<P> It was with the work of Charles Darwin that the descriptive version of social theory received another shock . Biology had, seemingly, resisted mathematical study, and yet the theory of natural selection and the implied idea of genetic inheritance--later found to have been enunciated by Gregor Mendel, seemed to point in the direction of a scientific biology based, like physics and chemistry, on mathematical relationships . In the first half of the 20th century, statistics became a free - standing discipline of applied mathematics . Statistical methods were used confidently, for example in an increasingly statistical view of biology . The first thinkers to attempt to combine inquiry of the type they saw in Darwin with exploration of human relationships, which, evolutionary theory implied, would be based on selective forces, were Freud in Austria and William James in the United States . Freud's theory of the functioning of the mind, and James' work on experimental psychology would have enormous impact on those that followed . Freud, in particular, created a framework which would appeal not only to those studying psychology, but artists and writers as well . </P> <P> Though Comte is generally regarded as the "Father of Sociology", the discipline was formally established by another French thinker, Émile Durkheim (1858--1917), who developed positivism in greater detail . Durkheim set up the first European department of sociology at the University of Bordeaux in 1895, publishing his Rules of the Sociological Method . In 1896, he established the journal L'Année Sociologique . Durkheim's seminal monograph, Suicide (1897), a case study of suicide rates among Catholic and Protestant populations, distinguished sociological analysis from psychology or philosophy . It also marked a major contribution to the concept of structural functionalism . </P> <P> Today, Durkheim, Marx and Max Weber are typically cited as the three principal architects of social science in the science of society sense of the term . "Social science", however, has since become an umbrella term to describe all those disciplines, outside of physical science and art, which analyse human societies . </P> <P> In the first half of the 20th century, statistics became a free - standing discipline of applied mathematics . Statistical methods were used confidently, for example in an increasingly statistical view of biology . </P>

Historical factors that gave birth to the social sciences in the west