H&SS Scholars Co-edit Special Issue of AJS

H&SS Scholars Co-edit Special Issue of AJS

The American Journal of Sociology published a special issue devoted to the intersection between genetics and sociology. The supplement, published in November 2008, was the collaboration of the Health & Society Scholar Program’s Codirector, Peter Bearman, Sara Shostak, H&SS Cohort 2 and Molly Martin, H&SS Cohort 1, who coedited the issue titled “Exploring Genetics and Social Structure.”

The special issue, now available online, discusses how thinking about genetics can shape sociological thinking about social structure. In contrast, to much recent work on the seam between genetics and social science focuses on trying to estimate how much of any particular behavior is environmental or genetic or if human behavior can be examined without investigating the influence of genetics. The special issue considers whether genetic knowledge of all sorts has an impact for sociologists’ understanding of social process.

“There was a sense,” Bearman said in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “that there were two modes of thought about genetics and health. One was ‘Genetics causes everything.’ Another was a refusal to think that anything related to genetic expression was worth studying.”

The special issue explores the middle ground bringing sociologists to the conversation with ten articles discussing a wide range of issues, sex, weight, mathematical achievement, illness, education, happiness and others. The range of topics is matched by a range of opinions about ways in which the integration of genetic information impacts fundamental ideas in the social sciences.

“Just about every week the Science Times - one of the places where science meets the public - enthusiastically reported on new research findings that revealed the genetic basis for something (intelligence, voting behavior, obesity, depression, sexual behavior, religiosity, orgasms, altruism and egoism, generosity, thrift, and, of course, earwax type).” Bearman writes in the introduction to the special issue. “Aside from the earwax, the phenomena reported to be ‘genetic’ were largely of sociological interest. Yet sociologists were rarely discussed in these articles.”

Jeremy Freese’s article in the special issue, “Genetics and the Social Science Explanation of Individual Outcomes,” argues that genetics can only influence major outcomes by first influencing the development of our embodied characteristics, especially psychological traits; that the challenges posed to sociology by behavioral genetics therefore are challenges primarily from psychology; and that because the importance of genetic differences depends on social context, sociologists need to develop theory about the aspects of social context that lead genetic differences to matter.
 
In his article “Gene by Social Context Interactions for Number of Sexual Partners among White Male Youths: Genetics Informed Sociology,” Guo considered specific genes in conjunction with sociological observations to examine differences in numbers of sexual partners. He concludes, “The genetics informed sociological analysis here suggests that explaining a human trait or behavior may require a theory that accommodates the complex interplay between social contextual and individual influences and genetic predispositions.” Here, thinking with genetics, Guo identifies core contextual effects on sexual behavior not necessarily seen previously.

Martin’s study of adolescent obesity also concludes that an ”interplay” between the genetic and the environmental is necessary to examine the full range of the growing obesity rate. Martin writes that her article “The Intergenerational Correlation in Weight: How Genetic Resemblance Reveals the Social Role of Families,” “is the first to demonstrate that the association between parents’ obesity and adolescent weight is both social and genetic. Furthermore, by incorporating genetic information, the shared and social origins of the correlation between inactivity and weight are better revealed.” Martin finds that elements of the genetic and social are at play and by examining both, the role of social influence becomes even more pronounced, not less.

The contributions from all ten articles illuminates different and sometimes divergent ways of thinking about the influence that genetics can have on sociology and also the potential influence of sociology over what can seem definitive and simplistic genetic explanations of human outcomes.

There are an increasing number of data sets that combine both genetic and social factors, like the Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health that make studies like Martin’s possible. As the number of data sets that combine both social and genetic information increases and medical understanding of genetics expands, sociologists will continue to debate the issue and make difficult decisions about their own work and the role of genetics in the field of sociology as a whole.

“Sociologists should not feel that our enterprise is diminished by findings that genetic differences are causally related to differences in the individual outcomes we study,” Freese writes, “for sociological thinking is fundamental to explaining why.”

To read the AJS Special Issue in its entirety please visit, http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/ajs/114/s1
and to learn more about the Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholars Program visit their
website at http://www.chssp.columbia.edu/.