Biology without Biologism: Social Theory in a Postgenomic Age

Abstract

The epistemology of the life sciences has significantly changed over the last two decades but many of these changes seem to remain unnoticed amongst sociologists: both the majority who reject biology and the few minorities who want to biologize social theory seem to share a common (biologistic) understanding of ‘the biological’ that appears increasingly out of date with recent advances in the biosciences. In the first part of this article I offer an overview of some contemporary importations of biological and neurobiological knowledge into the sociological field. In the second section I contrast this image of biological knowledge circulating in the social sciences with the more pluralist ways in which biology is theorized in many sectors of the life sciences. The ‘postgenomic’ view of biology emerging from this second section represents a challenge for the monolithic view of biology present amongst social theorists and a new opportunity of dialogue for social theorists interested in non-positivist ways of borrowing from the life sciences.

Keywords

biology cultural evolution Developmental Systems Theory epigenetics Griffiths and Stotz’s biohumanities modern synthesis neurosociology postgenomic biology post-positivism Runciman

In Nikolas Rose’s recent claim that the human and social sciences are entering ‘a biological age’ (2013) the emphasis may sound excessive, but there is a truth of which sociologists need to take note and make some sense. Even commentators with very different opinions from Rose are aware that we live in a time when the boundary ‘between something called “biology” and “sociology”’ is being renegotiated (Fuller, 2007: 144), or at least that the relation between biology and sociology needs to be at the core of the new agenda of social science (Holmwood and Scott, 2007). Also, symbolically, 2013 has been the 60th anniversary of the discovery of the structure of DNA and the 10th anniversary of the deciphering of the human genome. The 150th anniversary of the publication of On The Origin of Species has just passed and few other scientific icons like the image of the double helix, the Human Genome Project and Darwin’s portrait can so powerfully characterize the profile of our time. However, it is not only iconic events that should alert sociologists today to a closer attention to the biological. More subtly, it is also that the biology of the last two decades or so has significantly changed its grammar and has become more and more permeable to social events. This has made the biology/society boundary increasingly difficult to patrol and the entwinement of biological and social facts a reality that is difficult to avoid. Amongst many, I note here three factors that illustrate important changes in the epistemology of the life sciences and its growing porosity to the facts of human sociality.

First, the selfish view of biology that was characteristic of the 1970s (Dawkins’ Selfish Gene) is giving way to a more pro-social view of evolution (Meloni, 2013). The social sciences have started, over at least two decades, to appreciate the possibility of a different view of the relationship between altruism and biology, in which altruistic behaviours are seen as an integral part of biological/social facts (Frank, 1988; Pilliavin and Charng, 1990). Social scientists are today no longer confronted with the ‘unattractive alternative’ of either thinking of human behaviours as isolated from biology or viewing them just as a mask for genetic self-interest (Sterelny and Griffiths, 1999).

Second, the brain is no longer represented in neurobiology as an isolated data processor but as a multiply connected device shaped by external social influences ‘that range from dyads, families, neighbourhoods and groups, to cities, civilizations and international alliances’ (Decety and Cacioppo, 2011). With all its limitations, the emergence of a field like social neuroscience represents this shift well.

Third, the new burgeoning field of molecular epigenetics is the latest newcomer to point at the indissoluble entanglement of biological and social events. Epigenetics refers to molecular mechanisms of gene regulation that may channel social-environmental information at the genetic level without altering DNA sequences. Epigenetics reveals that gene expression is dependent on social and environmental factors that, through mechanisms like methylation, can switch on and off genes. This makes of genomes, in the words of philosopher of science John Dupré, ‘dynamic entities that respond constantly and often adaptively to their environments, not merely cellular but social events’ (2012). This is why epigenetics has been defined as the biological proof of ‘how the social gets under the skin’ (Hyman, 2009).

The increasing ‘socialization’ of the biological emerging from these three changes is symptomatic of the fact that the 150-year story of the nature/nurture separation, with its wedge between biological and social factors, was ‘biologically fallacious’ (Meaney, 2001) and is probably coming to a close today (Goldhaber, 2012; Logan and Johnston, 2007). With the end of the nature/nurture dichotomy, biology is entering a new ‘postgenomic’ phase. The label postgenomic (Stotz, 2006, 2008) indicates here not merely, chronologically, what has happened after the Human Genome was deciphered in 2003, but, more importantly, the discovery of mechanisms beyond the genome that challenge established (i.e. biologistic) views of the biological as what is ‘genetic’, ‘innate’, ‘prior to social’, ‘essential’, ‘universal’, and ‘invariable’ (Oyama, 2000a, 2000b).

The problem I want to deal with here is that many of these changes seem to remain unnoticed amongst sociologists: both the majority who reject biology and the few minorities who want to biologize social theory seem to share a common understanding of ‘the biological’ that appears increasingly out of touch with recent advances in the epistemology and language of the life sciences. This paralyzing complicity neutralizes the possible penetration of the epistemic novelties of the new biology into social theory. To show how an outdated epistemology still dominates contemporary importations of biological knowledge into the sociological field, in the first section of my essay, I offer an overview of some recent borrowings from neuroscience and evolutionary thinking into the sociological field. In sketching this outline, the impression remains that the mainstream way of importing biological knowledge in the social/cultural field continues to be marked by a polarized narrative and a dichotomous set of metaphors: if the social sciences are ill, biology looks like the therapy; if sociological investigations are thin and fragmented, biological knowledge is solid and cohesive; finally, if the social is an erratic, ephemeral entity, lacking firmer ground, what is required is to anchor it onto the firmer basis of evolutionary thinking and neurobiological facts. This way of picturing biology clearly does not contribute to making the works of these outliers attractive for mainstream sociology. In reading biology through the eyes of these contemporary bio- or neuro-sociologists, the majority of social theorists will keep thinking that biology hasn’t changed much since the past, and, far from being a biology that is dynamically mixed with social facts, it remains a biology aiming, positivistically, to colonize the social. In the second section of this article I contrast this perception of biological knowledge amongst sociologists with the way in which many theoretical biologists and epistemologists within the life sciences have increasingly challenged such a monolithic view of biology, both in terms of theoretical discipline (the current paradigm crisis in the modern evolutionary synthesis) and concept (the end of the reassuring notion of the biological as a ‘solid basis’ sealed off from social processes). In conclusion, the discrepancy between these two images of ‘the biological’ in the everyday practice and theorizations of social theorists and biologists will be used as an opportunity to reflect critically on the epistemological position of the social scientist with regard to the life sciences.

Section 1 – Biologizing Social Theory: From the Crisis of Social Constructionism to the New Curiosity toward the Biological

Historically, intimacy and rejection have characterized the relationship between sociology and biology. Cycles of enthusiasm and refutation are part of this history. Two generations after Comte and one after Spencer, the Comtean plan to make biology ‘the guide and preparation for Sociology’ (1830) has already turned into the sour anti-biologism of the founding fathers of 20th-century sociology, in its different versions: Durkheimian, Weberian, or Boasian (Benton, 1991). As a recent historiography has stressed again (Renwick, 2012; cf. also Collini, 1983; Osborne and Rose, 2008), there is also a British version of this immunization from the biological. At the very origin of British sociology, the appointment of the anti-biologistic Hobhouse to the first LSE chair determines the irreversible split of sociology from Galton’s eugenics and Geddes’ civism. Overall though, in spite of the powerful injunctions to reject biology, the presence of biological inspirations informing the sociological agenda has been more obstinate than one would expect prima facie. In terms of intellectual history, biologism resembles a semi-submersed archipelago or more properly a karst river, a stream of water running in subterraneous caves and sinkholes that sometimes suddenly reappears on the surface. The last phase of intellectual history has been clearly once again one of these moments of resurgent interest toward the biosciences, in almost all the branches of the social disciplines, sociology included (Meloni, 2012). Taking as terminus a quo, at least for the UK, Ted Benton’s call for ‘a re-alignment of the human social and the life-sciences’ (1991), an increasing dissatisfaction toward the ‘bio-phobic’ attitude (Bone, 2009; Ellis, 1996; Franks and Smith, 1999; Freese et al., 2003) of the mainstream sociological tradition has progressively characterized sociological publications in the last two decades. This renewed interest toward biology has to be located in a very specific zeitgeist: the increasing frustration toward the fin-de-siècle hegemony of hermeneutic, social-constructionist and postmodernist approaches that, with their exclusive focus on issues of ‘language, meaning, and understanding’ (Shilling, 2003), simply reiterated the predominance of the cultural over the natural (Inglis and Bone, 2006). The most significant champion of this new sceptical attitude toward social constructionism has been the call to produce a ‘material-corporeal’ (Newton, 2003), ‘embodied’ foundation (Shilling, 2001) for social theory in British sociology (Birke, 1999; Dickens, 2001, 2004; Freund, 1988; Shilling, 1997, 2001, 2003, 2005; Turner, 1984; Williams, 1999; Williams and Bendelow, 1998; Williams et al., 2003). This stream of research has emphasized the importance of considering the body ‘not only as a location for social classifications’ but as ‘generative of social relations and human knowledge’ (Shilling, 2003: XII) trying to re-establish contact with the socio-natural level of human experience. It is not by chance that such embodied sociology has formed an excellent basis for dialogue with some key findings in the contemporary life sciences: for instance, the works of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio on the somatic dimension of thinking and morality (Cromby, 2004). However, these authors have often limited themselves to the rather general remark that ‘human bodies are simultaneously biological and social’ as Rose again points out. ‘They find it difficult to conceptualize the role that the social sciences might actually play in their relations with life scientists’ (2013: 13), and vice versa one should add. In the context of the growing attractiveness of biological arguments for the entire social science spectrum (Meloni, 2011, 2012), a mere appeal to embodying sociology is not enough, leaving an unfilled hole for those who want to go more deeply in mixing the social with the biological. The problem is that this hole keeps being filled by positivistic solutions that embrace biological findings as a foundational vocabulary through which to rewrite the whole sociological agenda. This is what has happened in the four approaches summarized below. These four programmes have been selected for discussion here because: 1) they represent the very latest examples to bring massive doses of biology into sociology, at least in the Anglophone world (with the exception of Runciman, all these authors began to biologize social theory only in the last decade); 2) they cover two of the most hegemonic themes in biology in the last decades: neuroscience and neo-Darwinian thinking; 3) epistemologically, they aim to appear as a new generation of biologizers, well aware of the polemics surrounding past biologistic writings and willing to avoid the same mistakes (reductionism, ‘neuronism’, a Panglossian view of selection, etc.); 4) each of these authors takes a cue from the crisis of legitimacy of social constructionism and postmodernism, and aims to make the most of it by proposing biological knowledge as a more solid foundation that can bring social theory into a safer territory. In spite of the fact that I have carefully avoided including in this overview opinions directly inspired by more reductionist frameworks like sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, the impression remains that all these authors are still very much implicated in an outdated version of the biological that makes it problematic to import their work into mainstream social theory, in any serious way. Nonetheless, mapping the work of these four outliers is an important task, as it reveals quite clearly the way biology remains conceptualized in many sectors of the social sciences.

Biologizing Social Theory Today I: Sociology and Neuroscience

Neurosociology

The first use of the term ‘neurosociology’ goes back to the 1970s when it referred to studies of variations in the use of areas of the brain due to different cultural and ecological pressures (TenHouten, 1997). However, in the recent writings of American sociologist DD Franks (Franks, 2003, 2010; Franks and Smith, 1999), ‘neurosociology’ has taken a much broader meaning, and now indicates the attempt to understand, inform, and reformulate concepts from the sociological traditions on the basis of the results and methodologies of contemporary neuroscience. As Franks writes, introducing his recent book Neurosociology: ‘Sociologists can find various areas of creditable neuroscience that on closer analysis are compatible with their interests (…) Many areas of neuroscience inform sociological understanding and deepen our knowledge of our essential social natures’ (2010: 6).

Of all the projects tending to use findings from the life sciences more directly, neurosociology is probably the closest to the intellectual agenda of the ‘material-corporeal sociology’ mentioned above. First, neurosociology is meant as an attempt to find a neurobiological embodiment for sociological concepts, especially those coming from the pragmatist and symbolic interactionist tradition, on the grounds that ‘symbolic processes are firmly dependent on brain processes’ (Franks, 2010: 64). Second, neurosociology openly locates itself within the ‘biological turn in social theory’ (Franks and Smith, 1999); it contests the boundaries and partitions between sociological and biological phenomena, and shares the frustration toward the ambiguity of symbolic interpretations and ‘the extremes of the “linguistic turn”’ (Franks, 2003: 613). To this dissatisfaction, however, it adds a further step, the idea that the vagueness of social-constructionist explanations must find a confirmation in neuroscientific discoveries. The key theoretical assumption of neurosociology is the aspiration to ground social and cultural processes in the activities of the working brain. Though it openly refutes reductionism (‘neuronism’: Franks, 2010: 154) and recognizes the reality of mind as irreducible to that of the brain (2010: 199), neurosociology’s basic epistemology reflects the assumption that the findings from neuroscience are somehow ‘deeper’ or more ‘tangible’ and less ‘debatable’ than sociological-culturalist findings. For instance, in the case of a phenomenon like intersubjectivity, Franks, relying rather uncritically on the new burgeoning literature on mirror neurons, claims that ‘since our motor cortices are actually doing what we watch others do, we share immediate and direct intersubjective understandings free from the ambiguity of symbolic interpretation’ (2010: 90, my italics). Neuroscience is unlikely to ‘replace the linguistic formulations of Mead and Cooley’, but it is somehow better positioned than sociology, Franks believes, to reveal the very social nature of humans, the fact that ‘our brains are social to the core’ (2010: 60). Sometimes neuroscience will not contradict sociological findings, but, even in these fortunate cases, the function of neuroscience is believed to give a firmer ground to ‘airy’ sociological explanations. As Franks claims, as a consequence of brain science advancements, we can say today that ‘comprehension, understanding, and intersubjectivity have been dislodged from the airy realm of pure symbols (…) into a firmer behavioral world of real success and failures’ (2010: 102, my italics). Biological knowledge emerges from Franks’ account as something stable and solid, opposed to the vagueness and ambiguity of sociological interpretations. The epistemic function of neuroscience seems to be to place a limit on the never ending debates in cultural and sociological disciplines. Franks concludes:

… in spite of our constant interpretations of its ways, the behavioural world is not as open to debate – at least not in brain science (…) With all our constant interpretations, we live in real worlds – of real actions and real consequences. Our brains and the mirror neurons seem constituted to respect this fact. (2010: 102, my italics)

Stephen Turner: Social Theory as a Cognitive Neuroscience

The starting point of the American sociologist Stephen Turner is somehow more radical than the approach of neurosociology. Turner’s basic assumption is that there is a mismatch between new discoveries in cognitive neuroscience and a certain conceptual legacy of the sociological tradition, and that this latter has to ‘adjust’ to the ‘reality’ of cognitive neuroscience if it wants to remain scientifically credible (2002: 20). In particular, the vocabulary of sociology that Turner believes is no longer tenable is the holistic vocabulary of ‘collective intentionality’, ‘tacit norms’, and ‘shared premises’, a neo-Kantian and Durkheimian legacy that for Turner has to be dismissed today as it fits ‘badly with what we have come to understand about (…) brain processes’ (2002: 4). What can produce today ‘a genuine rebirth of social theory’ (Turner, 2007a: 371) is for Turner only a radical transformation of its core concepts in the light of the vocabulary of cognitive science, and connectionism in particular. If social theory wants to avoid ‘the path of spiritualism’ (2002: 7), Turner continues, it has to take seriously the idea that ‘any plausible mental concepts in social theory need to be realizable in terms of the real features of real brains’ (2007a: 359). In Turner’s proposal what emerges clearly is a strategy of passively importing the findings of a particular scientific research program (cognitive neuroscience), whose epistemic premises are never questioned. To social-cultural disciplines in crisis, Turner wants to administer the bitter medicine of a cognitive science considered as truer, more ‘realistic’, and in the condition of validating (or dismissing) the dubious findings of the sociological tradition. As in Franks, recent discoveries in neuroscience are quite uncritically taken to show their superiority compared to sociological explanations. The recent findings around mirror neurons for instance are believed to ‘transform empathy (…) and imitation, from vague and dubious phenomenon that can be observed and described but not explained, into something that can be explained in terms of brain processes’ (2007a: 367; my italics); mirror neurons are believed to solve ‘the problem of the social transmission of skills and tacit knowledge’ in a more straightforward and elegant way than the Bourdieusian notion of habit, for instance (see Turner, 2007b). This use of biological knowledge as an external validation for sociological concepts reaches, in Turner, the point of affirming a principle of physical realism for theoretical constructs, by which ‘a theory that matches up with known causal mechanisms [in the brain] is better than one that does not’ (2007a: 368). The use of the brain sciences in Turner is thus as an ultimate yardstick against which it is possible to measure the truth of a certain theory. Turner concludes provocatively:

… one can imagine a future in which the absence of any such correspondence, for example, between a notion of normativity, and any specifiable activity in an actual brain location, would count as a ground for doubting the cognitive causal reality and role of that concept. (2007a: 367)

Biologizing Social Theory Today II: Evolutionary Theory and Sociology

Alex Mesoudi: Darwinizing the Social Sciences

With Alex Mesoudi’s proposal for a Darwinization of culture we move from neuroscience and cognitive science to the use of evolutionary methodology and findings as a ‘common theoretical framework’ (2011: 23) to reform and unify (‘synthesize’) the social sciences. In a series of articles and in a recent monograph, Mesoudi has stressed ‘the similarity between biological and cultural change’ (2011: X). Since in the study of culture the three conditions of variation-competition-inheritance are met, for Mesoudi, a Darwinian analysis of culture is entirely possible:

… culture exhibits key Darwinian evolutionary properties. If this is accepted, it follows that the same tools, methods, and approaches that are used to study biological evolution may productively be applied to the study of human culture, and furthermore, that the structure of a science of cultural evolution should broadly resemble the structure of evolutionary biology. (Mesoudi et al., 2006: 329)

In truth, Mesoudi presses things even further and proposes a second and more direct historical parallel: the social sciences, Mesoudi believes, ‘are currently in a similarly fractioned state as the biological sciences were prior to the 1930s’ and are therefore ready to become the object of a larger synthesis, a process of reformulation and unification of the single disciplines on the model of what the modern evolutionary synthesis (hereafter MS) did to the ‘fractured biological sciences’ between the 1930s and 1940s (2011: 210).

Although this is not the space to discuss thoroughly the soundness of Mesoudi’s proposal, or to go into the details of the many criticisms that the idea of modelling culture in analogy with biological evolution has historically received, a series of observations can still be proposed in this summary. First, it has to be recognized that Mesoudi’s proposal stays away from the most problematic aspects of both late 19th-century waves of evolutionary sociology and the dogmatic neo-Darwinism of sociobiology or memetics. In the first case, no naïve linear progressism or evolutionary stages are implied by Mesoudi’s account; in the second case, Mesoudi is aware of the importance of explicitly incorporating ‘non-neo-Darwinian microevolutionary processes such as blending inheritance, Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics, and nonrandom variation’ in his evolutionary analysis of culture (2011: 47). In spite of these and other appreciable corrections, however, Mesoudi often falls victim to the same rash ambitions (for instance: 2011: 205), partisan claims (2011: 206), and unconvincing metaphorical apparatus of former reductionist attempts to biologize the social (the same idea of ‘synthesizing the social sciences’ in his title resonates with Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis). Exactly as in these past reductionist frameworks, Mesoudi tends to maintain a series of uncritical oppositions that polarize his narrative: between the ‘vagueness’ of concepts like ‘socialization’ or ‘social influence’ (2011: 56) on one side, and ‘fully scientific, quantitative, and rigorous’ (2011: 18) approaches drawing inspirations from the biological sciences, on the other; between the lack of achievements and slowness of what he calls nonevolutionary social sciences and the successes of biology (Mesoudi et al., 2006); between the fragmentation and plurality of paradigms in the social sciences, and the victorious unification of evolutionary theory under the aegis of the modern synthesis. Also, his treatment of alternative nonevolutionary approaches in the social sciences is often caricatural (Lewens, 2012), as when he claims that ‘mind-body dualism’ lurks behind the resistance to psychologize cultural/sociological phenomena (Mesoudi, 2011: 52). Moreover, Mesoudi never discusses his basic epistemological assumption that ‘the traditional social sciences are hindered by the separation of different methods and different subjects into different disciplines’ (2011: 208, my italics), and seems to take for granted that unification is always better than a plurality of paradigms. Finally, and more importantly, his belief that the ‘little theoretical common ground’ (2011: XIII) between the different branches of the social sciences can be cured by the advent of an evolutionary synthesis on the model of the MS in the 1940s (2011: 53) is never really problematized in his work. This over-confidence in the integrative force of MS, around which Mesoudi’s theoretical hypothesis revolves, might look to be ill timed, as we see in the final section.

Runciman’s Selectionist Sociology

Runciman’s proposal for a selectionist sociology, ‘a programme of research which starts from the premise that social evolution comes about through a process analogous to natural selection’ (1998: 169), is an obvious final candidate in this synopsis. Runciman’s ‘quest for a distinctively Darwinian sociology’ (1998: 168) arises from the remark that over the last few decades an intellectual revolution has occurred in the understanding of human behaviour as a consequence of the extension of the neo-Darwinian paradigm (or ‘new synthesis’) to the study of human affairs. This growing body of research, which ‘bears directly on sociology’s traditional concerns’ (2009b: 358), has not, however, found an intellectual referent within the sociological agenda. This is exactly the gap that Runciman aims to fill, by applying ‘the concepts and methods which have proved so successful in the explanation of the evolution of species to the explanation of the evolution of human cultures and societies’ (2009a: VII). In overt polemic against ‘the founders’ of sociology, Runciman claims that the time has come to challenge ‘the inability, or unwillingness, of 20th-century sociologists to move beyond the agenda bequeathed by Marx, Weber, and Durkheim’ (2008: 358–9). ‘Sociologists who feel threatened by the claims made by, or on behalf of, evolutionary psychologists (…) will have to refute them rather than simply bemoan their influence’, Runciman observes (2008: 361).

Methodologically, Runciman’s suggested extension of ‘the neo-Darwinian paradigm’ to social and cultural processes starts from a classification of human behaviour into three categories: biologically evoked, culturally acquired, and socially imposed behaviours. These three levels are inescapably integrated, and the analysis of social and cultural phenomena in terms of ‘heritable variation and competitive selection’ (2009a: 9) requires an understanding of this threefold structure. The selectionist sociology Runciman envisages is therefore committed to the study of the ‘simultaneous workings of natural and cultural and social selection’ (2009a: 70), not the reduction of one level onto the others. Clearly much of this strategy lies on the assumption of profound analogies between biological evolution, cultural evolution, and social evolution (between genes, memes, and practices for Runciman) that, though distinct in their workings, can be all studied in terms of the triad of variation-competition-inheritance, as we saw in Mesoudi. And, as in the case of Mesoudi, it is fair to give Runciman credit for recognizing some of the potential issues with selectionism, such as the fact that ‘not all cultural and social variation can be explained by natural selection’ (2009a: 8) and the question of dis-analogies between the three levels of selection (2009a: 52). He is also aware of some problematic assumptions of neo-Darwinism, such as its reading of the organism as merely passive to the requirements of the environment (2008: 365), and its tendency to be Panglossian in some of its conclusions about optimization (2008: 367).

However, in spite of these caveats, one can find in Runciman much of the same conceptual apparatus already seen at work in other authors here reviewed. First, especially in his publications in the late 1990s (1998: 163–4), Runciman confidently embraces several very controversial notions such as evolutionary psychology’s list of ‘metacultural constants’ (Brown), and other similarly dubious hypotheses such as the ‘language instinct’ (Pinker) and the view of the mind as a set of specialized psychological algorithms (Tooby and Comsides). Second, although his attacks against a certain holistic vocabulary in sociology are not so vitriolic as Turner’s, Runciman still proposes an epistemological model in which biological findings are conferred the authority to authenticate sociological vocabularies: he writes that collective categories such as ‘Western mind’ or ‘conscience collective’, though they don’t need ‘to be expunged’ from the vocabulary of sociology, have ‘to be validated by accurate reports of the distribution and ongoing reproduction of identifiable memes which significantly influence the course of cultural and social evolution’ (2009a: 119). Finally, the usual metaphorical apparatus of ‘firmer bases’ and ‘stable foundations’ is also found in Runciman. Once again, biological findings are said to offer sociology ‘a basis far more solid than Marx, Weber, or Durkheim could have conceived of’ (2008: 367, my italics) and neo-Darwinian theory is supposed to guarantee the social sciences the ‘theoretical grounding which they otherwise lack’ (1998:175).

Section 2 – Biology in the Postgenomic Age: Biology without Biologism

The prospect of a unification between the social and the life sciences, emerging from the authors reviewed above, has received a salvo of criticism throughout history. One recent version of these critiques has emphasized that scientific disciplines, far from constituting ‘a unified, homogeneous whole’ are in fact just a set of different pragmatic tools (Derksen, 2005: 141), reflecting a fundamental pluralism and disunity of epistemic virtues (Dupré, 1993). Philosophically speaking, I am totally sympathetic to this critique, which, by emphasizing variations and competition amongst disciplines, seems much more Darwinian (Gergen, 1998) than any unifying metaphysics. However, this is not the path of criticism that I will follow here: first this line of critique is much more familiar to sociologists; second, in assuming only incommensurability, and thus lack of overlap amongst different disciplines, this stream of critique has historically run the risk of leaving the epistemological status of the natural sciences untouched. This is why I want to dedicate this remaining section to convey another sort of critique: I refer to the idea that the image of biology emerging from many of the writings summarized above may be in a significant way out of touch with how biological knowledge is currently theorized in the writings of a growing number of theoretical biologists and epistemologists within the life sciences themselves. There is a ‘mystique’ in the monolithic notion of biology (Jackson and Rees, 2007) evoked by many social scientists that might be due more to the illusory effect of looking at biology from a distance (or with positivistic glasses) than an actual sense of how biology is currently explored within the discipline itself, with all its complexity, plurality, internal conflicts and dissent. This is why I suggest looking more closely at the way in which biology is currently reflected upon within its epistemic borders, both as a theoretical discipline and as a concept.

Biology as a Theoretical Discipline: A Monolithic Synthesis?

All the authors reviewed here have a tendency not to question the disciplinary status of the biological knowledge that they want to import into social disciplines. This is true for Franks’ and Turner’s passive attitude with regard to neuroscience as well as for Runciman’s and Mesoudi’s taking for granted the solidity of the Modern Synthesis (MS) and neo-Darwinism. I focus my analysis here on these two latter authors in particular.

The over-confidence in the solidity of evolutionary theory as a ready-made package capable of offering the most disparate answers transpires, for instance, from Runciman when he expresses his confidence in the explanatory success of ‘neo-Darwinian’ theory, its ‘proven capacity to resolve such hitherto vexed questions as reciprocal altruism, mate choice, senescence’ (1998: 163). For Mesoudi, even more significantly, the MS not only offers the theoretical framework to reconstruct the social/cultural sciences, but also a model of integration for them (repeating what MS did to fragmented biological disciplines in the 1940s). However, even a rapid overview of the debate occurring in theoretical biology today shows a reality very distant from this vision of MS as a firm, uncontroversial understanding of evolutionary processes. It is impossible to go into more substantial detail here, but the least that can be said is that theoretical biology witnesses today an explosion of proposals and intellectual movements whose ambition goes from ‘extending’ (Pigliucci and Muller, 2010) to bringing a ‘revolutionary change’ (Gilbert and Epel, 2009; Jablonka and Lamb, 2005) into the very foundations of MS. Intellectual movements like Developmental Systems Theory (DST) (Oyama et al., 2001), Niche-Construction (Lewontin, 2001; Odling-Smee et al., 2003) and Evo-Devo (Amundson, 2005; Muller, 2007), just to name a few, are symptomatic of the very fluid status of evolutionary theory and the heated debate within it. Each of these new proposals aims to highlight certain shortcomings of the neo-Darwinian consensus: the flux of information is not only one-directional, from genes to organisms, as the MS believed (DST); the organism is not a passive object of the environment but contributes to its construction (niche-construction); development is not a trivial factor, the mere activation of a ‘genetic program’, that can therefore be sidelined when understanding evolution (Evo-Devo). It goes beyond the goals of my article to discuss more deeply these three major revisions of evolution. What is important to notice for the purpose of my analysis is that, against many of the stereotypes found in the four biologizers reviewed above, biology as a theoretical discipline is today a field of intense epistemological conflicts and disagreements, in which a strong pluralism, epistemological tensions, and lack of stability characterize its internal debate. Evolutionary theory is not ‘set in stone’ (Jablonka and Lamb, 2005), but a discipline open to revisions, challenges, and contestations in a certain measure as the social sciences are. My critique joins here what postpositivist critiques in social theory have convincingly repeated (Holmwood, 1996; Kemp, 2005): a theoretical framework for the social sciences cannot be built in advance on the basis, in this case, of an idealized view of ‘evolutionary thinking’, imagined as a prêt-a-porter conceptual scaffolding, but has to emerge from a constant dialogue with the substantive empirical research and situated current theorizations in the biosciences. And what clearly emerges from this substantive research is a more dynamic notion of biology, no longer sealed off from the influences of the social, as my second point illustrates.

Farewell to Biologism: From Biology as a ‘Firmer Basis’ to Interactant in a Chain

Moving from biology as a disciplinary field to ‘biology’ as a concept, what emerges from the contribution of each of these new movements, and Developmental Systems Theory in particular, is a demolition of one the key conceptualizations that has been so great a part in the irresistible allure of appeals to biological knowledge. I refer to the stratigraphic (or foundational) model according to which the concept of ‘biology’ is invariably associated with notions of a ‘firmer basis’, or a ‘deeper layer’ upon which social and cultural processes are ‘anchored’, and ‘guaranteed’ in their workings (or ‘limited’ in their range of variations). Nothing like this hierarchical model reveals the essence of biologism. It has been the criticism of Susan Oyama in particular (2000a, 2000b) to expose the widespread tendency to use the notion of ‘the biological’ in such a foundational way, that is as a solid bedrock that lies below cultural and social ‘appearances’. The stratigraphic model is present every time an author conveys the idea that in moving from the social to the biological, we are moving, so to speak, ‘“down” the layers (…) from effect to cause, from the provisional to the immutable, from the trivial to the profound, from the merely mental to the fundamental’ (Oyama, 2000a: 164–5). This hierarchical way of thinking is accompanied almost inevitably by a set of metaphors of solidity, stability, and logical primacy of biological processes, as it has emerged quite eloquently from the language of almost all the authors reviewed above: from neurosociology’s idea of a ‘firmer behavioral world’ revealed by neuroscience as an alternative to the ‘airy’ vocabulary of sociology (Franks, 2010: 102), to Runciman’s notion of a ‘basis far more solid’ offered by evolutionary findings (2008: 367).

My argument here is that this uncritical way of conceptualizing the biological as a stable, more fundamental, pre-existing resource, is strictly connected to parallel, increasingly untenable, views of the gene as a context-independent, primary cause of development. The bad news for this kind of foundationalist biology is that such a view of the gene squares poorly with the context-dependent view of the gene that is increasingly making its way into contemporary ‘postgenomic’ biology (Barnes and Dupré, 2008; Dupré, 2012; Griffiths and Stotz, 2007; Keller, 2000; Lewkowicz, 2011; Mameli, 2005; Moss, 2003; Oyama et al., 2001; Parry and Dupré, 2010; Robert, 2004). For this new postgenomic biology, it is meaningless to think of the biological as something given in advance of the social/environmental level. As neuroscientist Michael Meaney remarked more than 10 years ago:

There are no genetic factors that can be studied independently of the environment, and there are no environmental factors that function independently of the genome (…) At no point in life is the operation of the genome independent of the context in which it functions. (2001: 51–2)

The recent explosion of interest in epigenetics is the most telling example of this postgenomic appreciation of a bi-directional interaction between ‘the biological’ and the ‘environmental’. In epigenetic terms, gene expression is determined by regulatory mechanisms that depend on social experiences and environmental factors such as maternal-offspring interaction, nutrition, and exposure to stress. Epigenetics shows how gene expression is directly affected by ‘nurture’ factors and life events, and how the link between ‘the social’ and ‘the biological’ is impossible to disentangle. Especially in the light of this, the ‘biological’ that the theorists reviewed here still fantasise about is an outmoded legacy of the old nature/nurture dichotomy. The paradox here is therefore that while the importation of biological knowledge into the human/social sciences often contributes to reinforce the foundational view of biology as what always comes first in the chain of causal factors (which is the essence of biologism), an increasing body of research within the life sciences is leaving behind all this metaphorical apparatus and making room for a more pluralistic and contingent vision of ‘the biological’. Once biology loses its mystique it becomes just another interactant, in the language of Developmental Systems Theory, that co-contributes to socio-cultural processes. A social-cum-biological exploration is made even more plausible by this postgenomic approach, but losing the allure and authoritative dimension that is often attributed to the importing of biological knowledge into the social.

Conclusion

I have tried in this article to show the discrepancy between the image of biology circulating even in sophisticated accounts within the social sciences, and the actual biology as it is disputed and reflected upon by professional epistemologists in the life sciences, especially in the light of recent postgenomic developments. The possibility of this discrepancy, a possibility in which theorists in the social sciences play the paradoxical role of reinforcing the less dynamic accounts of biology, should offer elements for reflecting on the position of the sociologist with regard to the life sciences today. Karola Stotz and Paul Griffiths’ (2008) recent proposal for a biohumanities is a very helpful way to conceptualize this position. The biohumanities model is an attempt to create a space where the role of the humanities/social sciences is neither one of passive acceptance nor of mere commentary on ‘the significance or implications of biological knowledge’ (2008: 37). What biohumanities suggests is a ‘more intimate relationship between biology and the humanities’ (2008: 38), the opening of a critical space where our understanding of biology is enriched and challenged, not merely accepted as an undisputed fact. In contrast to the predominant notion that ‘biologists provide the facts while humanists and social scientists are confined to discussing the implications of those facts’, the biohumanities approach has the ambition of producing research able to ‘feed back into our understanding of biology itself’. The result of this critical awareness should be the emergence of more contingent and dynamic views of biological knowledge. Although it would need an epistemological expertise that is currently lacking in the sociological curricula in our universities, this contingent view of biology would make the construction of a sociological-cum-biological research program much more practicable. This may seem too ambitious a project for the present, but the alternative is to stay trapped in the current oscillation between uncritical importation and disdainful rejection of biological knowledge into the social field. In this age of renegotiation of the boundary between the facts of bios and social facts, this unfruitful position is something that future generations of sociologists and social theorists can no longer afford.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I thank my colleagues Brigitte Nerlich, Paul Martin and Aleksandra Stelmach for common discussions on the meaning of epigenetics, John Holmwood for several conversations on social theory, and Andrew Turner for his help with the English language in the text.

Funding

I acknowledge the contribution of a Marie Curie ERG grant, FP7-PEOPLE-2010-RG (research titled ‘The Seductive Power of the Neurosciences: An Intellectual Genealogy’).

Maurizio Meloni is a social theorist working on the history and political implications of the life sciences, neuroscience and epigenetics in particular. He has published in journals such as Economy and Society, Subjectivity, Telos, History of the Human Sciences, and the Rivista Italiana di Psicoanalisi, in the edited volume Neurocultures (2011) and a recent collection on neuroscience and political theory (Routledge, 2012). He is currently preparing a book on biology and social theory in a postgenomic age (Palgrave).

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