Sociobiology: Sound Science Or Muddled Metaphysics?

Abstract

The public image of science is that of an enterprise of dispassionate, cool objectivity: something involving sober, emotion-free, white-coated people, as they battle collectively to wrest secrets from the stubborn universe. Nor is this an image entirely unacceptable to scientists themselves. How else can one explain the great fondness they have for Sir Karl Popper’s philosophy of science, with its picture of men of science ruthlessly discarding favoured brain-children in the face of ugly but falsifying facts?¹ As we know, even biologists avidly swallow and regurgitate this myth, despite the fact that Popper calmly tells them that their most important theory is but a collection of half-baked truisms (see Essay 3). However, as historians of science know only too well, much of the actual activity of science descends right down to (metaphorical) bare-knuckle fighting of the most bloody kind (Ruse, 1979a). Today, there exists just such an acrimonious scientific dispute over the supposed new discipline of ‘sociobiology’, an area of inquiry concerned with biological causes of animal social behaviour, including human social behaviour. On the one hand, some absolutely first-class biologists feel that it represents a basic breakthrough in a crucial area of evolutionary thought. On the other hand, some equally first-class biologists feel that in important respects it represents an excrescence on evolutionary science: an excrescence of the most reactionary and malignant nature.