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5/3(三) 何榮宗(香港城市大學社會與行為科學系副教授) Returning Biology to Evolutionary Sociology: Reflections on the Conceptual Hiatuses of “New Evolutionary Sociology” as a Vantage Point

刊登日期:2023-04-26  
友善列印
【學術演講】

講題:Returning Biology to Evolutionary Sociology: Reflections on the Conceptual Hiatuses of “New Evolutionary Sociology” as a Vantage Point
講師:何榮宗(香港城市大學社會與行為科學系副教授)
主持:陳克瀚(國立臺北大學社會系助理教授)
時間:112/5/3(三) 12:00-14:00
地點:國立臺北大學三峽校區社會科學院807

【講師簡介】
何榮宗,香港城市大學社會與行為科學系副教授,英國倫敦大學亞非學院博士。研究興趣包含社會問題、華人社會發展、社會學理論等等,2017年出版書籍 "Occupational Health and Social Estrangement in China."。
【演講簡介】

Decades of scholarly efforts to reignite the theoretical integration between sociology and biology have come to partial fruition in the birth of evolutionary sociology at the turn of the twentieth-first century. This paper examines one of the most elaborated versions of the paradigm—“new evolutionary sociology” (NES)—proposed by Jonathan H. Turner and colleagues. NES emphasizes purposeful, multilevel selective pressure targeted at corporate units, groups, or societies—rather than the blind, Darwinian natural selection on individuals—from which institutional systems are developed. Despite its contribution, NES possesses conceptual lacunae that have fettered NES in specific and evolutionary sociology in general from becoming a novel and truly evolutionary-cum-sociological paradigm in explaining social phenomena. This paper identifies three conceptual hiatuses of NES, in that it lacks due deliberation of (1) the gene-culture interaction that bridges individual behaviors—via natural, sexual, group, and multilevel selections—with the emerging sociocultural formations; (2) the epistemic role of fitness as a post factum propensity in empirical analysis; and (3) the concept of causal mechanism utilized to explain the diverse paths leading to the emergent phenomena.