Marion Blute and Fiona Jordan

Part VI: Conclusion
29. Why Sociology Should Incorporate Biology
      Rosemary L. Hopcroft

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Biography

Rosemary L. Hopcroft is Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She has published widely in the areas of evolutionary sociology and comparative and historical sociology, in journals that include the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Evolution and Human Behavior, and Human Nature. She is the author of Evolution and Gender: Why It Matters for Contemporary Life (Routledge 2016).