ABSTRACT
In a nutshell, the crisis may be described as follows: Sociology has failed to produce a recognizable body of nomothetically organized knowledge to guide further and cumulative developments. At the end of World War II, sociology was a half-century old, as an academic discipline and well into its second century as a recognized social science. Sociology had not yet ascended to the heights of science. Yet, in 1948 Robert K. Merton, one of the most esteemed sociologists of the post-World War II era, imparted precisely lessons. Merton's emphasis is on the adaptation, that is, function, termed innovation. This chapter shows that the survival of sociology depends very much on whether the profession can cope with the extraordinary revolution now taking place in evolutionary biology, an alliance of disciplines that are increasingly becoming behavior-oriented.
