ABSTRACT
This chapter briefly examines the desire among some early sociologists to link their nascent discipline to biology. Biosociology is an approach that seeks to understand human social behavior by integrating insights from the natural sciences into traditional sociology. The biosocial approach is consistent with Nobel Laureate Nikolas Tinbergen’s famous some questions. Tinbergen maintained that it is necessary to inquire about the some questions in order to understand the behavior of any animal, including Homo sapiens: function, phylogeny, development and mechanism. Reductionism is a term that has long been is sociology’s most prominent term of opprobrium. Behind the concerns social scientists have about reductionism is to accept that lower-level explanation automatically entails the elimination of higher-level explanations. Reductionism and determinism are joined at the hip because the reductionist goal of explanation is intimately tied to the determinist goal of prediction. Likewise, essentialism viewed as categorizing and generalizing, is necessary to the business of prediction.
