Alexander Riley – författare

Reflecting on the 1960s at 50: A Concise Account of How the 1960s Changed America, for Better and for Worse is a punchy, conversational look at some of the most interesting pieces of cultural and social conflict from the ‘60s, reflected through the lens of our own vantage point today.

This approachable, informative volume uses transcripts of public interviews to provide the viewpoints of half a dozen nationally known scholars with long records of writing in scholarly and popular realms. They represent a range of disciplinary and political perspectives from the humanities to the social sciences and from the progressive left to the conservative right. These scholars offer their thoughts on:

This book will be of interest to students of American history and the history and politics of the 1960s as well as sociologists. It searches for meaning in a period that made major contributions to the shape of America as a country.

Reflecting on the 1960s at 50: A Concise Account of How the 1960s Changed America, for Better and for Worse is a punchy, conversational look at some of the most interesting pieces of cultural and social conflict from the ‘60s, reflected through the lens of our own vantage point today.

This approachable, informative volume uses transcripts of public interviews to provide the viewpoints of half a dozen nationally known scholars with long records of writing in scholarly and popular realms. They represent a range of disciplinary and political perspectives from the humanities to the social sciences and from the progressive left to the conservative right. These scholars offer their thoughts on:

This book will be of interest to students of American history and the history and politics of the 1960s as well as sociologists. It searches for meaning in a period that made major contributions to the shape of America as a country.

Sociology is in crisis. While other disciplines have taken on board the revolutionary discoveries driven by evolutionary biology and psychology, genomics and behavioral genetics, and the neurosciences, sociology has ignored these advances and embraced a biophobia that threatens to drive the discipline into marginality. This book takes its place in a rich tradition of efforts to integrate sociological thinking into the world of the biological sciences that can be traced to the origins of the discipline, and that took on modern form beginning a generation ago in the works of thinkers such as E.O. Wilson, Richard Alexander, Joseph Lopreato, and Richard Machalek. It offers an accessible introduction to rethinking sociological science in consonance with these contemporary biological revolutions. From the standpoint of a biosociology rooted in the single most important scientific theory touching on human life, the Darwinian theory of natural selection, the book sketches an evolutionary social science that would enable us to properly attend to basic questions of human nature, human behavior, and human social organization. Individual chapters take on such topics as: The roots and nature of human sociality; the origins of morality in human social life and an evolutionary perspective on human interests, reciprocity, and altruism; the sex difference in our species and what it contributes to an explanation of sociological facts; the nature of stratification, status, and inequality in human evolutionary history; the question of race in our species; and the contribution evolutionary theory makes to explaining the origins and the importance of culture in human societies.

Sociology is in crisis. While other disciplines have taken on board the revolutionary discoveries driven by evolutionary biology and psychology, genomics and behavioral genetics, and the neurosciences, sociology has ignored these advances and embraced a biophobia that threatens to drive the discipline into marginality. This book takes its place in a rich tradition of efforts to integrate sociological thinking into the world of the biological sciences that can be traced to the origins of the discipline, and that took on modern form beginning a generation ago in the works of thinkers such as E.O. Wilson, Richard Alexander, Joseph Lopreato, and Richard Machalek. It offers an accessible introduction to rethinking sociological science in consonance with these contemporary biological revolutions. From the standpoint of a biosociology rooted in the single most important scientific theory touching on human life, the Darwinian theory of natural selection, the book sketches an evolutionary social science that would enable us to properly attend to basic questions of human nature, human behavior, and human social organization. Individual chapters take on such topics as: The roots and nature of human sociality; the origins of morality in human social life and an evolutionary perspective on human interests, reciprocity, and altruism; the sex difference in our species and what it contributes to an explanation of sociological facts; the nature of stratification, status, and inequality in human evolutionary history; the question of race in our species; and the contribution evolutionary theory makes to explaining the origins and the importance of culture in human societies.