The evolution of the rational thought process into a workable, empirical formula known as social science was given a historical review in the well-attended Sun Room of the Memorial Union on Thursday night.

Hamilton Cravens, professor of history, has a resume that includes being named a 2007 Center For Excellence in the Arts and Humanities Distinguished Scholar and is a famed author of academic social and behavioral novels, such as “Designing Humanity: The Social and Behavioral Sciences, 1776-2001,” which was also the name of his lecture.

Cravens spoke on the historical evolution of natural thought processes, filtered through the changes in popular thought. Advances in research and theory, beginning when man crawled out from the “dark ages” into what Cravens calls the “democratic revolution,” saw events such as the American Revolution in 1776 and the French Revolution in 1789 as a new ballast of thought. This carried into the 1840s and ’50s, with scholars beginning to analyze and study human behavior, Cravens said.

“It was the creation of a democratic society where the control of human behavior and the established order were questioned,” Craven said. “Without hierarchy, do you have chaos?”

Craven detailed the beginnings of social science through the study of individual behaviors, first by dismissing some of the popular theories of the time, such as phrenology, which used parts of the skull to reason out intelligence, all the way down to Charles Darwin’s theories, which shifted study to the individual.

Social science’s focus on human behavior started with the evolution of the educational curriculum and reconditioning behaviors. Next came the invention of the penitentiary system, and then the insane asylum, where “moral therapy” was said to be administered to individuals needing to learn better habits, Cravens said. The “complex elaborate series of physiological exercises geared toward individuals with mental retardation,” which would have taught them “correct behavioral patterns,” was the final growth in social science.

But all of these grew into foundational institutions, started by the democratic revolution. Scholars began to prize and study the individual through behavioral mapping and found out that it could be measured mathematically, economically and scientifically, Cravens said, which ushered in a new age of reason.

“[Research focused on] behavior you can measure and you can experiment with,” he said.

Cravens said the fragmentation of the social sciences in the modern era, which broke down to study smaller bits of human behavior, such as economically, physiologically and politically. Studies in American universities were mainly focused on the individual society versus the collective, Marxist society.

“This is the age of individual fragmentation, of infinite number of ‘n.’ What matters is the individual’s choice, not a group, race or nation. [It is focused on] rational choice,” he said.

Students of the social sciences and of history could find a lot of common ground in Craven’s speech.

“I came to understand his class better. I wanted to get a better grasp of the concepts, and I’m a history buff as well,” said Nick Voermans, senior in music.