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Our approach is largely historical, argument by example. We leave it to the theoreticians and empiricists to take the argument in a more technical direction.¹ Throughout, we suppose that germs are self-interested and they have a research question, for example, how might our species improve the chances of survival, the answer to which might potentially benefit germs (or, harm them by less).

Epidemiology is often described as “the basic science of public health” (Savitz, Poole & Miller, 1999; Syme & Yen, 2000). This description suggests both a close association with public health practice, and the separation of “pure” scientific knowledge from its application in the messy social world. Although the attainability of absolute objectivity is rarely claimed, epidemiologists are routinely encouraged to “persist in their efforts to substitute evidence for faith in scientific reasoning” (Stolley, 1985, p. 38) and reminded that “public health decision makers gain little from impassioned scholars who go beyond advancing and explaining the science to promoting a specific public health agenda” (Savitz et al., 1999, p. 1160). Epidemiology produces authoritative data that are transformed into evidence which informs public health. Those data are authoritative because epidemiology is regarded as a neutral scientific enterprise. Because its claims are grounded in science, epidemiological knowledge is deemed to have “a special technical status and hence is not contestable in the same way as are say, religion or ethics” (Lock, 1988, p. 6). Despite the veneer of universality afforded by its scientific pedigree, epidemiology is not a static or monolithic discipline. Epidemiological truth claims are embodied in several shifting paradigms that span the life of the discipline. Public health knowledges and practices, competing claims internal and external to epidemiology, and structural conditions (such as current political economies, material technologies, and institutions) provide important contexts in which certain kinds of epidemiological knowledge are more likely to emerge.

Political scientists have taken up behavior genetics (BG) at a momentous time in the science of genetics. Momentous, because the science of genetics is undergoing a paradigm shift [Petronis, A. (2010). Epigenetics as a unifying principle in the aetiology of complex traits and diseases. Nature, 465(7299), 721–727]. This shifting paradigm poses a significant challenge to both the prevailing methodologies of behavior genetics – twin, family, adoption studies – and one of the most noteworthy findings to emerge from such studies, that is, which we can call the principle of minimal parental effects. This is the supposition that the effect of the shared parental rearing environment on the behavioral phenotypes of offspring is statistically equivalent to zero (Plomin & Daniels, 1987). It is not uncommon nowadays to find twin, adoption, and family studies utilized in the study of political behavior (e.g., Alford, J., Funk, C. L., & Hibbing, J. R. (2005). Are political orientations genetically transmitted? American Political Science Review, 99(2), 153–167.); likewise, the principle of minimal parental effects is frequently invoked in such studies (e.g., Mondak, J. J., Hibbing, M. V., Canache, D., Seligson, M. A., & Anderson, M. A. (2010). Personality and civic engagement: An integrative framework for the study of trait effects on political behavior. American Political Science Review, 104(1), 85–110.). As we shall see, the challenge comes from recent discoveries in genetics that are radically transforming our understanding of the genome and its relationship to environment.

If we are to examine the role of “controls” in different experimental settings, it is appropriate that the word be defined carefully. The Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition) defines the verb “control” in the following manner: “To exercise restraint or direction upon the free action of; to hold sway over, exercise power or authority over; to dominate, command.” So the word means something more active and interventionist than is suggested by it’s colloquial clinical usage. Control can include such mundane things as ensuring sterile equipment in a chemistry lab, to restrain the free flow of germs and unwanted particles that might contaminate some test.

This paper seeks to identify in Philip Selznick’s earliest predominantly organizational writings the germs of a strong and unifying temper – or better perhaps, because the concept plays a significant role in the works, a coherent intellectual and moral character. It infuses Selznick’s work in all the domains he entered. It was evident in his earliest political writings and contributions to organization theory, and remained so in his later contributions to the sociology of law and social and public philosophy.

At one level each of his works had a different subject, at another they all were pondered within a common frame of concerns, intellectual and moral, and approached with a distinctive manner and tone. At a general level, this involved a conception of social science as a “humanist science,” the central concern of which was the fate of values in the world. His specific posture in relation to this subject was underpinned by a commitment to moral realism, or what I call “Hobbesian idealism.”

Selznick began, like Thomas Hobbes as a threat expert, and never lost regard for that expertise. He is alert to fragility, vulnerability, and the need to guard against them. Moreover, his normative reflections are sustained and deepened by his understanding of social processes in general, and of the dangers to which organizations and institutions, but also human personalities and groups, are susceptible. He has a lot to tell us about ways in which those dangers might be avoided. However, Selznick resists stopping where Hobbes stops. Though he stresses the presence and resilience of evil and the need for strenuous efforts to contain it, he holds out for more. Indeed, though recognizing danger might be the beginning of wisdom, it is only half – over time less than half – of the story.

He emphasized the importance of attending both to Hobbesian insights and idealistic ambitions in relation to organizational leadership, to law, to justice, to human achievement of all kinds. To see him, as the earliest critics of his organizational theory did, as a voice of unadulterated melancholy, or as his later ones tended to, as altogether too programmatically sunny and full of hope, is to miss the real core of the intellectual and moral sensibility that pervaded his life of scholarship in the social sciences. The paper concludes by commending this uncommon sensibility, both at the general level of advocacy of “humanist science” and in its specific “Hobbesian idealist” posture.

This chapter documents how eugenics, scientific racism, and hereditarianism survived at Harvard well into the interwar years. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Thomas Nixon Carver and Frank W. Taussig published works in which they established a close nexus between an individual’s economic position and his biological fitness. Carver, writing in 1929, argued that social class rigidities are attributable to the inheritance of superior and inferior abilities on the respective social class levels and proposed an “economic test of fitness” as a eugenic criterion to distinguish worthy from unworthy individuals. In 1932, Taussig, together with Carl Smith Joslyn, published American Business Leaders – a study that showed how groups with superior social status are proportionately much more productive of professional and business leaders than are the groups with inferior social status. Like Carver, Taussig and Joslyn attributed this circumstance primarily to hereditary rather than environmental factors. Taussig, Joslyn, and Carver are not the only protagonists of our story. The Russian-born sociologists Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin, who joined the newly established Department of Sociology at Harvard in 1930, also played a crucial role. His book Social Mobility (1927) exercised a major influence on both Taussig and Carver and contributed decisively to the survival of eugenic and hereditarian ideas at Harvard in the 1930s.

This study analyzes the rise of genome instability in the life sciences and traces the problematic of instability as it relates to the sociology of health. Genome instability is the study of how genomes change and become variable between generations and within organisms over the life span. Genome instability reflects a significant departure from the Platonic genome imagined during the Human Genome Project. The aim of this chapter is to explain and analyze research on copy number variation and somatic mosaicism to consider the implications of these sciences for sociologists interested in genomics.

This chapter draws on two multi-sited ethnographies of contemporary biomedical science and literature in the sociology of health, science, and biomedicine to document a shift in thinking about the genome from fixed and universal to highly variable and influenced by time and context.

Genomic instability has become a framework for addressing how genomes change and become variable between generations and within organisms over the life span. Instability is a useful framework for analyzing changes in the life sciences in the post-genomic era.

Genome instability requires life scientists to address how differences both within and between individuals articulate with shifting disease categories and classifications. For sociologists, these findings have implications for studies of identity, sociality, and clinical experience.

This is the first sociological analysis of genomic instability. It identifies practical and conceptual implications of genomic instability for life scientists and helps sociologists delineate new approaches to the study of genomics in the post-genomic era.

The purpose of this chapter is to offer reflections on conventional theories concerning causes and determinants of diseases. It also intends to examine both theoretical and empirical bases for adopting an Integrated Social-Ecological Systems (ISES) lens as a tool for understanding complexities related to drivers, determinants and causes of diseases.

We assessed the theoretical underpinnings of a range of historical and contemporary lenses for viewing infectious disease drivers and the implications of their use when used to explain both personal (i.e. individual) and population health. We examined these issues within the empirical context of the City of Dhaka (Bangladesh) by adopting an ISES lens. Within this study an emphasis has been placed on illustrating how feedback loops and non-linearity functions in systems have a direct bearing upon various aspects of infectious disease occurrences.

A brief triumph over microbes during the last century stemmed in part from our improved understanding of disease causation which was built using disciplinary-specific, monocausal approaches to the study of disease emergence. Subsequently, empirical inquiries into the multi-factorial aetiology and the ‘web of causation’ of disease emergence have extended frameworks beyond simplistic, individualistic descriptions of disease causation. Nonetheless, much work is yet to be done to understand the roles of complex, intertwined, multi-level, social-ecological factors in affecting disease occurrence. We argue, a transdisciplinary-oriented, ISES lens is needed to explain the complexities of disease occurrence at various and interacting levels. More theoretical and empirical formulations, with evidence derived from various parts of the world, is also required to further the debate.

Our study advances the theoretical as well as empirical basis for considering an integrated human-nature systems approach to explaining disease occurrence at all levels so that factors at the individual, household/neighbourhood, local, regional and global levels are not treated in isolation.