Human biology is a social biology,

Human biology is a social biology, and it is probably up to social scientists to make this point. Biosocial research, conducted in diverse, community-based settings, encourages an epistemological shift that reframes human biology, development, and health as complexly determined by multiple forces inside and outside the body. It engages issues and processes of interest to biological scientists, but foregrounds social/contextual factors as potentially important contributors to variation in human physiological function and health (Stinson,Bogin, & O’Rourke, 2012). This should be familiar ground for developmental and social/behavioral scientists who have long emphasized the complex interplay among genes,biology, and society across the life course (Engel, 1978; Glass & McAtee, 2006; Gottleib,1991; Shanahan & Boardman, 2009). With an increasingly sophisticated toolkit for integrating biological measures into community-based, social science research, the time is right for a new generation of biosocial scholarship that enriches both the biological and the social sciences, and helps build stronger links between them.