Political science: sociology's disdain for the scientific method undermines its scientific pretensions.

ALTHOUGH sociology proclaims itself as the queen of the social sciences, it has never graduated to the status of a fully scientific enterprise. The essential flaw of modern sociology is its failure to accept the limitations of social engineering dictated by the facts of human biology. We know beyond reasonable doubt that humanity is an evolved species whose nature is in significant part fixed. Yet contemporary sociology neglects or suppresses the growing body of information about human nature that is being uncovered by behavioral biology and its related fields.

On account of its vast biological ignorance the practice of sociology today is often as fanciful as the alchemy of the Middle Ages. Despite continuing controversy around the margins, it is now indisputable that humans have certain essentially immutable traits not changeable by short-term social interventions. Sociologists will continue their vain quest for social gold, usually communalistic or sexual utopias, until their methods and theories reflect these immutable aspects of human nature.

SUCH a harsh judgment on an entire field of study may seem extravagant. After all, sociologists are a diverse bunch, employing methods from stratospherically abstract verbal theorizing to sophisticated observational and statistical procedures. Fortunately, however, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Sociology has recently provided an authoritative summary of the entire field that allows us to assess its scientific content. Precisely because of the breadth and clarity of its exposition, the Dictionary is a most damning document. It reveals a discipline at odds with biology and the other natural sciences -- a discipline whose main unifying principle is not a powerful set of scientific theories, but a devotion to left-wing ideology.

Let us begin our browse through the dictionary with the entry on sociobiology. (Readers may recognize the word 'sociobiology' because of its public exposure during a controversy beginning in 1975, when Harvard professor Edward O. Wilson published his volume of the same name.) The summary of sociobiology in the Concise Oxford Dictionary is inaccurate and woefully incomplete, making clear that political opposition and professional jealousy are still interfering with a fair-minded evaluation of biology's contributions to social science. No mention is made of the actual theoretical origins of Wilson's and other sociobiologists' ideas. They are Darwinians who view the behavior of humans and other animals through the prism of natural selection. Drawing on research in population genetics, they argue that genes for behavior, like other genes, are selected insofar as they contribute to reproductive success. Thus genes for various behaviors that in the past have made men and women successful at leaving descendants define current human nature.

The Dictionary's omission of the intellectual provenance of sociobiology undoubtedly has political roots. Wilson's understanding of innate human behavioral tendencies revives and refines the concept of human nature for our times. The academic Left, however, detests the concept of human nature because it is a barrier to their utopian schemes for transforming man by changing society. Therefore the strong support for a biologically based concept of human nature in evolutionary theory -- by any account one of the most important scientific discoveries of the millennium -- must be suppressed. Most sociologists would ridicule Biblical creationists, but to sustain their politics they must remain creationists themselves -- only with society rather than God as man's creator.

Our browse through the Dictionary continues with a group of entries connected with family relationships. Even before the modern synthesis of natural selection and genetics made clear how human behavior in general was a biological adaptation, it was widely understood that family relationships were features of the natural world because they were found across cultural and national boundaries and even had similarities to relationships in other species. It is hard to see how the more audacious sociological claims about the family reported in these entries could be taken seriously at a time when modern science shows them to be not only false but ridiculous.

Childhood: Most people understand that childhood is a state of progression from infancy to adulthood that is a natural fact of the physical world. But listen to the Dictionary: '[C]hildhood is constructed on the inabilities of children as political, intellectual, sexual, or economic beings despite empirical evidence to the contrary, . . . [T]his serves the need of capitalist states.' Or, 'The child also provides state agencies with the excuse to intervene in irregular families, and to change or dismember them. . . .' The entry pays no heed to the voluminous scientific evidence on cross-cultural universals in the states of a child's development from infancy to adulthood and in parent -child interaction and play. Only willful ignorance of the most elementary facts of biology could lead the Dictionary to describe the child's dependent state as constructed by exploiting capitalists or meddlesome bureaucrats.

Family, nuclear: While conceding that anthropological studies emphasize the 'naturalness' of the nuclear family, the Dictionary immediately adds that 'sociologists emphasize that biology is not sufficient for understanding family forms.' Rather, the entry suggests alternative sociological theories: for instance, the nuclear family may be a cultural adaptation to industrial society or a means for oppressing women. According to the Dictionary, 'The nuclear family is no longer the norm in either Britain or America,' though it concedes that the family is a 'remarkably resilient institution. . . . ' The entry simply fails to note that maintenance of familial bonds remains the norm for related individuals, whether they reside together or not.

If sociology were swayed by science more than by ideology, it would have deployed the evolutionary theory of kin selection to explain the 'resilience' of family bonds in society after society: humans have a tendency to take an abiding interest in their kin's welfare because their kin share copies of many of the same genes. Once again, however, a biological theory that offers a serious explanation of a human universal is ignored in favor of political musings.

Marriage: Incredibly, the reproductive function of marriage is not mentioned. The question, 'Why do people marry?' does not even raise the possibility that providing a secure base for child-rearing is a prime function or concern. To anyone but a sociologist this would seem at least some part of the explanation. As it happens, biology has developed a well-tested theory that explains the diverse relations between the sexes in different species in terms of the need for parental investment. Because of the naturally long period of childhood dependency in our species, children were more likely to survive if the father joined with the mother to pool their resources and efforts for raising their children. Thus marriage, one of our most enduring institutions, has roots in a human adaptation to the natural world. Reading the Dictionary, however, one could get the impression that marriage is wholly dependent on contingent power relations between social groups or the sexes.

Maternal deprivation: The Dictionary offers a cautious definition: '[T]he absence of maternal care considered necessary for later mental health' (emphasis added) and then adds: 'Feminists denounce the idea for its ideological role in subordinating women to motherhood.' From a naturalistic perspective, however, motherhood is not in the first instance something to which women are subordinated. Taking care of children is a reproductive function for which females of bird and mammal species have been selected, to which most women aspire, and for which they are usually well adapted. But in any case, how is a denunciation of the idea of maternal deprivation itself relevant to sociology as a science, rather than as ideology? Would it be relevant for a dictionary of bird behavior to report that some ornithologists denounce the idea of gravity because it prevents birds from soaring as far as they might?

Motherhood: Feminist themes are continued in this entry, with modern biological knowledge again notably absent. The Dictionary states that many empirical feminist studies have 'challenged the common assumption that women have some instinctive desire to have children and to care for them. . . .' '[S]ome feminist theorists have suggested that it is the biological fact of child bearing that is the key source of women's oppression, . . . [h]owever, such claims have been hotly contested. . . .' One is glad to hear that such ideas are contested.

It would have been more reassuring to learn that the opposition is in the overwhelming majority, and that it makes use of hard biological science. Girls' and women's spontaneous learning of child-care behaviors has been well documented cross-culturally, and maternal care is also common in other primates, humans' closest relatives. Yet the biological view of the function of motherhood is simply not stated. Feminist ideology rather than science is the motherhood and apple pie of sociology's study of the family.

IN addressing sexuality, the Dictionary takes yet another tack in order to devalue the importance of biology: it treats all theories, including biology, as equally valid parts of scientific discourse, rather than as sets of hypotheses that may be proven true or false.

Gender: The Dictionary does discuss biological ideas about gender, an exception to the trend noted so far. For example, a criticism of the sex - gender distinction is reported that reaffirms the importance of biological issues in women's lives, sees sex differences as biologically, not socially, constructed, and critiques that form of feminism that would eradicate gender in favor of androgyny. The entry under ''sex roles'' also notes the biological and psychological theories of sex-role differences as well as criticisms of them.

However, the Dictionary goes on to expressly entertain the views of Michel Foucault, the radical French philosopher, for whom science is just another social construction of the powerful rather than a means of discovering objective truth. The Dictionary states ''[Foucault's approach] too can be another means by which biology is discounted and biological science dismissed as merely a social discourse.'' Going by the Dictionary in the area of gender studies, sociology fails the test of empirical rationality because its practitioners do not believe that one side of a debate can be right and other sides wrong.

Sex, sociological studies of: The sociological study of gender and sex roles is relatively enlightened in comparison to the treatment of sex. Mention is made of the differences in human sexuality between the sexes that are shown by behavioral studies, brain physiology, ontogeny (the study of the course of development of fetuses and babies), and endocrinology (the study of hormones). But instead, the entry emphasizes sociology's in-house work on sexuality, begun in the 1960s, which rejects biological concepts such as an innate sex drive or innate differences in sexuality between men and women. The entry thus embraces ideas about sex from Foucault, feminism, and social constructionism that are united in their hostility to naturalistic conceptions of sex.

The culturalist twists given to human sexuality are, of course, fascinating and relevant to the study of society. But it is scientifically irresponsible to begin deconstructing a phenomenon before one has established as firm a description of it as possible. If sociology were a science, the Dictionary could have in the first instance drawn on the mainstream biological disciplines dealing with sex. Such an approach would describe the universal procreative and bonding functions of sex and of sexual signaling not only in humans but in other animals. Sociology could then ground its analysis of sexuality in firm knowledge gained from behavioral biology and evolutionary theory.

Consider, for example, what might have been achieved by a short entry under ''hormones and behavior.'' Endocrinology offers knowledge vital for the study of gender, sex differences, sexuality, aggression, dominance, and hierarchy: it shows how all these behaviors are influenced by the hormonal balances in our bodies. The Dictionary's decision to omit mention of hormonal effects, however, is not hard to understand, because such discussion would cast serious doubt on so much of sociology's recent work on sexuality. It would suggest that the differences in sexual behavior between the sexes are not entirely the product of social processes but have biological roots as well.

Since man is simultaneously part of the natural and the social world, it is necessary to find a way to connect the natural and social sciences that seek to describe his behavior. Biology provides that bridge. Its strongest span is Darwin's theory of evolution, which reaches out to connect such diverse disciplines as genetics, biochemistry, demographics, physiology, and behavior. But rather than accept biology as a bridge to the natural sciences, sociologists spend a large part of their time rationalizing their failure to cross it. As a result, sociology today is like a decaying medieval city cut off from the rest of the world. It concentrates on rearranging the rubble within its walls rather than on rebuilding its structures with the ever more bountiful resources available outside.