Criticisms of the scientific status of sociology possess some validity when applied against narrowly positivist interpretations of sociological methods and metatheory, but do not undermine the scientific project of formulating generalized explanatory models. (1) Critics allege that sociology has made no lawful findings; but valid general principles exist in many areas. (2) Situational interpretation, subjectivity, reflexivity, and emergence are alleged to undermine explanatory sociology, but these topics themselves can be explained by a widened conception of science that allows informal procedures (...) in theorizing aimed at maximizing explanatory coherence. (3) The fact that intellectual discourse itself is a historically changeable social product does not invalidate objective explanatory knowledge. (4) The historicist claim that there can be no principles that hold across particular times and places is invalid and rests upon a confusion of underlying generative principles with the complexities of the empirical surface of history. (5) Metatheoretical criticism of the concept of causality does not undermine a sophisticated conception of scientific sociology. Sociological knowledge can and does advance, but it depends upon building the coherence of theoretical conceptions across different areas and methods of research. (shrink)

The debate about the credentials of sociobiology has persisted because scholars have failed to distinguish the varieties of sociobiology and because too little attention has been paid to the details of the arguments that are supposed to support the provocative claims about human social behavior. I seek to remedy both deficiencies. After analysis of the relationships among different kinds of sociobiology and contemporary evolutionary theory, I attempt to show how some of the studies of the behavior of nonhuman animals meet (...) the methodological standards appropriate to evolutionary research. I contend that the efforts of E. O. Wilson, Richard Alexander, Charles Lumsden, and others to generate conclusions about human nature are flawed, both because they apply evolutionary ideas in an unrigorous fashion and because they use dubious assumptions to connect their evolutionary analyses with their conclusions. This contention rests on analyses of many of the major sociobiological proposals about human social behavior, including: differences in sex roles, racial hostility, homosexuality, conflict between parents and adolescent offspring, incest avoidance, the avunculate, alliances in combat, female infanticide, and gene–culture coevolution.Vaulting Ambitionthus seeks to identify what is good in sociobiology, to expose the errors of premature speculations about human nature, and to prepare the way for serious study of the evolution of human social behavior. (shrink)