**4. Conclusions**

The need to rethink the relationship between empirical research that uses quantitative methods and the articulation of explanations and theories results from three circumstances:


The aim of this chapter is to state the criteria that sociological reflection must fulfill to articulate an explanation and a theory.

The first one comes from the fundamental change in the history of thought at the beginnings of modern thought, which replaces a logic that resorts to an ultimate absolute origin as explanation for a relational-procedural logic. However, remains of the old logic survive today in numerous explanations, approaches, and theories.

In the modern sense, explaining means to resort to the conditions a phenomenon arises from, in other words, to cognitively recover its intrinsic causality. However, a method that resorts to history is not enough. It requires a second-order observation that analyzes the first-order empirical observations and associates them to other knowledge. Statistical data from empirical research must be subject of a professional sociological observation that correlates it with the knowledge that has been recognized as objective and valid by the scientific community.

The reflections made by a second-order observation of the statistical material from sociobiology, especially those studies that statistically link "European ancestry" with income and cognitive levels, show that in quantitative methodology, variables that in social reality are immersed in a network of historical, social, and political relationships are taken out of context to form part of a two-dimensional statistical model. Without a reflection that contributes to give meaning to the data, the mere enunciation of correlations does not offer possibilities to explain any of the phenomena it deals with.

In the case of the existing relationships between race and cognitive abilities analyzed by the sociobiology, they follow the already historically overcome early logic. This logic parts from what is before it and refers to an origin in which is already contained what is to result from it. In this sense, whether in the race or genes, what is to emerge from them is already contained in them. In this reasoning, what truly determines cognitive abilities, the learning development, is left out.
