The Social Construction of Life:

Critical Thinking about Biology in Society

(version 2 February 2019)

Introduction

"The Social Construction of Life." What does this title mean to you? Take a minute and jot down your thoughts.
While you do this, here is a non-distracting graphic.


What was your response to being asked this at the outset? What did you feel? Think? Do? Take another minute and explore your responses? Be honest.
An other non-distracting graphic.



Probably most of you just turned over the pages to see what point I intended to make by starting with these questions. I could make you wait if this were a lecture you were listening to. If you were students, I could have used my authority as a teacher to get you to write down something. But this is a book so I cannot enforce readers' compliance with my directions. Let me then move on and explain the meaning and associations I attach to key terms, then provide an overview of the themes that unfold over the chapters. But first, note that:

Overview of Themes and Terms

This book aims to expand the boundaries of the influences that readers consider when interpreting the practices and products of the life sciences ("biology") and their impact on society. In this spirit, "science" is not just a knowledge-generating dialogue between theory and reality, but
At each level social action is occurring, which involves
Given this diversity of social considerations, the relations between biology and society is constructed, in the sense both of
Moreover, this social construction of life connects not only the life sciences, but also
When I define critical thinking I point to inquiry that is informed by a strong sense of how things could be otherwise. I believe that people understand things better when they have placed established assumptions, themes, facts, theories, practices, and social relations in tension with alternatives. [C]ritical thinking as I define it does not depend on my readers rejecting conventional accounts and adopting some alternative dogma. It does, however, require you to move through places of uncertainty. This book destabilizes established approaches, raises many propositions well in advance of demonstrating them, and invites you to use the propositions in your own thinking and writing—to experiment, take risks, and through experience develop tools that work for you.

In the spirit of critical thinking, we can place in tension the idea that something is constructed with the idea that it is determined. In construction (in sense of building, not of interpretation):
In contrast, when something is determined:

Interpreting Ideas of Nature
Broad-brush themes:

The structure of origin stories
Interpret story-telling, focusing on origin stories both outside science and inside.

Multiple layers in influencing an audience: The case of Darwin's On the Origin of Species
Having been sensitized to the story telling aspect of scientific writing, to the dominant structural themes adopted in accounts or origins, and to the ideas of nature that were invoked before Darwin to support ideas of the social order (whether that was the actual, idealised, or desired order), we are now in a better position to read Darwin and interpret his ideas on evolution and on the means by which it occurs.

Metaphors of Coordination and Development
What causes a disease?—the consequences of hereditarianism in the case of pellagra

How changeable are IQ test scores?

Social negotiations around genetic screening

Intersecting processes involving genes and environment

Looking back; looking forward
The introduction stated that social action involves the use of language, making one's life and work in a particular time and place, and from a (possibly changing) social position, economic relations, and political conflict and negotiation. The chapters have emphasized the first two features. However, in the illustrations of intersecting processes—the social origins of depression in a population of working-class women and soil erosion in Oaxaca—economics and politics are evident. Future chapters that may be added would give more explicit attention to the contribution of economic relations and political conflict and negotiation to the social construction of life.

Structure of chapters

1. Introduce simple theme(s), building on previous sessions
1b. amplified by mini-lecture (which might include interactive activity)

2. Precis of reading with directions about reading the full work

3. Activity so students can work with simple theme, but then
3b. see its shortcomings

4. Synthesis and extensions: notes summarizing themes in more complex formulation
4b. including notes on pedagogical issues

5. Connections and resources, e.g., annotations to additional readings
5b. Online forum, through which students can provide suggestions and resources for revising the chapter
5c. Adaptation of themes from the chapter to students' own projects of learning about or engaging with biology in its social context: Suggestions for how to do that.

Boxes (or exhibits) referred to (i.e., linked in the online version) follow at the end of the five sections.