ABSTRACT

This chapter looks at two sociological explanatory variables that claim causal power for physical behavior of the people in each participant's environment. The group of sociological explanatory variables denoted by "demographism" should be distinguished from "demography." Demographistic variables occur frequently in analyses of nonhuman social phenomena. Demographistic variables are the environmental counterparts of materialistic variables. They refer to the absolute number of people in a given participant's environment, their existentially given physical capacities and needs, and the extent to which, when they die or move out of that environment, they are replaced there by newborns or immigrants. Social structuralistic variables are the environmental counterparts of nurturistic variables, and four major varieties of social structuralism (unison, exchange, conflict, and functionalist) were identified and explicated. Both exchange and conflict social structuralisms are clearly implicit in the emphasis that functionalism places on differentiated part-whole and part-part relations. Exchange social structuralism plays a secondary role to conflict social structuralism in sociobiological explanations.