Review by Choice Review
Degler surveys the rise, decline, and resurgence of biology, especially Darwinian biology, as offering acceptable explanations in social science. He analyzes the early 20th century shift from biological determinism as the explanation of social differences to exclusively cultural determinants. Then, with the advent of the Synthetic theory of evolution and ethology, Degler traces the rise of biological explanation once again. He stresses the reformist ideological components in the shift from biology to cultural explanation. Science, he argues, played a secondary role. The ideological dimension has been familiar in analyses of the first period, he writes, but is less discussed or acknowledged for the second. The new biological phase, Degler insists, is not a ideological return to racism, sexism, or social Darwinism, but an attempt to place human beings properly in the framework of organic evolution. The return of biology to social science has not been without controversy. The book reviews both the resistence to social biology and the ramifications of it for related concerns and disciplines. Recommended for all libraries. Good index; notes. -N. C. Gillespie, Georgia State University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Charles Darwin, who spoke frequently of savages and lower races of intermediate creatures and wrote that men were superior in mind and body to women, implicitly accepted a hierarchy of human beings. Social Darwinism left a legacy of racism, exclusionary immigration policies, eugenics and discrimination against women, as Stanford historian Degler demonstrates in this scholarly, dispassionate, historical examination of the nature vs. nurture controversy. Today, new biocultural theories of evolution shouldn't it be: `new biocultural theories of evolution'?aa stress the interaction of environment and heredity; ethologists studying lions and chimps in the wild revealless wordy. aa continuity between animal and human behavior; animal rights activists draw on Darwin for support; and sociobiologists maintain that human morality has been shaped by biologytighter.aa . Degler argues that this ``return to biology'' is not a return to Social Darwinism, as culturalists have charged, but an attempt to give biological and genetic factorsor `influences'?aa/leave as is.gs their due. His wide-ranging discussion also exploresok? aa the incest taboo and differences between the sexes. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Noted historian Degler's new work covers much of the same nature-nurture territory as Kenneth Bock's Human Nature and History ( LJ 11/15/80), but most of the material is presented as narrative history full of personalities and contexts rather than simply as competing ideas. Ranging from Darwin's day to the present, this account chronicles the rise, fall, and recent resurgence of biological and hereditarian (especially racial and gender-based) explanations of the variations in behavior and intelligence. Degler's study is thoroughgoing and evenhanded, though it is far more engaging when it recounts struggles to overcome racism and eugenics in the early decades of this century than when it attempts to evaluate current work on these topics . For academic and larger public library collections.-- Glenn Petersen, Baruch Coll., CUNY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The sobering conclusion one reaches at the end of this immensely informative and detailed history of social thought is that there is more to human nature than earlier commentators have imagined. Degler (American History/Stanford; At Odds, 1980) is marvelously adept at synthesizing paradigms past and present, quoting the prime movers in anthropology, psychology, biology, and other social sciences. Much of his text is devoted to a chronicle of the nature (biology) or nurture (culture) debate in relation to race, male/female differences, and intelligence. Darwin is seen as partly responsible for Social Darwinism and racism since he deplored the propagation of ""the weak members of civilised societies"" and despised the Tierra del Fuegans as savages. The swing away from biological determinism came with Franz Boas and his followers and later with cultural supremacists such as Leslie White and Claude LÉvi-Strauss. In the decades between came the intelligence-testing movement, sterilization laws, behaviorism, the ""new syntheses"" of evolutionary biology and genetics, ethology, and sociobiology. World War II did much to counter racism, and the postwar years defeated behaviorism. Today, no one paradigm rules the roost, although Degler clearly sees value in the contributions of ethology and such ideas of sociobiology as inclusive fitness. His final chapters present varying contemporary interpretations of the incest taboo, male/female differences, and evolutionary theory in relation to sociopolitical thought. He concludes with conjectures on the evolution of culture itself, with discussions of the continuity from animals to man in self-awareness, planning, and even ethics--a discussion that leads him to conclude that some of Darwin's most radical ideas are only now coming to the fore. Wonderfully written history that provides a challenging perspective on what it is (or what people have thought it is) to be human. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
