Social Constructions of Life:
Critical Thinking about Biology and Society
Provisional list of cases
INTRODUCTION
1. What can it mean that biology and society are constructed? -- An
account of severe depression in working class London women
READING & WRITING BIOLOGY
2. How did we get here? I -- Narratives of human origins
3. How many genders make up mankind? -- Bias in accounts of fertilization and
sexual reproduction
4. What is a mother? -- Categories destabilized by scientific developments.
5. How did we get here? II -- Structural themes used in interpreting the
record of life.
6. What is nature? -- Historical changes in meanings of "nature" in relation
to changes in society.
EVOLUTION
7. How did Darwin try to convince people of Natural selection as the
mechanism of evolution? -- Multiple layers of a scientific theory
8. Why does evolution matter in thinking about society? I: Darwin as a social
darwinist and sociobiologist.
HEREDITY & DEVELOPMENT
(subtheme: causes & their relation to
favored views of social action)
9. Why are people so concerned about heredity? -- Galton, regression to the
mean & eugenics
10. What causes a disease? -- the consequences of hereditarianism in the case
of pellagra
11. How did genetics become synonymous with heredity? -- Multiple accounts of
heredity in early 20C.
12. How are characters produced? -- Transmission vs. development.
13. How can development be organized? -- Metaphors of control and
co-ordination.
14-15. Can genes determine characters like intelligence? To whom is this
plausible? -- IQ & inheritance.
16. Can identical twins be raised apart? -- Gestational programming and
diseases of later life
EVOLUTION REVISITED
17. Does Nature select? -- Selectionist vs. constructionist
explanations of evolution.
18. Why does evolution matter in thinking about society? II: Social messages
REPRODUCTIVE INTERVENTIONS
(subtheme: scientists working within a field
of economics, politics & moral responsibility)
19. Who benefits from scientific progress? I: The breeding of hybrid corn
20. Who benefits from scientific progress? II: The green revolution
21. How autonomous can science be from social influences? -- The rise of
biotechnology
22-25. Who sets limits on the engineering of human reproduction? -- Gene
therapy & pre-natal diagnosis & intervention (incl. the history of Down
syndrome as the mother's problem, and history of PKU screening and
treatment).
ECOLOGICAL & ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
26. For whom is population growth the problem? -- Attention to the
dynamics among unequal groups can qualitatively change one's analysis of
environmental problems
27. When are resources held in common degraded "tragically"? -- The hidden
complexity in simple formulations
28. How do we know "we" have "global" environmental problems? -- Causes
proposed & their relation to favored views of social action
29 & 30. How can we discipline, without suppressing the complexities of
environmental, scientific, and social change? -- Political ecological analyses
of environmental degradation and conservation projects.
(rev. 7/01)