Generations of philosophers have argued that all human beings are essentially the same, that is, they share the same nature, and that this essential similarity is extremely important. Periodically philosophers have proposed to base the essential sameness of human beings on biology. In this paper I argue that if ‘biology’ is taken to refer to the technical pronouncements of professional biologists, in particular evolutionary biologists, it is simply not true that all organisms that belong to Homo sapiens as a biological species are essentially the same. If ‘characters’ is taken to refer to evolutionary homologies, then periodically a biological species might be characterized by one or more characters which are both universally distributed among and limited to the organisms belonging to that species, but such states of affairs are temporary, contingent, and relatively rare.

At a recent conference I attended involving physicists, biologists, historians, and sociologists, a question about the development of theory in biology in comparison with theory in physics arose, with special interest in the nature of the theorists in the two domains and where they ranked in prestige. The biologists, primarily biochemists, maintained that “theory had a bad name in contemporary biology.” As they saw it from the perspective of biochemists and bench scientists, experimental work was much more highly regarded than theoretical work in biology, in interesting contrast to physics.

Certainly not all biologists are theory averse. In the preface to the first of three volumes edited by C.H. Waddington, the late distinguished geneticist wrote in 1968 that he felt” …that the time is ripe to formulate some skeleton of concepts and methods around which Theoretical Biology can grow….

Interest in and detailed studies of development go back to Aristotle, and antedated serious work on evolution. In the 19th century, theories of and information about development played a significant role in evolutionary thought. This wave reached a crest with Emst Haeckel's late 19th century attempted fusion of evolutionary and developmental ideas through the study of comparative embryology via his ‘Biogenetic law’ that ‘Ontogeny recapitulates phytogeny.’ With the rise of experimental methods for studying development, and the separation of the study of heredity from that of development leading to the birth of genetics as a separate discipline, Haeckel's views fell out of favor by the first decade of the 20th century as evolutionary thought took on new directions. (See, e.g., Allen 1979, Gould 1977, and the essays by Hamburger and Churchill in Mayr and Provine (1980)).

Critics of human sociobiology need a new image. Intense as the joys of strangling infant sciences may be, they do eventually fade, leaving a desire to nurture some more healthy enterprise. In this essay, I shall attempt to complement the critique given in my (1985) by offering a blueprint for the transformation of human sociobiology.

I start with a point that seems to me essential for understanding the complex of issues surrounding sociobiology: sociobiology is highly diverse. Restricting our attention to what I have called “narrow sociobiology” (Kitcher 1985, p. 115), the application of ideas from evolutionary biology to the study of animal social behavior, we find a range of studies and programs that differ in scope, rigor, and intention. Almost everyone who is concerned with the evolution and function of social behavior pays homage to Darwin (for exceptions, see Ho and Saunders 1984), but this common commitment that covers thinkers as diverse as Richard Lewontin and E. O. Wilson provides no grand conclusion about the nature of sociality in humans or in animals generally.

Sociobiology is a diverse field. Its ranks of practitioners and store of explanatory paradigms are growing daily. Thus it would be foolish to claim that all sociobiology is scientifically valid, or that its philosophical foundations can all be laid out in the same terms. But I can offer a logical justification for one fairly widespread brand of sociobiology. Along the way I hope to explain why some brands of sociobiology are less acceptable than others, and also where some of its detractors are seriously misinformed. I want to defend sociobiology, especially as it pertains to the human case. I will show that it is not a genetically determinist position and does not rely on a naive and outdated dichotomy between nature and nurture. Consequently, it is neither politically conservative nor socially pernicious, despite the continuing claims of its detractors (e.g., Allen et al. 1977, Kitcher 1985).

Sociobiology is, in the words of Philip Kitcher (1985), a motley comprised of a variety of arguments defending biological explanations of behavior. Kitcher has shown that sociobiology offers no new theory to the corpus of evolutionary biology but, rather consists of the application of the neo-Darwinian synthesis to social behavior. In fact, one major line of attack on sociobiology (cf. Gould and Lewontin 1979, and Gould 1986) is to identify it as an instance of the worst kind of adaptationism found in evolutionary biology generally. In order to avoid the evil of just-so stories, this strategy aims to eliminate completely explanations by adaptation (including the sociobiological ones) from biology. I believe that explanations by adaptation can be legitimate provided certain necessary conditions are met. After laying out those conditions, I will address the question of the adequacy of explanations offered by William Durham (1976, 1978,1979,1982) in defense of human sociobiology.

I want to claim that healthy science involves, at all times, a synchronic tensed suspension of consensus and dissensus between working scientists, which provides both the variety of opinion and the agreement in opinion essential to coherent scientific progress. The early philosophers of science and the early sociologists of science seem both to have worked with an oversocialized conception of scientific thought, philosophers regarding lapses from postulated objective standards of rationality as the unfortunate intrusion of emotional and personal factors into scientific reasoning, and the sociologists viewing the breakdown of shared values within research groups as the inexplicable accompaniment of emerging anomalies. More recently, sociologists working with a conception of the social construction of scientific thought have reversed the emphasis, suggesting that consensus is essentially a temporary and unstable phase in scientific development, and philosophers have recently crafted a new form of philosophical scepticism for science in suggesting that it is impossible ever to establish that a genuine consensus exists between scientists.

Consider Larry Laudan's (1984) recent statement of the role that consensus plays in scientific validation:

The bulk of this paper will be divided into three sections. I will first sketch what I take to be the main problem in the epistemology of science and explain how the issue of consensus is related to this problem. I will then try to solve the problem by using a social conception of scientific rationality based on evolutionary ideas. And I will finally elaborate that social conception by responding to several objections.

For over two decades now, many philosophers have talked about the existence of a crisis in the epistemology of science. This crisis presumably came about as the result of the dispute between two schools of thought: the logical and the socio-historical. The logical school is associated with the analytic and empiricist tradition in the field and is supposed to defend the rationality of science. The socio-historical, whose most notorious exponents are Kuhn (1970) and Feyerabend (1975), has been accused of irrationalism.

It is certainly not excessively original to maintain that an empirically oriented theory on the structure and on the history of Physics—that is a theory that can and should be put to the test of what physicists, qua physicists, actually do and have been doing and of what they actually come up with—is still badly needed. And it is equally unoriginal to hold that the implementation of such a project cannot but somehow relate to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn, 1962), a work which, to its author's mind at least, was meant to provide some kind of a starting point for such a project. But the fact is that The Structure (as well as all the other work of Kuhn of the same inspiration) has not, in the main, been read that way.

Baltas calls for an empirical theory of the structure and development of Physics—one which gives a unified ac count of both the internal and external aspects of the science. In this paper he proposes a tripartite structure for physical theory and describes the role of socially determined ideological “assumptions” upon that structure.

Since there is very little social consensus amongst philosophers today on many elements of his project, before discussing his proposal in detail it might be helpful to sort out some of the widely disparate enterprises which are associated with terms such as external or ideological when applied to the study of science. Baltas does not always use these terms in quite the ways I would expect.

One of the enduring problems in history and philosophy of science is the interaction between theory and experiment. Hacking (1983) has argued persuasively that experiment often has a life of its own, independent of theory. Lakatos (1970), on the other hand, has argued that theory often proceeds independently of experimental results. More typically, the interaction seems to be rather complex. Experiment may confirm or refute a theory or call for a new theory. Theory may suggest new experiments, offer a new interpretation of known results, or help to validate an experimental result. These are, of course, not the only possibilities (Hacking 1983 and Franklin 1986, Chapter 4).

In dealing with the complex interaction between theory and experiment the old cliche, “Man proposes, Nature disposes,” has been shown to be far from adequate. Pickering's study of quark models and theory (1984a) has shown that it is not always clear at the time what is being proposed.

“An experiment,” the Oxford Dictionary of the History of Science records, “unlike an experience, is a designed practical intervention in Nature; its upshot is a socially contrived set of observations, carried out under artificially produced and deliberately controlled, reproducible conditions. At the experiment's core is the notion that the conditions for producing a given effect can be separated into independently variable factors, in such a way as to demonstrate how the factors behave in their natural (i.e. the non-experimental) state.” (Dictionary 1981, p. 136). Around 1900, some biologists would have acceded to such a definition, yet many would have offered alternatives. Some would have denied that the conditions in question must be “designed” or artificially produced; nature may also provide experiments. Others would have emphasized the use of experimentally-derived observations for hypothesis testing; experimentation goes beyond the mere experiment itself, that is. A variety of additional definitions would have been advanced as well, illustrating the lack of one such orthodox interpretation as the Dictionary now offers.

This paper is about realism. The ideas presented were developed as part of a response to a persistent criticism levelled against the relativist/constructivist programme in the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), namely that this programme fails to allow the real any role in the articulation of scientific thought. This criticism I believe to be mistaken, and justified, if at all, only by the relative silence of the SSK tradition on the role of the real. To indicate that this silence is a contingent, rather than a necessary attribute of the tradition, my aim here is to explore what can be said about the relation between the real and the articulated on the basis of empirical studies of scientific practice.

To situate what follows, let me note that the standard philosophical debate on realism concerns the reality, or lack of it, of unobservable entities appearing in well confirmed theories (Leplin 1984).

It is impossible to overrate the important contribution which statistical mechanics makes to our contemporary understanding of the physical world. Cutting across the hierarchy of theories which describe the constitution of things, and related in subtle and not yet fully understood ways to the fundamental dynamical theories, it provides the essential framework for describing the dynamical evolution of systems where large domains of initial conditions lead to a wide variety of possible outcomes distributed in a regular and predictable way. For the special case of the description of systems in equilibrium, the theory provides a systematic formalism which can be applied in any appropriate situation to derive the macroscopic equation of state. Here the usual Gibbsian ensembles, especially microcanonical and canonical, function as a general schematism into which each particular case can be fit. In the more general case of nonequilibrium the situation is less clear.

The nature and basis of irreversibility has been intensively investigated over the last 100 years by physicists, mathematicians, and philosophers. But if progress is measured by convergence of opinion among the “experts” then it is hard to detect; in fact the field is a virtual Tower of Babel. J.L. Lebowitz, one of the leading mathematical physicists in the field put it this way:

With the appearance of J.H. Conway's On Numbers and Games (1976), the mathematical and philosophical communities have much to celebrate. It is Conway's important discovery that the familiar Dedekind cut and von Neumann ordinal constructions are part of a more general construction which leads to a proper class of numbers embracing the reals and the ordinals as well as many less familiar numbers including -ω, ω/2, l/ω, √ω and ω-π, where ω is the least infinite ordinal. Conway further shows that the arithmetic of the reals may be extended to the entire class yielding a real-closed ordered field (1976, pp. 40-42); that is, an ordered field where every positive element is a square, and every polynomial of odd degree with coefficients in the field has a solution in the field.