JUST HOW DOES THAT WORK? Please explain it. Every single instance of "data collection" in sociology is fraught with subjectivity, either the subjective judgement of a person reporting their own alleged experience or situation - which the researcher almost never can check or goes to the bother of attempting to check for accuracy or honesty - or the subjective judgement and description of the researcher. Since it is impossible to review just about any individual datum in that kind of "research" it is fraught with subjective inclusions, not least of which are the desires of the person or group of people conducting the research to achieve a publishable result - hopefully one that will create lots of media splash. Or at least in the profession. I don't think it's even possible to measure the amount of such subjectivity or if it is of any predictable percentage of the raw material. You can't observe it like insect body parts in a batch of food in a factory or e-coli at the water-works.
How is that forest of subjectivity made to disappear from the results? I'd really like to know and have identified the mechanism by which that element of subjectivity is supposed to disappear, what with the combined subjectivity of all of those involved in the process. It would seem to me to be a far, far more likely thing that the subjectivity adds up if not increases by multiplication in the process, no matter the motives to ignore that. Any claims that that process produces objectivity would certainly require identifying the magical means of sifting that out. What that claim is, is a sort of meta-subjectivity based on the common interest in denying that. That denial of the problem is what drives that along with the desire to pretend it disappears. Or the even greater shared goal of pretending what they are doing produces "objective knowledge." If that were the case then their research should be verifiable at the same rate and in similar ways that traditional physics and chemistry could be verified and the results would be as durable and long lasting as reliable, workable knowledge. Let's get it clear, though, I'm talking of the old days when physical theory was proven by careful observation and replication of experiments or from nature, not now when the theoreticians come up with stuff that not only can't be verified now, but for which there is no prospect of it ever being verified by human science and they claim a right, by assertion, that they don't need to follow scientific method for it to be science.
It's like the magical means with which the overt teleology in animal husbandry and plant breeding is used as "proof" that something claimed to be quite similar happens in nature with no planning and with a claim that there is no teleological component of it. When Darwin used animal and plant breeding as support for a theory for a "force" of nature which explained how new species arise, a force which it was claimed had entirely different characteristics from human breeding, no planning, no goal, but was mere accidental happenstance, it was a logically inept claim. Though a claim which gained favor and still holds hegemony in science even though the logical bases of it in both conducting experiments which are the result of intelligent design and the whole thing having the most overt of teleological goals. And also with the far from disinterested, ideologically colored observations - often of a quite unnatural captive group of animals, many of which never experienced life in the wild for many generations under whatever vicissitudes wildness includes - claiming to demonstrate, even "prove" the validity of natural selection outside of the lab. But if you're going to use those to "prove" that natural selection is a thing you don't get to claim that your research only includes those aspects of your examples you like while pretending the ones you don't like were no part of the results you cite in that argument. By the way, the human breeding which Darwin claimed as a model of how new species arose didn't produce new species - if by that you mean animals which can breed and produce a permanent line of animals or plants of a new species which is biologically stable, by some definitions the impossibility of interbreeding the definition of a different species. So the claims for it are multiply inept and dishonest.
I don't think science knows now or likely will ever know the various means through which new species have arisen in nature. I very much doubt there is any one "force" that made that happen. Though it's obvious that new species did arise from old ones and it can be said that older species "went extinct."* I doubt there is any one mechanism and I am absolutely convinced that "natural selection" as defined by Darwinism is not a real thing.
There's no reason for a reasoning person who doesn't choose to buy the snake oil of such "science" to ignore or deny the problems with it, I'm under no moral obligation to sociology or Darwinism both of which have records ranging from dubious benefit on one hand to being a producer of total evil and depravity on the other one. I have demonstrated exhaustively the links between Darwinism and eugenics, including the genocidal Nazi eugenics through the most highly credentialed and even lauded scientists of the period between Darwin and 1945 - I've also shown that scientists since then have not only NOT given up eugenics and scientific racism based in the theory of natural selection, many of those who have promoted both have been and are still holders of honored faculty appointments and the editorship of journals and the leadership of professional organizations. Many of them have been as supportive of both eugenics and scientific racism as anyone was in the 1920s or 30s and even as the Nazi genocides were happening. Similar things could be said for those in sociology, psychology, anthropology and, perhaps most tellingly of all, the dismal "science," economics. I have demonstrated through their own words the Darwinian origins of the cold-bloodedly eugenic "herd immunity" theory that got tens of thousands and not improbably hundreds of thousands of us killed by Covid-19 under Trumpism here and under allegedly socialist government in Sweden. I have repeatedly given the quotes from Darwin that support such scientific claims.
I don't trust any of it, there is no logical or moral obligation for me to pretend not to see the problems with them I see and not to call intellectual dishonesty just that no matter what the pedigree or position of the claims and those claiming them. I'm not worried about having your totally imaginary cooties. For Pete-sake, I left 7th grade much more than a generation back. Lots of you guys have hung around schools too long, you never get past acting like kids. Grow up.
Since you claim to be a professor, I wonder if anyone has studied the infantalizing effects on college faculties of constantly dealing with immature near adults and trying to get their approval or liking or more. Not that I'd trust such a study to tell us anything much about it.
* The idea of extinction of species is too inspecific because if a species gradually, through changing generations, produced a still living line, it's quite a different thing from a species all being killed off without any surviving line going on into the future. Those are two very different entities. If "natural selection" is supposed to be an explanation of how biological diversity came about any lines of life that got cut off in the past or today are not a part of that production of new species. The scientific ineptness in not distinguishing the two seems, to me at least, to account for some of the most depraved of murderous claims made under natural selection,
An especially bad example of which was the lauded, even idolized biologist Karl Pearson and his fascination with "the death rate" which he gave as a definition of Darwinism. Just one example is his criticism of the use of cesarean section to deliver babies because it kept too many babies with big heads born to women with pelvises too small to deliver them alive was about as depraved an idea as I've ever seen. He certainly favored the deaths of the children and the women because of his favorite theory of natural selection and his entirely imaginary results which he was sure would "bring down the race." And especially bizarre considering the role that "big craniums" had in Darwinist assertions of human superiority, I may look for the possibility Pearson made such claims, which wouldn't surprise me.
Given what was said about "herd immunity" above, I could have given Charles and Leonard Darwin's certainty that universal vaccination would bring down the race by keeping too many of the victims of smallpox alive, though I see no evidence that Charles Darwin kept his own brood from being vaccinated. Leonard died without issue, an irony in the most active eugenicist of Darwin's eugenicist children. It was always other kinds who were to be eliminated, not the rich, the white, the "favored race." It's remarkable how many totally imaginary crisis scenarios the Darwinists came up with to favor the elimination of this kind or that kind of person from the species, preferably in a particularly terrible way. It's a symptom of the endemic mental depravity of the British upper class - who they never seemed to find at all in need of such pruning by eradication, not even a socialist like Pearson. I think Darwinism was born of the attitudes of the Brit class system, a component of it from its conception and it has never developed immunity to it. It's more than a viral infection, it's part of its DNA.
I'd like to go farther into that area of researching the real history of Darwinism but I'm not sure I've got the time for it. The more I look into that "socialist," the fixture in British Fabianism, Karl Pearson, the more sinister and depraved his mainstream science is. As someone who evolved out of the more radical end of socialism into the far more radical religious economics of charity, I'd recommend my socialist friends that they really consider the primary source claims of some of those they once held up as heros. Lots of them were quite depraved.
"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it." Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010 LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE
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