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Tiger and Fox have been called everything from fascist to sexist to simply "unpersuasive" They are not suprised, "You don't go up to someone who has taught cultural relativism for 40 years and say, 'Sorry, old chap, but you're wrong,' and expect to be loved," says Fox philosophically. He believes that they are being criticized primarily on political grounds. The critics "think we should be striving for the good and the right and the true."
Tiger and Fox are preaching that man's survival as a species depends on finding out what kind of creature he is. "What is proposed here is not a kind of determinism," they insist. "To those who think that the law of gravity interferes with their freedom, there is nothing to say. To most sensible people, this law is simply something that has to be taken into account in dealing with the world ... In the behavioral sphere, we may be ignoring laws just as fundamental." Man must learn from his animal heritage, or evolution will be as ruthless with him as it was with the dinosaurs, say the anthropologists who are laying their bets on the biological roots of man's behavior.
ANOTHER discipline in a state of flux is academic sociology. It is largely an American invention—about 75% of the world's sociologists work in the U.S. The discipline took hold in the universities after the first World War. After World War II, with burgeoning demands for applied social science by both industry and Government, sociologists began to do research and become consultants off campus. Asked to help expose and solve the nation's problems, sociology became almost a wing of the liberal establishment. The "sociology of poverty" was a study in itself, and the '60s were especially busy years, with work on such programs as urban renewal and the Office of Economic Opportunity. When these efforts collapsed, many social scientists became less sure of their solutions. "We're asking ourselves harder questions now," says Otto Larsen, executive officer of the American Sociological Association. Political activism, Harvard's Lee Rainwater adds, "washed out. Sociologists found out they were not very good on the firing line. Now the issue is more what is the problem, rather than what you do or don't do to change it."