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Essay on Human Biology Determines Human Behavior
Biology of human behavior was for most of this century the most reviled and ridiculed branch of research. In the past 20 years, sophisticated quantitative methods, along with more recent techniques for exploring DNA, have helped make biology of human behavior respectable at last. Despite its newfound acceptability, however, much about the biology of human behavior continues to elude analysis. Biological explanations have, in the last 20 years, come to be the dominant paradigm in two major mental illnesses, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. They also are more and more in vogue in studies of Alzheimer's disease, the anxiety disorders, and autism.
The largest study ever to show a major role for sociobiological factors in male homosexuality was published in 1991, and a similar study on lesbians, reporting much the same results, appeared early this year. Biologically-based models are favored for funding at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Biological research on human behavior is now so fashionable that even some behavior biologists have begun to worry that the pendulum has swung too far. "I think we have to be very careful as biologists not to say everything's biological. There are some things more biological than others," cautions Geoffrey Pope in his book ‘The Biological Bases OF Human Behavior’.
For its partisans, acceptance of the new behavior biology seems like rationality triumphant. It is based, they say, on hard scientific evidence, on methods and techniques that render it credible--or at least far more credible than the screeds of the old-time evangelical eugenicists, whose blatant prejudices and sloppy research early this century turned behavior biology into a laughing matter for decades.But critics take the opposite view; they see the discipline's new popularity as a failure of reason. "In an era when we pride ourselves on our scientific orientation and our scientism, our faith and our belief in biological reductionism.......
