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Sociobiology: Sound Science or Muddled Metaphysics?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Michael Ruse
Michael Ruse*
Affiliation:
University of Guelph
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Extract

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. Witness, for example, the great fondness they have for Sir Karl Popper's philosophy of science, with its scenario of men of science ruthlessly discarding favoured brain-children in the face of ugly but falsifying facts. Even biologists avidly swallow and regurgitate this picture, despite the fact that Popper calmly tells them that their most important theory is but a collection of half-baked truisms.

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.

Type
Part I. Sociobiology
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1976 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1976 , 1976 , pp. 48 - 73
Copyright
Copyright © 1977 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

This paper was supposed to be a commentary in a symposium on sociobiology, with lead papers by R.D. Alexander and R.C. Lewontin. However, although both main speakers kindly sent me some of their writings on sociobiology, neither was able to let me have a copy of the paper to be given in the symposium. This is the reason for the somewhat independent nature of this paper; although, assuming that neither Alexander nor Lewontin change too much in what they write here from what they said in Chicago, what I write here will in fact be a commentary on their basic positions.

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