Political Science, Department of
Date of this Version
October 2006
Abstract
Recent research by E.O. Wilson, James Q. Wilson, Simon, Alford-Hibbing, Carmen and others indicates that the competing social science paradigms of behavioralism and rational choice are in their last throes. Their salient weakness is insensitivity, bordering on ignorance, to politics as a biologically-orchestrated phenomenon. More specifically, political scientists know precious little about either genetics or evolutionary dynamics.
In this paper, I present a new theory--sociogenomics--to replace the shopworn conceptions of yesterday’s political science. I then demonstrate how social scientists can employ the tools of molecular biology to flesh out the genes coding for baseline political attitudes and behaviors. The theory and methods of sociogenomics will serve to synthesize the social sciences with the natural sciences in a broader consilient framework, so that the laboratory of Darwinian investigation can become the laboratory of Aristotelian investigation.