Joseph Lopreato


Joseph Lopreato was a sociobiologist, a social theorist, and a professor of sociology. After receiving his Ph.D. from Yale University he taught and lectured at various universities in the USA and abroad, and published a dozen books and monographs plus numerous papers in several languages. He died in Georgetown, Texas, on March 25, 2015, and is buried in Austin, Texas.

Career

His work spanned various fields of theory and research, including migration and underdevelopment, social inequality and change, political sociology, the sociological classics, the philosophy of science, and evolutionary demography, among others. Joseph Lopreato was one of the first sociologists to take up the challenge from behavioral evolutionary biology to work toward a synthesis of the biological and sociocultural disciplines. He is accordingly best known for his work as a human sociobiologist.
His work in sociobiology, preeminently Human Nature and Biocultural Evolution and Crisis in Sociology: The Need for Darwin, provides a theory of human nature embedded in a taxonomy of “behavioral predispositions”; a demonstration of bio-cultural interdependence in such areas as ethnicity, sex roles, and social inequality; an argument that the “crisis” in sociology arises primarily from the failure to discover even a single general law or principle ; and, inter alia, a well-reasoned appeal for a scientific sociology through the exploitation of the sociobiology “fitness principle,” to which he has attached a number of important culture-relevant conditions.
In Peasants No More, he studied the effects of emigration in Southern Italy.

Selected bibliography