SCIENTIFIC MORALITY, SCIENTIFIC MYTH: BIOLOGY AND SOCIAL THEORY FROM SOCIAL DARWINISM TO SOCIOBIOLOGY

Beginning in the 1960\u27s, a number of the leading figures in the new disciplines of molecular biology and sociobiology have attempted to derive from their work a truly scientific theory of human affairs. Highly controversial, such attempts have been denounced as ideological defenses of the capitalist status quo, as revivals of Social Darwinism, and as harbingers of Nazism. However, analysis of these contemporary works and of those efforts which preceded them suggests otherwise. Since the time of Spencer and Darwin, the concerns which have shaped the transformation of evolutionary biology into social theory have been more metaphysical and moral than economic. Evolutionary biology has been used to advocate a variety of economic and political systems, but what has remained constant is its use in portraying a rationally comprehensible universe, the scientific understanding of which discloses the truth of human origins and nature, and provides certain knowledge of how to live. Nevertheless, the efforts of molecular biologists and sociobiologists to deduce scientific moralities from sanctifying scientific myths of life\u27s Origins and Ends differ from those of their predecessors. Social Darwinists, Reform Darwinists, and biological humanists had attempted to achieve a partial reconciliation between evolutionary biology and traditional, Western moral and religious beliefs, thereby preserving a sense of human uniqueness, value, and responsibility in a still vaguely Christian world. Philosophically committed to an extreme reductionism and filled with a sense of imminent cultural collapse, the contemporary biological scientists studied explicitly break with, and are hostile towards, what they variously term Western, Christian, or literary culture. In its place, acknowledgement of truths contained within the DNA molecule is said to be essential to species survival, cultural transformation, and a cure of souls. Upon examination, the scientific moralities and myths of molecular biologists and sociobiologists prove no more successful than earlier attempts. Failure is due, not to an illogical leap from is to ought, but to a metaphysically and morally laden description of what is, and to the irreconcilable conflict between the moral positions offered and the reductionist myths used to validate them. Despite these inherent contradictions, an historical comparison with the fate of popularized Darwinism in Germany suggests that these contemporary efforts may indeed prove dangerous