Sociology, Biology Musings 1

I figure this is a good way to study, to ponder my lectures and regurgitate all that knowledge back out into the world.

Today, the topic of social determinism and free will came up in my sociology lecture. Questions like ‘How much of our actions is individually controlled, and how much is a result of our social circumstances and conditioning?’, and “To what extent are we responsible for our actions?” were thrown around.

To me, the idea of social determinism is rather odd. After all, there is no society without the individuals that compose it, and that in itself is proof that the individual has influence. On the other hand, to singularly advocate free will is also rather short sighted, too romantic. The self and the society are inextricably entwined, they influence each other. (Replace ’self’ with ‘nature’ and ’society’ with ‘nurture’ and this argument will sound even more familiar and overused. Sigh.)

The interesting part of accepting both self and society play a role is that you acknowledge that both have a level of responsibility for the events that occur. A felon is a ’self’ that lives in a ’society’, so to what extent is society responsible for his or her crime? How much of the responsibility for his actions as an individual should be waived because he was born at the bottom rungs of a capitalist society, that generations of his family had all lived at the bottom?

And if we hold the poor felon less accountable for his actions because of this, should a middle-class felon who commits the same crime be more individually responsible than the lower class felon? Can we afford to be that ‘fair’, is it possible to determine all possible reasons behind a crime and the social influences? Is the life of a man worth the trouble?

I’m beginning to realise that all of life’s hard questions are answered by more hard questions. There is rarely a clear line to be drawn, but since when do we want anything linear in life anyway?

This sort of awkwardly takes me to Biology, the other subject I have been exposed to of late. The relationship between an individual and its environment is also something we’re looking at in this subject. Except because all subjects enjoy their own jargonised language, I will be talking about organism and environment, not self and society.

Adaptation, the phenomenon of how an organism fits so well into its environment is a question that my lecture notes tell me biologists find hard to answer. Using the previous conclusion drawn from sociology, that the organism and the environment are impossibly interwoven, adaptation makes perfect sense.

An organism grows in the environment, the environment is what it feeds on and breathes, it gives back to the environment. This close relationship means that there is no need for the individual organism to adapt – it has grown in the environment and contributed to it. The way we know how a native Australian child adapted to Australian life, there was no need to adapt, they simply lived.

Similarly, if an organism is moved to a different environment it will begin to take in the different chemicals and structure of the new environment. The constant process of input and output means that both organism and environment change from the relationship. It’s a chemical process, different chemicals in environment alter the chemicals in the organism.

There should be no question of how close they fit together, they interact with each other. Organisms in environments that are not compatible simply die, Natural selection re-Darwin.

This is just a hypothesis. There is probably more depth to the adaptation argument that I have not learned yet. The simple organism-environment relationship seems pretty logical to me at this point, but we’ll  see in a few weeks. I’ll keep these musings going for as long as I can.