I suppose it is open to debate whether sociology is really science, but a lot of its practitioners would claim it is, or can be.
Sociology, psychology, economics, linguistics, history and various other fields of study are referred to as the "soft sciences." "Science" because their practitioners do their best to apply the principles of science to their endeavors, and "soft" because not
all of those principles can be used. For example, in psychology it is commonly unethical and often illegal to perform
experimentation, one of the cornerstones of the scientific method. Linguistics, another example, has to work without
evidence, another cornerstone, because for approximately 65,000 years languages evolved without being written down or recorded in any other way.
Sociology is plagued by both of these handicaps: you might be thrown in jail or even assassinated for trying to perform
experiments, and before the invention of the technology of writing in the Bronze Age,
evidence is sketchy and easy to misinterpret. But this doesn't mean that psychologists, linguists and sociologists aren't scientists.
Humans differ from animals in that we have free will.
Duh? For starters, many people are convinced that the universe is 100% deterministic, so
nobody of any species has "free will" about anything.
Those who call on the Heisenberg Principle to justify the assumption that the universe is not deterministic (at least not 100%), have quite a challenge to explain how random motion of quarks, leptons and bosons inside the atoms that comprise our brain cells has anything to do with
"will" at all, rather than simply adding a truly
random component to our behavior--and also to the behavior of every other organism as well as of volcanoes, decaying radioactive isotopes, and everything else in the universe.
The phrase "free will" implies some sort of
causal chain of events. We do A because we've seen how poorly things worked out the last time we did B and C. How can this be correlated with
random motions?
The human DNA evolved instincts over millions of years according to evolution.
This is true of all chordates: mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish and cartilaginous fish. We all have a forebrain (which, humbly enough, evolved out of the olfactory lobe: our first intelligence was simply chasing after attractive smells because that implied good food was in the offing) which is programmed with a lot of logic gates and other things that we barely understand, including
instincts.
All chordates have instincts. For example, even as an infant, almost every chordate will run (or swim, fly, crawl, etc.) away from a larger animal with both eyes in front of its face because that is the face of a predator.
More advanced chordates have more complex instincts. Certain male birds build elaborate nests including colorful baubles, and the females choose the mate with the prettiest nest.
While free will allows us to choose apart from our genetic based instincts. Free will is something relatively new to the human brain, and it could override the instincts of the DNA.
Balderdash. Have you never had a dog or a cat? Have you never seen a domesticated horse, goat, dog, cat, parrot, emu or koi? They make conscious choices every day, often conflicting with their instincts.
The non-human apes in particular are fascinating. Many of them live in low-risk environments so they have plenty of time to kill, and they use that time to invent games. Members of at least two species (gorilla and chimpanzee) have been taught American Sign Language, and the conversations their trainers have with them are illuminating. They're curious and eager to absorb new information.
The tree of knowledge of good and evil is law, since law define what is good and evil. If one was connected to instinct, like an animal, there is no need for law, since this is all innate within instinctive behavior.
Paleolithic humans (early stone age, before agriculture settled us down into permanent villages) had law, but it was instinctive. You don't kill a member of your own tribe. You share your food. You cooperate in hunting. You always do what Grandfather tells you. In a lean year (due to low rainfall) you fight to protect your tribe from other tribes because you're all desperate to encroach on each other's hunting and gathering territory. But in good years you have a summer festival where you swap hunting techniques, medicines, songs and stories... and a few daughters to keep the gene pool "chlorinated."
Law is needed when innate knowledge due to genetic instinct was no longer clear.
Actually, law was needed precisely when the Agricultural Revolution occurred. It became obvious quickly that division of labor and economies of scale increase the productivity of a tribe, and both of these things were more easily attained by increasing the size of the tribe. So after hundreds of generations of sticking together and not cooperating with other tribes (except at the summer festival), it suddenly became advantageous to welcome them into the village in order to make it larger and more productive.
But humans had an instinct to only trust and depend on people they had known since birth. Living in harmony and cooperation with strangers ran counter to our instincts. So they had to invent rules that made this coexistence both peaceful and profitable. Don't steal your neighbor's food. Leave his wife alone. Take turns watching the herds so the lions don't get them. Everyone must cooperate during harvest season. If you have a genuine problem, let the elders decide who's right, and obey their orders.
We've been doing this ever since. Our villages keep getting larger: cities, states, nations, and now trans-national hegemonies like the E.U. Our rules have gotten more complicated and we have many more levels of "elders," as we find ourselves living in harmony and cooperation with people on the other side of the planet who are nothing more than anonymous abstractions--
because it makes everybody happier, safer and more prosperous--at least when it's working.
Our laws now fill entire computers, but they have the same purpose as the first Neolithic laws (late stone age): they tell us how to get along with each other when our instincts aren't up to the task.
It's interesting to notice that our dogs have taken a different path. In the few hundred human generations since the Agricultural Revolution, dogs have undergone several thousand generations. This is quite long enough for their instincts to evolve in order to align with their environment. Even though they are physically not much different from wolves (smaller brains for a diet with less meat, teeth more suited for chewing carrots than killing a bison, etc.), their instinctive behavior is much different from wolves. They have a very weak alpha instinct, allowing a human to be pack leader; they prefer "scavenging" for food (i.e. something out of a can) over hunting; they're much more gregarious, forming huge packs that include even other species; and they retain childhood behaviors like barking, wagging their tails, roughhousing and chasing sticks
because that endears them to us. The wolves who were born without these traits wandered back into the forest--or in many cases were simply regarded as meat.
Dogs have the instinct to be perfectly happy in a huge, complicated civilization. We don't, so we need laws.
There's no need to invoke an invisible supernatural creature who controls human life. This is all plain old evolution.
We would not be able to speak in terms of animal behavior, if they had free will, since each unique animal of a species would do its own thing.
Oh come off it! Each human does not "do his own thing." The majority of our activities harmonize with our community. Shopping for groceries, cleaning the house, taking the kids to school, wearing clothes, obeying the traffic laws, being productive at the office, helping a neighbor with a problem.
We are a pack-social species like wolves, dolphins and elephants, and we use our
instincts to help the pack survive and prosper. People are occasionally born without that instinct (or damaged). We call them
sociopaths.
Natural selection would not have chosen a behavior doomed to death and disease under natural conditions but needs gimmicks of science and medicine to prop it up.
What bizarre assertions are you coming up with now??? Infant mortality was
eighty percent from the first appearance of our species, right up until the end of the
19th century! The human species barely survived, because our women were always pregnant or nursing. In fact there was a major die-off about 60,000 years ago, during which the total population fell to about 10,000. (I could be a little off on those figures because I'm not going to bother looking them up right now.) There was a plague around 500CE that killed about half the entire population of the world, and another one a thousand years later that killed off half of the people in Europe.
It was only at the dawn of the age of science that we took matters into our own hands and made the world safer. Covered sewers and clean water piped directly into homes made everything and everybody cleaner so they weren't covered with pathogens. Wrapped food kept people from swapping germs in the market, and the automobile did away with the shin-deep layer of fly-infested horse manure that covered the streets of every city. Finally, vaccines and antiobiotics saved the lives of the children who got sick anyway, so that today infant mortality is less than one percent and most people in the developed world don't even know somebody who lost a child!
The "gimmicks of science and medicine"
conquered the evils of nature!
You're funny!