Science and Reality

Abstract Sociobiologists believe that they possess the means to gain real understanding about the adaptive significance of behavioral traits. The discipline’s foundation, Darwinian natural selection theory, has an internal logic that is unassailable. The theory can be used to produce hypotheses that are subjected to the same process of evaluation used by all members of the scientific community. Scientists everywhere feel confident that this process yields valid conclusions about what causes things to happen in the natural world. Not everyone, however, is so confident of the objective nature of the scientific approach. Indeed, in recent years critics of science have arisen, largely within the academic community, critics who go by the labels of cultural relativist, postmodernist, or social constructivist and who advance a spectrum of counterviews and counterconclusions. For our purposes I shall assign these observers of science in general and sociobiology in particular to one of two camps: the hard cultural relativists and the soft cultural relativists.