Abstract
Criminologist at Boise State University, Anthony Walsh (b. 1941) begins his latest book thus: “I became a college freshman at the ripe old age of thirty after having been a marine, merchant seaman, and police officer. I wanted to be a physical therapist, so I majored in biology. The Vietnam War was at its height, and the sociopolitical atmosphere was tumultuous when I took my first sociology class during my junior year.” He explains that his introduction to the field, via Peter Berger’s books and “the works of sociology’s founding fathers,” excited him, yet in time he learned that the most intriguing elements of the discipline were laid out early in his coursework: “In grad school Isoon found out that we got all the exciting stuff early on in sociology and there was no real improvement on it in subsequent classes.” He believes this is because sociology, unlike biology and the other natural sciences, is not scientific enough to be cumulative. He also reports that “I’m a recovering Marxist.”
Like many of his criminological colleagues, he understands “the real world” of crime and incarceration through personal acquaintance with its protagonists. This gave him concrete knowledge that his colleagues, distanced from the social world of the criminal, almost always lack. And having been there, Walsh does not much cotton to the sociological reductionism that he believes dominates contemporary American sociology. His tastes run more toward biological explanations for human action, though he is too sophisticated in his appreciation of both disciplines to discount their mutual interaction. If an entirely socio-centricexplanation for human behavior seems nonsensical to Walsh, so, too, does genetic or biological reductionism of the type that enthralls the most dedicated sociobiologists: “Sociologists would be pleased to know that the natural sciences view genes and culture as co-evolutionary partners, and that culture is a major, perhaps the major, force in the evolution of both the psychology and morphology of our species” (p. xv).
Eleven chapters constitute the book, each one swiftly moving through a major topic bearing on Walsh’s overall theme. He begins by recalling Lester Ward’s ethical hostility to Social Darwinism but refuses to follow that line since “advocacy must not be confused with science” (p. 3). By referring without let-up to items in a very large bibliography (pp. 239–275), Walsh carries on a dialogue with those who are hostile to biological reasoning as applied to human actions. He believes they are in error, but is willing to hear them out before shifting to other sources of wisdom, for instance, Nikolas Tinbergen’s “four famous questions” (pp. 9–10). He concludes his opening broadside by defending reductionism, holism, determinism, and essentialism—despite the thoroughgoing opposition to these concepts byhis peers in social science—because “real” science requires their ready application to whatever data and concepts it hopes to defend.
Chapter Two is a short course in genetics as it should be understood by sociologists. Walsh confronts head-on the standard objections to genetic explanations for behavior by introducing the fundamentals of molecular genetics, quantitative trait loci, epigenetics, and other things that biology majors learn but sociologists do not. The third chapter continues in this vein by simplifying how the brain interacts with its cultural environment, in all its fabulous complexity. Though not technically as demanding as textbooks on brain functioning, Walsh’s pursuit of “Macro Gene-Culture Interactions: 5-HT Polymorphisms” and related topics is not breezy reading: “About 75% of East Asians carry at least one short allelle of the 5-HTTLPR compared with about 44% of Europeans . . . and only about 20% of persons of African descent carry it” (p. 57, pertaining to tendencies toward depression).
The remaining chapters deal with debates more familiar to sociologists at large, including intelligence, SES, family dynamics, gender roles, crime, and political economy. Walsh writes with passionate regard for the biological substrate beneath all social action, but is not so enamored of the purely genetic that he slights the sociological. Though the book will likely be embraced more by those already in his camp than by opponents of his view, he manages to deflate the general argument raised against socio-biology ever since eugenics was rejected 90 years ago. Confidence in physiological explanations of behavior seems most often to comfort the political right, but Walsh shows this is not an entirely reasonable standpoint.