Free Republic

Civilization depends on the health of the traditional family. That sentiment has become a truism among social conservatives, who typically can't explain what they mean by it. Which is why it sounds like right-wing boilerplate to many contemporary ears. The late Harvard sociologist Carle C. Zimmerman believed it was true, but he also knew why. In 1947, he wrote a massive book to explain why latter-day Western civilization was now living through the same family crisis that presaged the fall of classical Greece and Rome. His classic "Family and Civilization," which has just been republished in an edited version by...

The famous 6 degrees of separation theory fades under scrutiny. It’s rare for a sociological study to wind up a part of pop culture, but that’s what has happened to Stanley Milgram’s “small world” study, which posits that all of the people on the planet are connected to one another through an average of six acquaintances—or through six degrees of separation. The first popular use of Milgram’s study was the John Guare play Six Degrees of Separation, which was later made into a movie. Then came the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, created by college students, in which players...

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The Carrie Bradshaw lifestyle is showing up in unexpected places, with unintended consequences. After my Lot Airlines flight from New York touched down at Warsaw’s Frédéric Chopin Airport a few months back, I watched a middle-aged passenger rush to embrace a waiting younger woman—clearly her daughter. Like many people on the plane, the older woman wore drab clothing and had the short, square physique of someone familiar with too many potatoes and too much manual labor. Her Poland-based daughter, by contrast, was tall and smartly outfitted in pointy-toed pumps, slim-cut jeans, a cropped jacket revealing a toned midriff (Yoga? Pilates?...

A reorganization of workers at the Swedish Tax Authority is partly shaped on studies of apes, according to a leaked internal report. Employees are not flattered by the comparison. The tax authority is currently undergoing its largest reorganization for many years. One of the foundations of the restructuring plan is a report which says that studies of apes show that people work best in groups of 150. The reorganization was announced earlier in the summer. Work is being moved from small towns to larger towns and cities. Around 1,350 people are affected by the move. Economies of scale are a...

Not in my backyard, either Barbara Kay, National Post Published: Tuesday, July 10, 2007 MONTREAL -If you live in Montreal, and an acquaintance tells you she lives in Outremont, you may ask her with a wink -- the question is not perceived as anti-Semitic--if she lives in Outremont ma chere or Outremont kaschere. In Outremont, Montreal's most beautiful neighbourhood, one enclave, the aforementioned Outremont kaschere, is home to thousands of Hasidic Jews, who live peacefully but separately, very separately, from their neighbours. As in any Hasidic quarter, you can walk about there in assured physical security, although you may...

One of the more delicate areas I dealt with while running a dating service for more than two decades was the issue of race, and more specifically racial stereotyping by prospective members. Stereotyping in itself is a volatile issue, and at some point during intake interviews, I often repeated the phrase “While there is some truth to all stereotypes, there are certainly many exceptions to every single one.” However, when one is dealing with a sample of more than 20,000 single, divorced, and widowed men and women, I feel confident and comfortable making certain statements in a column titled The...

April 24, 2007 (RFE/RL) -- A disturbing video of a young boy beheading a Pakistani hostage has shocked and angered the Afghan public and international observers since it began circulating several days ago. Rights activists condemned the use of a child in the execution as "new low" -- even for an extremist group like the Taliban. In Afghanistan, it is unclear what effect the grisly video might have on militants' efforts to recruit sympathizers. more

This short essay begins with noting the recent death of Seymour Lipset as well as the previous deaths of Phillip Reif and David Reisman. The author then wonders why there are no new leaders. "...Of course, sociologists are still being trained, books are being published, and university departments of sociology show no sign of going out of business. But the sense of free-wheeling inquiry that drew some of the best minds of the 1950s and 1960s into sociology -- in what appears now to be its golden age -- is no longer in evidence. Seymour Martin Lipset explored the social...

Maybe it's the cyclist in the park, trim under his sleek metallic blue helmet, cruising along the dirt path... at three miles an hour. On his tricycle. Or perhaps it's today's playground, all-rubber-cushioned surface where kids used to skin their knees. And... wait a minute... those aren't little kids playing. Their mommies—and especially their daddies—are in there with them, coplaying or play-by-play coaching. Few take it half-easy on the perimeter benches, as parents used to do, letting the kids figure things out for themselves. Then there are the sanitizing gels, with which over a third of parents now send their...

“Today is ‘Juneteenth,’” Dr. Carey Stronach states in the small, crowded blue room of the Rayburn House Office building on Monday, June 19 at the “Survivors of the Academy Luncheon.” “The day that slavery ended, 151 years ago.” “I bring this up,” Stronach, 65, continues, “because, recently, certain freedoms have been violated at Virginia State University (VSU).” The caucasian Dr. Stronach, who has been a physics professor at VSU for forty years, recently retired two years early from the historically black college because he was sick of the “mistreatment of the faculty and staff by a highly politicized administration.” Along...

Ladies and Gentlemen, this evening it is my modest intention to tell you in the short time we have together . . . everything you will ever need to know about the human beast. I take that term, the human beast, from my idol, Emile Zola, who published a novel entitled The Human Beast in 1888, just 29 years after Darwin's The Origin of Species broke the stunning news that Homo sapiens--or Homo loquax, as I call him--was not created by God in his own image but was precisely that, a beast, not different in any essential way from snakes...

A young, single mother informed a Tribune reporter that "marriage is for white people." The statistics back up her words. More than three-quarters of black babies are born out of wedlock, according to the St. Joseph County Health Department. South Bend sociologist Johnnie Griffin says blacks were more likely to be raised by both parents during slavery days than they are today. Nearly 1.5 million babies, a record, were born to unmarried women in the United States last year, the government reported. And it isn't just teenagers anymore.

SEVERAL recent studies have garnered wide attention for reconfirming the tragic disconnection of millions of black youths from the American mainstream. But they also highlighted another crisis: the failure of social scientists to adequately explain the problem, and their inability to come up with any effective strategy to deal with it.[snip] Nor have studies explained why, if someone cannot get a job, he turns to crime and drug abuse. One does not imply the other. Joblessness is rampant in Latin America and India, but the mass of the populations does not turn to crime. And why do so many young...

Michelle has kindly posted the infamous "whiny kids grow up to be conservative" paper in PDF format. Would you believe that the paper claims that conservative boys were "visibly deviant?" Yes, it does. Click here to download and read the entire document from Michelle's site. Much of it is pretty boring, mundane stuff, but there is a noticeable pattern of ascribing negative behaviors to conservatives and positive behaviors to liberals.Read this part of the report. The participants’ LIB/CON index scores at age 23 were correlated—for the genders separately— (1) with their CCQ item values gathered 20 years earlier, (2) with...

Some women still party as if invulnerable It's midnight at Pravda, a trendy Manhattan bar where graduate students from nearby New York University are jammed into leather booths. A group chants, ''Another vodka! Another vodka!" A young woman named Jovana is in the corner, kissing a young man she met hours earlier. Days after the brutal rape and murder of a 24-year-old graduate student from Boston who had been drinking at a bar two blocks away, the scene is notable for an absence of fear. ''It happens here," Barbara Klen, a 24-year-old NYU student, said of the slaying. ''It happens...

An academic controversy recently erupted over the decision of Science Magazine editors to refuse publication of an article about gender difference by British biologist Peter Lawrence. Though the prestigious journal had given Dr. Lawrence a publication date and article proofs, Science editor-in-chief Donald Kennedy abruptly notified the author that the piece could not be published because it did not offer "a strategy on how to deal with the gender issue." The article, in edited form, is reproduced below. Some have a dream that, one fine day, there will be equal numbers of men and women in all jobs, including those...

Darwinism has had it all its own way for too long, Warwick's controversial sociologist tells Zoë Corbyn Guardian In 1981, in a courtroom in Little Rock, Arkansas, Michael Ruse testified that "creation science", the faith-based explanation of life's beginnings, was not science at all. "In my opinion," Ruse told the court, "creation science is religion." It was the first time in America's fraught struggle over evolution that a philosopher of science had taken the stand and his words made a big impression on Steve Fuller, then a 22-year-old PhD student. "It set a precedent because, up to that point, the...

Sociology is an academic discipline that has had an unhappy history since its founding in France in the nineteenth century. It has never had a consistent methodology and has been racked by competing theories. The grandiosity of much sociological theory has been matched only by its incoherence. Although the subject has been taught at Australian universities for more than fifty years, its practitioners have shown little concern about de­scribing the country to itself and far more interest in denounc­ing it for its failings. This is especially true in race rela­tions. For the past twenty years most sociologists of race have...

Understanding how liberals and conservatives differ, from conception on At Harvard and elsewhere, researchers in political science, sociology, psychology, and even genetics are attempting to assay this mysterious chemistry. These are particularly important questions right now. “When Goldwater ran in 1964, he said there wasn’t ‘a dime’s worth of difference between the two big parties,’” says Radcliffe Institute fellow and associate professor of government J. Russell Muirhead, who is working on a forthcoming book, Left and Right: A Defense of Party Spirit. “It used to be that most major legislation was passed by whopping bipartisan majorities, and lawmaking was characterized,...