Week 2 post / So Jeong Yeon (연소정)

1. Summary & Interesting items

 

◾ Sociology and other disciplines

 

In this week’s lecture, we began with comparisons between sociology and other disciplines such as economics, political science, anthropology, psychology and so on. Economics is a discipline which studies about how the production and consumption of goods and services affects the society. On the other hand, sociology studies about how different forces including the economy affect the society. Sociology is a far wider concept than economics. While political science focuses on international politics, sociology focuses more on internal politics. Anthropology studies about the historical societies and the organization of human social relations and anthropologists prefer a qualitative approach, whereas sociologists prefer a quantitative approach such as statistics and mass data. Psychology focuses on individuals but sociology studies about groups and social situations.

 

Nowadays, the boundaries between this disciplines has blurred but I think we need to know clearly the difference of those disciplines so that we understand what sociology is.

    
 

 

 

◾ History of sociology

    
 

We also learned about the history of sociology. why study history? I think studying history is so important because it is helpful when we understand our present and our future. We can learn a lesson from history and apply it to personal and social troubles. In this sense, we learned many sociologists. Comte coined the word sociology and was called the father of sociology. Spencer modeled human society in biological terms and Karl Marx contributed to establishment of the social science. And we also learned about Durkheim who stressed the importance of culture, Weber and Mead.

    
 

In particular, I was interested in Karl Marx’s arguments. The one is that society is structured depending on who owns the means of productions. The other is that humans are inherently good but get bad because of competition for scarce resources. I agree with his arguments. I think also the description of human nature is caused by inequality in the economy.

    

 

 

◾ Scientific method

 

The research in sociology goes through regular progression. lt begins with “research question” and the next step is “hypothesis”, “testing” and “theory.” I learned about the difference between “hypothesis” and “theory.” Hypothesis in which there are variables is a proposed explanation for a phenomenon, whereas theory is well substantiated explanation. The clear distinction was so interesting for me.

 

2. My opinion of the question

 

    

We debated about two questions - “What is more important- our genes or our environment?” and “Can you think of examples of charismatic, traditional, and rational legal leaders or governments in the history of your own country?”

Among those questions, l’d like to talk about the first one in more detail in this post.

 

    

Q. What is more important-our genes or our environment? 
 

This question related to sociobiology is a subject still under debate. I think both genes and environment are important. Both are all influential in our lives. So we have to consider the importance of genes and environment. But when you ask me “what is more?”, I’ll answer our environment is more important than our genes.

There are many reasons supporting the argument that environment is more important than our genes. We can see the importance of environment through the “identical twin.” The twins are born with same genes but they certainly don't share the same personality while growing up in different kinds of homes. In addition, the research results show that a parents' divorce can increase the probability of childrens' divorce. The children in those divorces are affected by that. This shows how significant environment is.

Finally, let’s think of “education.” We are well aware of effectiveness of education and learning. As we see directly or indirectly, It changes a person and elevates one´s mind. If genes are more important than environment, education is less effective. If he don’t improve his ability through learning, no matter how great gene he has, he can’t grow. If a person who has good genes grows up in a bad environment, he can deviate and use his ability in bad ways. In result, the life depends on the environment.