The Oxford Handbook of Evolution,

Biology, and Society Rosemary L.

Hopcroft (Editor)
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 T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

E VOLU T ION ,
B IOL O G Y, A N D
SOCIETY
The Oxford Handbook of

EVOLUTION,
BIOLOGY, AND
SOCIETY
Edited by
ROSEMARY L. HOPCROFT

1
 3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hopcroft, Rosemary L. (Rosemary Lynn), 1962– editor.
Title: The Oxford handbook of evolution, biology, and society /
[edited by] Rosemary L. Hopcroft.
Other titles: Evolution, biology, and society
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, [2018] |
Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017030134 | ISBN 9780190299323 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Sociobiology—Handbooks, manuals, etc.
Classification: LCC HM628 .O94 2018 | DDC 304.5—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017030134

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
 Contents

About the Editor ix

About the Contributors xi

PA RT I I N T RODU C T ION
1. Introduction: Evolution, Biology, and Society 3
Rosemary L. Hopcroft
2. Divergence and Possible Consilience Between Evolutionary Biology
and Sociology 13
Richard Machalek
3. Sociology’s Contentious Courtship with Biology: A Ballad 33
Douglas A. Marshall
4. Edward Westermarck: The First Sociobiologist 63
Stephen K. Sanderson

PA RT I I S O C IA L P SYC HOL O G IC A L
A P P ROAC H E S
5. Discovering Human Nature Through Cross-​Species Analysis 89
Jonathan H. Turner
6. The Neurology of Religion: An Explanation from Evolutionary
Sociology 113
Alexandra Maryanski and Jonathan H. Turner
7. Reward Allowances and Contrast Effects in Social Evolution:
A Challenge to Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity 143
Michael Hammond
8. Sex Differences in the Human Brain 163
David D. Franks
vi   Contents

9. The Savanna Theory of Happiness 171

Satoshi Kanazawa and Norman P. Li
10. How Evolutionary Psychology Can Contribute to Group Process
Research 195
Joseph M. Whitmeyer

PA RT I I I B IO S O C IOL O G IC A L A P P ROAC H E S
11. The Genetics of Human Behavior: A Hopeless Opus? 221
Colter Mitchell
12. DNA Is Not Destiny 241
Rose McDermott and Peter K. Hatemi
13. On the Genetic and Genomic Basis of Aggression, Violence, and
Antisocial Behavior 265
Kevin M. Beaver, Eric J. Connolly, Joseph L. Nedelec,
and Joseph A. Schwartz
14. Genetics and Politics: A Review for the Social Scientist 281
Adam Lockyer and Peter K. Hatemi
15. Genes and Status Achievement 305
François Nielsen
16. Peer Networks, Psychobiology of Stress Response,
and Adolescent Development 327
Olga Kornienko and Douglas A. Granger
17. Stress and Stress Hormones 349
Jeff Davis and Kristen Damron
18. Social Epigenetics of Human Behavior 379
Daniel E. Adkins, Kelli M. Rasmussen, and Anna R. Docherty
19. Physiology of Face-​to-​Face Competition 409
Allan Mazur

PA RT I V E VOLU T IONA RY A P P ROAC H E S

20. Evolutionary Behavioral Science: Core Principles, Common
Misconceptions, and a Troubling Tendency 423
Timothy Crippen
 Contents   vii

21. Evolutionary Family Sociology 451

Anna Rotkirch
22. Evolution and Human Reproduction 479
Martin Fieder and Susanne Huber
23. Evolution, Societal Sexism, and Universal Average Sex Differences
in Cognition and Behavior 497
Lee Ellis
24. Evolutionary Theory and Criminology 517
Anthony Walsh and Cody Jorgensen
25. The Biosocial Study of Ethnicity 543
Frank Salter
26. Human Sociosexual Dominance Theory 569
Kristin Liv Rauch and Rosemary L. Hopcroft

PA RT V S O C IO C U LT U R A L E VOLU T ION
27. From Paganism to World Transcendence: Religious Attachment
Theory and the Evolution of the World Religions 589
Stephen K. Sanderson
28. The Evolutionary Approach to History: Sociocultural Phylogenetics 621
Marion Blute and Fiona M. Jordan

PA RT V I C ON C LU SION
29. Why Sociology Should Incorporate Biology 643
Rosemary L. Hopcroft

Index 647
 About the Editor

Rosemary L. Hopcroft is Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at

Charlotte. She has published widely in the areas of evolutionary sociology and compar-
ative and historical sociology in journals that include the American Sociological Review,
American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Evolution and Human Behavior, and Human
Nature. She is the author of Evolution and Gender: Why It Matters for Contemporary Life
(Routledge, 2016).
 About the Contributors

Daniel E. Adkins is Assistant Professor of Sociology, Human Genetics, and Psychiatry

at the University of Utah. His research, broadly quantitative and interdisciplinary, inte-
grates social inequality perspectives on stress with genomic big data to map how social
disadvantage becomes epigenetically encoded, influencing downstream gene expres-
sion, health, and behavior. He has published over 50 peer-​reviewed articles in high-​
impact sociology, psychiatry, and genetics journals. In addition to pursuing his own
eclectic research interests and teaching statistics, he serves as statistical consultant to the
Utah Consortium for Families and Health Research.
Kevin M. Beaver is Judith Rich Harris Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at
Florida State University and visiting Distinguished Research Professor in the Center for
Social and Humanities Research at King Abdulaziz University. His research examines
the causes of antisocial behavior.
Marion Blute is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Toronto. Her the-
oretical interests are in selection processes of all sorts, and her empirical interests are in
the sociology of science/​scholarship and genders. She is a member of the editorial advi-
sory board of Biological Theory, of the editorial board of Spontaneous Generations: A
Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science, and an associate of Behavioral and
Brain Sciences. She is past Chair of the Evolution, Biology and Society section of the
American Sociological Association and a past member of the nominations and of the
Marjorie Grene and Werner Callebaut Prize Committees of the International Society
for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology. Her monograph, Darwinian
Sociocultural Evolution: Solutions to Dilemmas in Cultural and Social Theory, was pub-
lished by Cambridge University Press in 2010.
Eric J. Connolly is Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and
Criminology at Sam Houston State University. His research interests include biosocial
criminology, criminological theory, developmental/​life course criminology, and vic-
timology. His work focuses on examining the genetic and environmental contributions
to individual differences in antisocial behavior at different stages of the life course.
Timothy Crippen is Professor of Sociology at the University of Mary Washington. He
has specialized expertise in the evolution of various aspects of human social behav-
ior and in sociological theory. He is co-​author (with Joseph Lopreato) of Crisis in
Sociology: The Need for Darwin (Routledge, 2001). His work has been published in Social
xii   About the Contributors

Forces, Human Nature, and Sociological Perspectives, among other academic journals,
and he has contributed chapters to various edited scholarly volumes.
Kristen Damron is a graduate student in sociology at California State University, Long
Beach. Her work focuses on the impact of stressful social conditions on health. She plans
to pursue research on positive psychology in the near future.
Jeff Davis is Professor at California State University in the Departments of Sociology
and Human Development. He has published in the areas of neurosociology, human
behavioral ecology, and social inequality. His research focuses on the harmful effects of
structural inequalities on neurobiological functioning and social behaviors.
Anna R. Docherty is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Utah and the
Virginia Commonwealth University. Her research integrates dimensional phenotypic
assessment and genomic data to predict risk for severe psychopathology. She explores
strategies for genetic subtyping and risk analysis, and also the influences of comorbid
conditions on psychiatric trajectories.
Lee Ellis is a semi-​retired former Professor of Sociology at Minot State University and
Visiting Professor in Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Malaya. His main
areas of research are sex differences in behavior, social stratification, criminality, and
religion.
Martin Fieder is Associate Professor of Evolutionary Demography in the Department
of Anthropology at the University of Vienna. He has studied evolutionary anthropology,
behavioral biology, and informatics. His main research areas are human reproduction
and social status, homogamy, evolution of religions, and behavioral genetics.
David D. Franks has focused on the subject of neurosociology during the past dec-
ade. His book, Neurosociology: The Nexus Between Neuroscience and Social Psychology
(Springer, 2010), received an award from the Evolution, Biology and Society section of
the American Sociological Association (ASA). His book, Neurosociology: Fundamentals
and Current Findings, will be published in 2018 by Springer. In 1977, he came from the
University of Denver to chair the Department of Sociology at Virginia Commonwealth
University. He retired as Professor Emeritus in 1999. In 2015, he was awarded a Lifetime
Achievement Award from the Sociology of Emotions Section of the ASA. He was also
elected Chair of the Evolution, Biology and Society Section of the ASA in 2014–​2015.
Douglas A. Granger, PhD, is a psychoneuroendocrinology researcher who is well
known for his development of methods related to saliva collection and analysis and
the theoretical and statistical integration of salivary measures into developmen-
tal research. He is Chancellor’s Professor of Psychology, Public Health, and Pediatrics
at the University of California, Irvine, and has created and leads The Institute for
Interdisciplinary Salivary Bioscience Research. He holds adjunct appointments in the
School of Nursing, Bloomberg School of Public Health, and School of Medicine at Johns
Hopkins University.
 About the Contributors    xiii

Michael Hammond is a retired Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto.

He currently lives in San Francisco, California (michaelhammond@rogers.com). His
most recent project is titled “Fool’s Gold: Repetition Allowances and Contrast Effects in
Modern Economies.”
Peter K. Hatemi is Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Microbiology and
Biochemistry at The Pennsylvania State University. His research focuses on explicating
individual differences in preferences, decision-​making, and social behaviors on a wide
range of topics, including political behaviors and attitudes, addiction, violence and ter-
rorism, public health, gender identification, religion, mate selection, and the nature of
interpersonal relationships.
Susanne Huber is Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the
University of Vienna. She has studied behavioral biology. Her current research interests
involve evolutionary explanations of human behavior, effects of the early environment,
and epigenetic mechanisms underlying early life factor effects.
Fiona M. Jordan is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Bristol, where she
leads a research group on explaining cultural diversity. Her work uses comparative phy-
logenetic methods to answer questions about cultural evolution across human popu-
lations, with a particular focus on kinship, language, and the Austronesian-​speaking
societies of the Pacific. Her integrative research draws on a multidisciplinary back-
ground in anthropology, evolutionary biology, psychology, and language sciences.
Cody Jorgensen is Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Boise
State University. He earned his PhD in criminology from the University of Texas at
Dallas in 2014. His areas of interest include biosocial criminology, criminological the-
ory, statistics, policing, and forensics.
Satoshi Kanazawa is an evolutionary psychologist and intelligence researcher;
Reader in Management at the London School of Economics and Political Science; and
Honorary Research Associate in the Department of Clinical, Educational and Health
Psychology at University College London. He is Fellow of the Society of Experimental
Social Psychology, and serves as Associate Editor of the American Psychological
Association journal Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences. He has written over 120 peer-​
reviewed scientific articles and book chapters in all of the social sciences (psychol-
ogy, sociology, political science, economics, and anthropology), as well as in biology,
medicine, epidemiology, gerontology, demography, and criminology. His article “Why
Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent,” published in the March 2010 issue of Social
Psychology Quarterly, was widely reported in the media throughout the world, with the
combined viewership of 400 million people worldwide (estimated by Meltware News).
He is the author of The Intelligence Paradox: Why the Intelligent Choice Isn’t Always the
Smart One (Wiley, 2012) and coauthor (with Alan S. Miller) of Why Beautiful People
Have More Daughters (Penguin, 2007). His LSE home page is http://​personal.lse.ac.uk/​
Kanazawa.
xiv   About the Contributors

Olga Kornienko, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Applied Developmental Psychology at

George Mason University. Her research focuses on understanding how peer networks
promote and constrain psychological adaptation, development, and health across the
lifespan, particularly during adolescence. She approaches her research from an inter-
disciplinary perspective, drawing on theories and methods from developmental and
social psychology, sociology, network science, and psychoneuroendocrinology. Her
research has been funded by National Institutes of Health and been published in Child
Development, Developmental Psychology, Social Neuroscience, Hormones and Behavior,
Social Networks, and other outlets.
Norman P. Li, MBA, PhD is Lee Kong Chian Fellow and Associate Professor of
Psychology at Singapore Management University, and Associate Editor at the journal
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. He adopts a multidisciplinary approach to
the study of human behavior, integrating economic concepts and tools, evolutionary
theory, and social psychological experimental methodology. His research focuses on
human mating as well as problems at the individual, organizational, and societal levels
caused by the mismatch between people’s evolved psychological mechanisms and mod-
ern environments.
Adam Lockyer is a Senior Lecturer in Security Studies at Macquarie University. He was
also the 2015 Fulbright Scholar in US–​Australian alliance studies. His research focuses
on US foreign policy, political strategy, political attitudes, and evolutionary theory.
Richard Machalek is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Wyoming.
He studies and writes about the evolution of social behavior among both humans and
nonhuman species. He is especially interested in the distribution of basic forms of social
organization and interaction across species lines.
Douglas A. Marshall is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of Honors
Education at the University of South Alabama. His research lies at the intersection of
sociological theory, social psychology, and evolutionary biosociology, particularly as
applied to the sociology of rationality and to the sociology of religion, in which sec-
tion he was awarded the ASA outstanding paper award in 2011. His current projects
include The Moral Origins of God, a book integrating his work on ritual, the sacred,
and theogenesis into a comprehensive evolutionary theory of religion, and Sociology
Distilled: Science, Force, and Structure, a supplemental text for introductory sociology
courses.
Alexandra Maryanski is Professor of Sociology at the University of California,
Riverside. She has authored or co-​authored six books as well as coedited a large
Handbook on Evolution and Society (Paradigm, 2015), in addition to authoring dozens
of research articles. Her primary scholarly interests revolve around bringing data on pri-
mates, biological methods and models, network analysis, and neurology to the social
sciences. She was one of the founders of contemporary evolutionary sociology as well as
an early proponent of neurosociology. Her latest book, Emile Durkheim and the Birth of
 About the Contributors    xv

the Gods (Routledge, forthcoming) brings the accumulated data on primates, methods
from biology and network analysis, comparative neurology, and evolutionary theory to
an assessment of Emile Durkheim’s theory on the origin and operation of religion in
societies, as outlined in Durkheim’s essays after 1895 and in his monumental book in
1912, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.
Allan Mazur, a sociologist and engineer, is Professor of Public Affairs in the Maxwell
School of Syracuse University. He is author or co-​author of 10 books and nearly 200
academic articles, many on biological aspects of social behavior. He also studies the
sociology of science, technology, and environment. Mazur is a Fellow of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science. His most recent book is Technical Disputes
Over Public Policy: From Fluoridation to Fracking and Climate Change (Routledge, 2017).
Rose McDermott is David and Mariana Fisher University Professor of International
Relations at Brown University and Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences. She received her PhD in political science from Stanford University and has
taught at Cornell University, University of California, Santa Barbara, and Harvard
University. She has held fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the
Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, and the Women and Public Policy Program, all at
Harvard University. She has been a Fellow at the Stanford Center for Advanced Studies
in the Behavioral Sciences twice. She is the author of four books, a co-​editor of two addi-
tional volumes, and author of more than 200 academic articles across a wide variety
of disciplines encompassing topics such as experimentation, emotion and decision-​
making, and the biological and genetic bases of political behavior.
Colter Mitchell is Research Assistant Professor of Family Demography at the Institute
for Social Research and Faculty Associate at the Population Studies Center, University
of Michigan. His broad research interests include exploring biosocial mechanisms and
interactions for health and well-​being across the life-​course with a focus on integrating
genetic, epigenetic, and social factors. He also investigates new methods for collecting
and analyzing biological and social data.
Joseph L. Nedelec is Assistant Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at the
University of Cincinnati. His primary research interests lie within biosocial criminol-
ogy, evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics, and cybercrime. He is co-​founder
and Vice President of the Biosocial Criminology Association (https://​www.biosocial-
crim.org).
François Nielsen received a BA in sociology from Université Libre de Bruxelles and
a PhD from Stanford University. He has been on the faculty at McGill University and
University of Chicago and is currently Professor of Sociology at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill. From 2007 to 2010, he was editor of the journal Social Forces.
His research and teaching center on social stratification and mobility, behavior genet-
ics, sociobiology, sociocultural evolution, quantitative methodology, and the work of
Vilfredo Pareto. He has published articles in journals including American Journal of
xvi   About the Contributors

Sociology, American Sociological Review, European Sociological Review, Social Forces,

and Sociological Theory.
Kelli M. Rasmussen is a doctoral student in the Population Health Sciences program
at the University of Utah School of Medicine. She recently received her MS in sociol-
ogy with an emphasis in population health sciences from the University of Utah. She
is currently Senior Research Analyst for the VERITAS program within the Division of
Epidemiology at the University of Utah School of Medicine. Her current research inter-
ests include biodemography, oncology, health systems research, environmental expo-
sures and health outcomes, aging, and bioinformatics.
Kristin Liv Rauch received her PhD in anthropology from the University of California,
Davis, where she studied human behavioral ecology. She teaches evolutionary anthro-
pology at the California State University, Sacramento. Her research takes a biocultural
perspective on social institutions and human evolution, especially regarding mating
and life history strategies in complex societies.
Anna Rotkirch is Research Professor and Director of the Population Research Institute
at Väestöliitto, the Finnish Family Federation in Helsinki. She has pioneered evolution-
ary studies in family sociology in Europe and currently studies childbearing and fam-
ily relations in contemporary societies. Her research interests include sibling relations,
grandparenting, friendship, and the impact of “baby fever” on fertility behavior. Her
book on evolutionary family sociology, Yhdessä (Together), was published in Swedish
(S&S) and Finnish (WSOY) in 2014, and her latest co-​edited book, Grandfathers: Global
Perspectives, was published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2016.
Frank Salter is a graduate of Sydney and Griffith Universities, Australia. He researched
political ethology with the Max Planck Society in Andechs, Germany, from 1991 to
2011 and has lectured on ethnicity, nationalism, and other social science subjects in
the United States and several European countries. Much of his research on ethnicity
has examined the social impacts of diversity and their causes (e.g., see his edited vol-
ume Welfare, Ethnicity and Altruism: New Findings and Evolutionary Theory; Cass,
2004). Together with geneticist Henry Harpending, he provided the first estimate of
ethnic kinship, finding it to be higher than previously assumed. His book, On Genetic
Interests: Family, Ethnicity, and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration (Transaction,
2003), explored the politics and morality of ethnic solidarity from a neo-​Darwinian per-
spective. Now based in Sydney, Australia, he consults on academic, political, and man-
agement issues.
Stephen K. Sanderson taught for 31 years at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and for
8 years was Visiting Professor at the University of California, Riverside. He specializes
in comparative–​historical sociology, sociological and anthropological theory, and evo-
lution and human behavior. He is the author or editor of 14 books in 21 editions, and
he has published several dozen articles in professional journals, edited collections, and
handbooks. His most recent books are Rethinking Sociological Theory: Introducing and
 About the Contributors    xvii

Explaining a Scientific Theoretical Sociology (Paradigm, 2012) and Human Nature and
the Evolution of Society (Westview, 2014).
Joseph A. Schwartz is Assistant Professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal
Justice at the University of Nebraska Omaha. His research interests include behavior
genetics, developmental/​life course criminology, and additional factors involved in
the etiology of criminal behavior. He is also a cofounder and the current Treasurer/​
Secretary of the Biosocial Criminology Association (https://​www.biosocialcrim.org).
Jonathan H. Turner is Research Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara,
and University Professor of the University of California system, as well as Distinguished
Professor of Sociology, Emeritus, University of California, Riverside. He is primarily
a general sociological theorist but has interests in many substantive areas of inquiry,
including evolutionary sociology, neurosociology, and religion. He is the author of 41
books and more than 200 articles in theory and additional substantive areas, such as the
sociology of emotions, stratification, ethnicity, and interpersonal behavior.
Anthony Walsh received his PhD in criminology from Bowling Green University. He
is currently Professor at Boise State University, where he teaches biocriminology, statis-
tics, and law. He has field experiences in both law enforcement and corrections, and he
has published 38 books and approximately 150 journal articles and book chapters.
Joseph M. Whitmeyer is Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina
at Charlotte. He has published extensively on group process research, particularly on
exchange and status processes. He has also co-​written a book (with Saul Brenner) on the
processes that occur in one empirically important small group, the US Supreme Court.
 Pa rt I

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