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If sociologists ignore genes, will other academics -- and the wider world -- ignore sociology?
Some in the discipline are telling their peers just that. With study after study finding that all sorts of personal characteristics are heritable -- along with behaviors shaped by those characteristics -- a see-no-gene perspective is obsolete.
Nor, these scholars argue, is it reasonable to concede that genes play some role but then to loftily assert that geneticists and the media overstate that role and to go on conducting studies as if genes did not exist. How, exactly, do genes shape human lives, interact with environmental forces, or get overpowered by those forces? "We do ourselves a disservice if we don't engage in those arguments," says Jason Schnittker, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. "If we stay on the ropes, people from a different perspective, with a more extreme view, will be making them."
Schnittker is among the contributors to a special issue of the American Journal of Sociology, the field's flagship publication, devoted to "Genetics and Social Structure" -- evidence that at least some sociologists are attempting to reckon with the genetic revolution. And not just in the AJS. Other top sociology journals, too, are publishing work incorporating genetic perspectives: The American Sociological Review in August published a much-discussed article on genes and delinquency by Guang Guo, of the University of North Carolina. (A couple of years ago, in an early foray on this front, Guo co-edited a special section of another top journal, Social Forces, titled "The Linking of Sociology and Biology.")
It is even possible to identify sociology departments in which gene-environment interactions amount to a subfield: Chapel Hill, for one. Its department boasts at least five tenured scholars who write on the subject, and it offers a graduate seminar on genes and society.
The idea for the special issue of AJS was hatched a couple of years ago at Columbia University, under the aegis of that campus's Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholars Program. Its fellows are encouraged to reach across disciplinary lines, and Peter Bearman, who co-directs the Columbia program, found that he and two young visiting fellows, Brandeis's Sara Shostak and Penn State's Molly Martin, shared an interest in...