The biosocial: sociological themes and issues

Biology: Scott and Marshall's authoritative and bestselling Dictionary of Sociology (2009) has no entry for it. There are entries for Wilfred Bion, the Kleinian psychoanalyst, or for sociometry, the almost-forgotten method of measuring social relationships. In place of biology, we find an entry for 'biological reductionism, or biologism', a pejorative term indicating the ideology of the deterministic application of biological findings to society. To make things more problematic, biologism has one reminder, Robert Ardrey, successful science-writer of stories of killer-ape human ancestors, very popular between the 1960s and the 1970s. Giants of the real history of biology, in contrast, such as August Weismann, or Theodosius Dobzhansky, are not even considered. And it is actually very difficult to imagine that Ardrey's speculation was somehow more relevant to the sociological imagination than Weismann's displacement of Lamarckism, or Dobzhansky's populational rethinking of race with its massive impact on post-1945 social sciences.