1970) The problem with sociology's neglect of biology and evolution is not faulty logic but rejection of the data and theory of the natural sciences. Alchemy was condemned to remain a mysterious art driven by mixed goals until some exponents accepted as fact the idea that the building blocks of all chemical compounds are immutable elements such as hydrogen, sulphur, lead, and gold. The founding doctrine of chemistry, concerning the nature of the elements, banished as unscientific the quest for gold out of lead by chemical processes. Similarly, despite the great flexibility attainable through learning, it is certain that there are essentially immutable properties of humans not erasable by short-term, social intervention. Sociologists' quest for gold [...] overlooks the leaden human material that would be transformed. The quest will remain at best a protoscience, and at worst pseudoscience, until their methods and theories are disciplined by knowledge of the neo-Darwinian paradigm.

Frank Salter
"Sociology as Alchemy"
Skeptic (v4 n1, 1996)

1971) The growth of science over the last 400 years had provided thinkers with a large (and growing) reservoir of true assumptions on which to base their reasoning. The empirical resource in the natural sciences is so wide-ranging that it is ignored at the peril of reaching false conclusions. Indeed, scientific knowledge in many areas is so well developed that acceptance of it as a starting point can be taken as a criterion of rationality. Accordingly, we can treat a denial of the factual authority of the natural sciences as a whole as a case of empirical irrationality, the denial of well-verified facts.

Frank Salter
"Sociology as Alchemy"
Skeptic (v4 n1, 1996)

1972) [S]ociologists, for the most past, parasitize data collected by others, aggregate these data into abstracted categories, subject these aggregated data to countless statistical manipulations, and intercorrelate variables that are at least half-a-dozen steps remote from actual behavior. And those are the sociologists who claim to be empiricists. The remainder practice armchair social philosophy, endlessly rehash the ideas of other sociologists in tedious textbooks, or become engrossed in statistical gimmicry. [...] Sociology's claim to scientific status can no longer be upheld primarily through a facade of quantitative methodology. It must be anchored in a theoretical paradigm that satisfies scientific canons. Such a theoretical paradigm sociology signally failed to produce in over a century of self-conscious existence. The main reason for that failure is that sociology turned its back on the one theory that was overwhelmingly successful in explaining change and variation in life forms on this planet: evolution by natural selection.

Pierre van den Berghe
"Why Most Sociologists Don't (and Won't)
Think Evolutionarily"
Sociological Forums (5:173-85)
quoted by Frank Salter in
"Sociology as Alchemy"
Skeptic (v4 n1, 1996)

1973) [A] significant portion of sociology rejects established biological facts even when they bear directly on phenomena under study. Thus one hallmark of the scientific revolution - that theoretical disputes came to be resolved through controlled observation - has not yet reached sociology as a whole. A school of thought does not qualify as a science merely by including natural-scientific approaches in its endless "debates." To qualify as a science the scientific faction must prevail.

Frank Salter
"Sociology as Alchemy"
Skeptic (v4 n1, 1996)