Sociology begins with the importance of social connection, highlights the social processes that shape human outcomes, and takes account of social groups and the cultures they create when explaining human behavior. And we now know that these insights take us back to, not away from, our evolved biology:  that the environment influences genetic expression; that culture influences evolutionary change; that the need for group support and social connection are the evolved lodestone of our species and are reflected in the functioning of our brains.

The rapid spread of a virus on a global scale appears to be one of Thomas Malthus’ “Four Horsemen” riding through societies and overwhelming the human immune system. From a sociological view, this attack on the biological immune system is only one selection process. As has become so clearly evident, there is another level of selection operating in the social universe: selection on the social structures and cultures of each society being invaded by a small strip of RNA. Read Dr. Turner’s responses from the Q&A here.

The present pandemic is a stark reminder that humans are, first and foremost, biological beings – as vulnerable to environmental and evolved threats as is any other organism. Humans – like the virus itself – are products of an evolutionary process that has profoundly shaped not only our morphology, but also our behavior via the imperatives, capacities, and dispositions it has bequeathed to us. Although unwelcome in many quarters of Sociology, this reality is in fact the discipline’s saving grace. Read Dr. Marshall’s responses from the Q&A here.

At their core, humans are emotional creatures. However, both the biological and social sciences have only recently begun to take emotions seriously, having been constrained by the old Cartesian separation of brain and body, rationality and sensation. Despite the erosion of the sharp distinctions between thinking and feeling and the explosion of interest, disciplinary divides have constrained fruitful dialogue between neurobiology and sociology.

The brain modules supporting human social communication and interaction are the product of millions of years of evolutionary forces acting on Homo sapiens and their ancestors in face-to-face contexts. Looking at the big picture, we simply aren’t used to anything but face-to-face interaction. Over the last 20 years, though—less than a blink in evolutionary time—we have gone from none of us having smartphones and relatively few of us being online to many of us having smartphones and almost all of us being online.

We endorse calls for interdisciplinary collaborations to anticipate zoonotic spillover — and we believe the social sciences can make valuable contributions. The concept of normal accidents reminds us that even rare events are likely to occur with repeated trials over a range of contexts. Treadmill theory points to human organizations and processes that generate repeated exposure to novel viruses and heighten the risk of these exposures.

The coronavirus pandemic will inevitably strike a blow to U.S. economic growth. However, it is important to remember that over the last 150 years, the U.S. economy has suffered a long series of recessions and depressions of greater and lesser magnitude; but the economy has always bounced back, and remarkably, it always has returned to the same long-term average of just under 2% growth per capita per year.

Since the 1980s, it has been increasingly recognized that culture and social organization, not just genes, evolve by descent with modification. Sociocultural evolution is based on social learning by observation or linguistically encoded instructions, variation, and sociocultural selection. Moreover, genes and culture coevolve in interaction with each other, whether gene-culture or culture-gene coevolution, and whether within one or between species.

The success (or failure) that societies have had in the wake of COVID-19 offers a simple reminder that the success of Homo sapiens has been essentially a cooperative enterprise, not unlike the sciences, and not unlike religions. The connection between COVID and religion is appropriate given that I argue, a) that religion evolved; b) that it is cognitively natural; and c) that it spreads like a virus.

COVID-19 is a harrowing test of societies’ abilities to cope with twenty-first-century global risk. Beginning with the proliferation of nuclear weapons, human decisions increasingly produced novel global hazards, the long-term consequences of which are themselves dramatically shaped by human responses to these hazards. Viruses mutate and attack, but their spread is determined largely by human decisions. Global and state institutions coordinate efforts, but their effectiveness is shaped at a smaller scale—within local organizational and cultural contexts.

More than ever, the COVID-19 pandemic reminds us of our shared humanity. Everyone, rich and poor, old and young, from the developed world or the less developed world, of whatever color or creed, can get the virus. All over the world, the most vulnerable to dying from the virus are the elderly, as well as males in all age groups. This is a pattern common at all times and in all societies – the elderly are more likely to succumb to any disease, and the excess mortality of males in all age groups is well known to demographers.

Sociological social psychology in general, and particularly the study of morality, suggest caveats for the relevance of evolutionary processes to motivate modern research programs. Certainly, evolution has set the boundaries for social processes, but the prominent questions involve what happens within those biological and neurological boundaries.

COVID-19 has touched every corner of the earth resulting in catered economies, mounting mortality rates, and personal traumas. How can we break the grip of this wily foe? With a vaccine many months away, it is time to reach beyond medicalized wisdom by tapping into multiple spheres of scientific knowledge. One fertile source is evolutionary sociology because preventing the further spread of the disease requires a public effort, which is a demographic process and not an individual one.

Sociological approaches to understanding the COVID crisis are anchored to the relationship between social structures and epidemiological patterns, or Social Epidemiology. Although we sociologists have a tendency to distance ourselves from evolutionary explanations, evolutionary approaches in social epidemiology would likely explore the social structural conditions within which microbiological “accidents,” like a novel coronavirus, become epidemiological phenomena, and why they occur in varying ways depending on social structures.