So far in this course we have dealt entirely with the evolution of characters that are controlled by simple Mendelian inheritance at a single locus. There are notes on the course website about gametic disequilibrium and how allele frequencies change at two loci simultaneously, but we didn’t discuss them. In every example we’ve considered we’ve imagined that we could understand something about evolution by examining the evolution of a single gene. That’s the domain of classical population genetics. For the next few weeks we’re going to be exploring a field that’s actually older than classical population genetics, although the approach we’ll be taking to it involves the use of population genetic machinery. If you know a little about the history of evolutionary biology, you may know that after the rediscovery of Mendel’s work in 1900 there was a heated debate between the “biometricians” (e.g., Galton and Pearson) and the “Mendelians” (e.g., de Vries, Correns, Bateson, and Morgan). Biometricians asserted that the really important variation in evolution didn’t follow Mendelian rules. Height, weight, skin color, and similar traits seemed to

Human biochemical genetics

The present historical moment may seem a particularly inopportune time to review Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's latest exploration of civic decline in America. After all, the outpouring of volunteerism, solidarity, patriotism, and self-sacrifice displayed by Americans in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks appears to fly in the face of Putnam's central argument: that \"social capital\" -defined as \"social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them\" (p. 19)'has declined to dangerously low levels in America over the last three decades. However, Putnam is not fazed in the least by the recent effusion of solidarity. Quite the contrary, he sees in it the potential to \"reverse what has been a 30to 40-year steady decline in most measures of connectedness or community.\"' As an example of how the current \"war on terrorism\" could generate a durable civic renewal, Putnam points to the burst in civic practices that occurred during and after World War II, which he says \"permanently marked\" the generation that lived through it and had a \"terrific effect on American public life over the last half-century.\" 3 If Americans can follow this example and channel their current civic

Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society

Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 1994, Vol 39(2), 225. Reviews the book, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion by John Zaller (1992). The author's commendable effort to specify a model of mass opinion formation offers readers an introduction to the prevailing vi

The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion.

The four Visegrad states — Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia (until 1993 Czechoslovakia) and Hungary — form a compact area between Germany and Austria in the west and the states of the former USSR in the east. They are bounded by the Baltic in the north and the Danube river in the south. They are cut by the Sudeten and Carpathian mountain ranges, which divide Poland off from the other states. Poland is an extension of the North European plain and like the latter is drained by rivers that flow from south to north west — the Oder, the Vlatava and the Elbe, the Vistula and the Bug. The Danube is the great exception, flowing from its source eastward, turning through two 90-degree turns to end up in the Black Sea, forming the barrier and often the political frontier between central Europe and the Balkans. Hungary to the east of the Danube is also an open plain. The region is historically and culturally part of western Europe, but its eastern Marches now represents a vital strategic zone between Germany and the core of the European Union to the west and the Russian zone to the east.

Economy and Society

This article presents a new model of culture in action Although most sociologists who study culture emphasize its role in post hoc sense making, sociologists of religion and social psychologists tend to focus on the role beliefs play in motivation The dual‐process model integrates justificatory and motivational approaches by distinguishing between “discursive” and “practical” modes of culture and cognition The author uses panel data from the National Study of Youth and Religion to illustrate the model's usefulness Consistent with its predictions, he finds that though respondents cannot articulate clear principles of moral judgment, their choice from a list of moral‐cultural scripts strongly predicts later behavior

/pdf/motivation-and-justification-a-dual-process-model-of-culture-11xi515dc9.pdf

Motivation and Justification: A Dual‐Process Model of Culture in Action1

Most sociological research assumes that social network composition shapes individual beliefs. Network theory and research has not adequately considered that internalized cultural worldviews might affect network composition. Drawing on a synthetic, dual-process theory of culture and two waves of nationally-representative panel data, this article shows that worldviews are strong predictors of changes in network composition among U.S. youth. These effects are robust to the influence of other structural factors, including prior network composition and behavioral homophily. By contrast, there is little evidence that networks play a strong proximate role in shaping worldviews. This suggests that internalized cultural dispositions play an important role in shaping the interpersonal environment and that the dynamic link between culture and social structure needs to be reconsidered.

Can Cultural Worldviews Influence Network Composition

Qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) is an increasingly popular analytic strategy, with applications to numerous empirical fields. This article briefly discusses the substantive motivation and te...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1536867X0800800106

fuzzy: A program for performing qualitative comparative analyses (QCA) in Stata

Sociology was once integral to the scientific study of morality, but its explicit focus has waned over the past half-century. This article calls for greater sociological engagement in order to speak to the resurgence of the study of morality in cognate fields. We identify important treatments of morality, some of which are not explicitly so, and identify those treatments that build a distinctly sociological focus on morality: room for culturally divergent understandings of its content, a focus on antecedent social factors that shape it, and a concern with ecologically valid explorations of its social importance.

The New Sociology of Morality

10.1057/9781137391865 The Palgrave Handbook of Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity, 7 Modern Roots of the Sociology of Love: Tolstoy, Addams. 2014. the moral background: an inquiry into the history of business ethics. princeton in: handbook of the sociology of morality. edited by hitlin and vaisey (pdf). “Morally Bonded and Bounded: A Sociological Introduction to Neurology. In Handbook of the Sociology of Morality, Springer (Eds. Hitlin, Steven and Stephen.

Stephen Vaisey

Papers

Motivation and Justification: A Dual‐Process Model of Culture in Action1

Can Cultural Worldviews Influence Network Composition

fuzzy: A program for performing qualitative comparative analyses (QCA) in Stata

The New Sociology of Morality

Handbook of the sociology of morality