The aim of this paper is to give a brief overview of the development of neo-biologism (the explaining of human behaviour and social and political activities as mainly results of our biological nature).

It is here suggested that we may be in the middle of a development during which physics will fuse with biology into a new world view, a new "macro paradigm", and that the current rather pronounced biologistic intellectual trend is simply a part of a transition period at which end biology will fuse with physics into a new macro paradigm.

It is also suggested that the current biologistic trend may be a continuation of the biologism/evolutionism, or our history of evolution that dominated the period from the end of the nineteenth century up to the end of the second World War. It is further argued that this trend was temporarily interrupted by Hitler's devastating politics and regimen of horror which made biologism/evolutionism impossible for nearly four decades and therefore delayed the development of this suggested new macro paradigm.


On the History of Evolutionism – A Brief Overview
Darwins book on Origin of Species (1859), stimulated and intensified further discussion about the evolution of the species.
In the social and political sciences, the theory of evolution became popular rather soon after the publication of The Origins of Species. This was mainly due to the work of Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), but also to the efforts of Darwin's cousin Francis Galton (1822–1911) and others, and of course to Darwin's own later publications (Bowler P, 1989, p. 282–2; Oldroyd D R 1983, p. 204–306 ).

The theory of evolution became associated with social, political and technological progress, and with the elimination of inferior people in the struggle for life. This elimination was viewed, by some, as a unavoidable consequence of the natural laws of evolution and progress. The theory of evolution also became associated with the economic policy of laissez–faire with its accentuation of unlimited competition between humans as the most viable route to social and technological progress

There was the further worry that humanity was degenerating. It was supposed that humans were domesticated animals, in the same way as their cattle and other domesticated species. Modern society, it was argued, had neglected the laws of nature, therefore natural selection was no longer operating on humanity, to the result that inferior individuals reproduced to a higher degree than the more intelligent individuals. The poor of course, were the less intelligent people, and hence the inferior ones. Consequently the most hard headed Social Darwinists suggested that aid to the poor only increased the rate of degeneration (Adrian D /Moore J 1992 p. 153–154). Social lierals though, recommended better education for the poor, convinced that this would add to the quality of many of these people, qualities which could also be inherited (Oldroyd D R, 1983 p. 227–228).

Biology in general, as well as the theory of evolution, was also used to justify the oppression of women at a time when women intensified their fight for equal rights. Darwin's theory also offered justification for the oppression of people in the colonies, as well as for racism and oppression of coloured people in the Western World. Efforts were made to devise methods of demonstrating differences in intelligence between the different social classes in the Western World, between women and men, and between the "human races". Craneometry, which was further developed into racist eugenics, was one such method. Frances Galton developed methods to differentiate between more and less intelligent people. He introduced statistics to the behavioural sciences such as the Gauss curve (The Bell Curve) for this purpose. Because of Galton's work, and because of the tests developed by Simon–Binet, the intelligence tests were developed in the beginning of the twentieth century. At the end of the nineteenth century many psychologists developed theories about human types, or archetypes (Gould 1981 p. 147–233). These theories were obviously inspired by the findings in racial biology, in eugenics.

The first World War led to a lapse of discussion but in the aftermath of the war, biologists were able to revive the debate about the degeneration of humankind. There was also a scientific consensus on the gravity of the problem, and differences among scientists were more or less centred on which, among several available solutions was the best. Solutions proposed ranged from punishment of inferior individuals through decreased economic support to encouraging superior ones to reproduce more through schemes of extra support.

In the USA, laws were passed to prevent immigration of "inferior people", and psychological tests were used to select those who could be allowed to immigrate. (Gould 1981, p. 157). In Europe discussions about the domestication/degeneration were intensified during the twenties, and biologists and physicians suggested sterilisation of inferior people. Before 1929, and the economic crises, it was not possible to get enough political support for these measures, but as a consequence of the stock market crash in 1929, and with the argument that it was too expensive to support mentally retarded people, laws of this kind were passed in Germany, as well as in other European countries (Weingart/Kroll/Bayertz‚ 1988; Deichmann U, 1996 p. 232). In 1933 Hitler, who based his ideology on biology and on old German romantic idealism and nationalism, passed a law about compulsory sterilisation of the mentally retarded. In 1939 physicians started to euthanise mentally retarded people, and from December 1941 the gas chambers were put into practice. After the second World War Holocaust made biologism impossible. Now it is reoccurring again.


The development in biology
The purely biological question about how biological evolution really works, is a different matter. Darwin's theory of evolution stimulated intense discussions among theorists of evolution during the last part of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of this century.
The mechanism for biological inheritance was not known to Darwin and his contemporaries. Many scientists therefore tended to become Lamarckian a few decades after The Origin (Darwin 1982. p. 37–38, 121). These mechanisms were penetrated and disagreed upon. There was the debate about vitalism contra materialism (the mechanistic view), the discussion about a slow gradual contra sudden and catastrophic changes of the species. There was the discussion about how traits were really inherited etc. During the last decades of the nineteenth century scientists tended towards Lamarckism. August Weissman on the other hand, insisted on a purely biological inheritance of traits, and that inheritable traits were never influenced by the environment or experience of the parents. He did not know about genes, as these were not known by then, but he managed to demonstrate that acquired traits could not be inherited (Bowler P J, 1989, p 246–253)

In 1900 Gregor Mendel's research was rediscovered. He had published his results more than thirty years earlier, but his paper was not noticed at that time. The discovery of his paper about experiments with peas, and his suggestion about dominant and recessive mechanism for inheritance, was paradoxically interpreted as a support for a Lamarckian approach. Later though, it was viewed as a support for the hypothesis that there was one gene for every trait. This was taken by many as a confirmation of Galton's suggestion that intelligence was inherited. This belief was also one of the reasons why psychologists started to develop intelligence tests in order to reveal the intelligence of different individuals (Bowler P J, p. 274–281).

It is important to note however, that although the experts were, for the most part, convinced that acquired traits were not inheritable, the old Lamarckist view continued to influence politicians and non experts for many decades. The opposition against the theory of evolution remained for nearly eighty years after Darwin had published his book about the biological evolution.

It was not until in the thirties that the modern view of the biological evolution, the so called New Syntheses was formulated. It was developed as the result of communication between population geneticists and zoologists (Mayr E, 1991 118–124, 141). The New Syntheses stipulates a slow, gradual evolution of the species. In the sixties J S Gould and J Eldridge suggested their theory of punctuated equilibrium, according to which the evolution of the species was a result of periods of equilibrium interrupted by periods of rather rapid and dramatic changes. This theory was severely criticised. Researchers in the field of evolution still do not agree on this point, and their is a continued debate going on about how the biological evolution of the species really takes place. (Smith J M, 1989, p.131–1479).

In 1953 Crick and Watson managed to reveal the structure of the DNA–molecule. This was the beginning of a tremendous progress in genetics and ultimately it gave rise to a new sub discipline, molecular biology, in which many spectacular discoveries have been made. In 1973, for example, Stanley Cohen and Paul Berg, managed to transform genes from one bacteria to another. Thereby giving birth to gene technology.

The introduction of gene technology opened up new avenues of support for genetics and molecular biology because of the expectations that there could be new and profitable future use of the results emanating from these fields of research. Today an enormous amount of resources are put into gene technology, and in the HUGO (Human Genome) project, aimed at screening every human gene, a project in which thousands of geneticists all over the world are involved. Hence molecular biology has become the most fruitful, and one of the most commercially interesting scientific discipline of our time.

The development in some other
disciplines after 1945
Because of the economic disaster in 1929, classic laissez–faire economics was abandoned for the Keynesian economic theories after the second world war, and the most impressive well fare system in history was developed in Europe and in the USA.

In behavioural sciences behaviourism became the dominant theory for the decades to come. Originally its purpose had been to liberate psychology from metaphysics and mysticism and to make psychology a truly scientific discipline. Psychology should no longer deal with non measurable inner states and feelings but with observable end measurable variables. In contrast to Social Darwinism behaviourism stressed the importance of environmental factors for the development of personality and adult behaviour and capacities (Watson J B, 1970).

Even if the radical students in the sixties accepted the environmentalist view in this respect, they started to question and criticise the positivistic approach inherent in behaviourism.
In 1962 Thomas Kuhn's book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" appeared. Its theses were severely criticised. It was feared that it would lead to epistemological relativism, which it also did. The relativists among sociologists in the field of science studies, claim that scientific theories are influenced by social factors, and the more radical relativists maintain that there are no objective knowledge at all, only socially constructed ideas about reality (Barnes B/Edge D, 1982, Elzinga A/Jamison A 1984). Certain school of thoughts in philosophy of science also contributed to this development. Many scientists had to reconsider their ideas about their results and to admit that science does not present us with any final truths, which was earlier believed.
The anti positivist attitudes developed during the sixties and seventies led to an increasing use of qualitative methods in social and political sciences and to a refutation of earlier used, more positivistic methods, such as mathematical models and statistics. At the same time an originally rather small group of biologists, psychologists, and philosophers developed a neo–biologistic approach.

In 1973 the famous ethologist Konrad Lorenz published a book about knowledge as an evolutionary process of storing and gathering information (Lorenz 1973). In 1975 E O Wilson published his widely known and severely criticised book Sociobiology. This book gave rise to a very heated dispute between those for and against Wilson's theses, that human behaviour must be explained by biologists and from the point of view of the theory of evolution. One decade later sociobiology was broadly accepted and the critical voices had been silenced. After this point an increasing number of researchers, in social and behavioural sciences as well as in the humanities, turned to biology, particularly to the theory of evolution, in order to find useful intellectual tools and models for their studies and research.

In 1976 John Maynard Smith published an article in American Scientist (Smith J M, 1976 p. 41–45) where he suggested that game theory could be used to study animal behaviour. This suggestion, as well as Richard Dawkin's ideas about The Selfish Gene, published in 1978, (Dawkins R, 1986) was incorporated in the sociobiological paradigm.

Around 1990 biologism/evolutionism in the academic world formally exploded and suddenly there was an enormous amount of books and papers published in many different disciplines, where the evolutionist perspective was presented as a new exiting and fruitful approach.
Philosophers and theorists of science, as well as philosophers of ethics and morality have become interested in the theory of evolution as a better tool for production of knowledge. There are different schools of thoughts here. Some philosophers simply state that the fact that humanity is a biological species must have some bearing on our way of obtaining and producing knowledge about our environment. These philosophers usually call themselves "naturalists", and they do not form a specified and common school of thoughts. W V Quine (1985), one of the naturalists and one of the most famous philosophers of our century, has suggested that philosophy of knowledge should be replaced by psychology, the discipline to investigate our knowledge producing apparatus. Michael Ruse (1995) is another of these philosophers who have been impressed by the evolutionary perspective. Today he, as so many others, suggests that there is an evolutionary ethics.

Another school, the evolutionary epistemologists, trace their history back to a paper wrote by Konrad Lorenz in 1941, about Kant's philosophy (Lorenz K, 1983). Lorenz suggested that Kant's a priori categories were the result of our biological evolution. Environment had selected for those individuals who perceived the outer world correctly, therefore we could take for granted that there was a real world out there. Further, everything that our senses tells us about that world, which is not all there is to know about it though, we can trust. Reality has imprinted itself, so to say, in our nervous system and we therefore have a kind of inborn knowledge about nature. Kant had also suggested that our a priori categories were parts of our perceptual equipment, but in contrast to Lorenz he stated that they therefore, in some sense determined how we perceived the outer world. How that world really looked like we could never know, according to Kant, as we had to perceive it according to our inborn equipment. Contrary to Kant Lorenz suggested that the world had forced itself on our perception apparatus.

A few decades later Donald T Campbell found Lorenz's ideas impressive and developed them further in a paper (Evolutionary Epistemology, 1974) published in a book dedicated to Karl Popper on his sixtieth birthday. Popper was, as is widely known, interested in the theory of evolution and he had produced a theory about knowledge production which was based on an idea about science as a trial–and error process of much the same kind as the process we find in the evolution of the species

Donald T Campbell named this theory "Evolutionary Epistemology" and he posited that science could be viewed as a process of knowledge gathering where more and more complex organisms can obtain and gather an increasing amount of knowledge, both in their genome and during their life times (Campbell D 1974).
Evolutionary epistemologists usually maintain that many scientists and researchers have presented data and results supporting their views, such as the economist Hayek,and the linguist Noam Chomsky with his theory about an inherent generative grammar (Radnitzky G / Bartley III W W eds, 1987, p.174,369). Sociobiology is also viewed as a strong support for this perspective. 40;Wuketits i Wuketits ed‚ Wuketits FM ed‚ Concepts and Approaches in Evolutionary Epistemology‚ Towards an Evolutionary Theory of Knowledge‚, sid 19).

Peter Munz (1993) has published a book, in which he suggests that everything is already in our genes from the beginning and that nothing can be added during our lifetime. This is somewhat similar to the ideas of Carl G Jung, who is very popular these days, Jung suggested that we have the myths and ideas of our ancestors as a kind of inborn knowledge. This line of thinking, like many other biologistic ideas, is compatible with the instinctivism of the thirties.

Now we also have evolutionary psychology. Babies are studied in order to find out how much they know already at birth. Psychologists turn to primate studies in order to find out whether we are monogamous or polygamous by nature (Wright R, 1994). Physicians and biologists are telling us that we are primitive animals, which have not changed since we lived in caves, and therefore we have problems in adapting to the modern world of high tech. Even sociologists begin to look at our history of evolution in order to explain our social behaviour patterns (Schmid M /Wuketits F eds. 1989) The perspective is by no means new for sociologists, even if it has not been modern these last forty years. Already in Darwin's time biology became fashionable among some sociologists, such as for Herbert Spencer, the creator of Social Darwinism.
The world around us certainly seems to support the evolutionary perspective. Current dominant theories in economics, classic laissez faire politics, is in perfect accordance with sociobiology as both use the same mathematical models, game theory and cost benefit analyses. The basic ideas about what kind of animals humans are, are shared both by sociobiologists and economists. Both categories calculate with an egoistic human being, who is trying to maximise his/her own well–fare, also at the expense of others. The biological human being, like animals, is trying to maximise the reproduction of its own genes, the economic human is trying to maximise its fortunes. They both live in a world where all resources are limited, and they both want as much as possible of these limited resources for their own benefit. Therefore they are constantly competing with other humans over these limited resources, and living in a never ending conflict with nearly everything and everyone in their environment.

It can also be added that most theories or hypotheses about how we became human once in our history of evolution, suggest that the battles between groups of pre–humans over limited resources caused us do evolve the way we did. The most intelligent individuals could obtain most of the resources and hence get most of their genes transmitted to next generation. Therefore our ancestors became increasingly intelligent.


Political development and scientific ideas
in society after 1945
From the beginning of the seventies, Keynesianism was gradually replaced by a classic laissez–faire politics, the same economic theories that dominated last time evolutionism or biologism (the tendency to explain human behaviour and politics with biological factors) was the leading theme in sciences and in philosophy, that is from the latter part of the nineteenths century on to the outbreak of the second World War.

The ideas from the thirties are now reappearing in every field of the society. The social Darwinist view of humans has become popular again. Our idea about what is a human being, has changed dramatically, and is now more similar to that of Social Darwinism than it was twenty years ago. Poor people are poor because of bad genetic inheritance. The unemployed are themselves to blame for their unemployment. We have to reduce expenditure on social well–fare systems so that people are prepared to take any kind of jobs offered to them, and so that they accept as low salaries as possible, all ideas similar to the ideas of the late nineteenth century and of the twenties and thirties. The political arguments are the same as those used by conservative people in Europe in the thirties.

Also other ideas from the thirties reoccur these days. Wagner and Nietzsche are popular again and both are declared innocent as to what happened in Germany in the thirties and forties, in spite of the fact that Wagner was an avowed anti Semite and an eager nationalist, and that Nietzsche, even if he did not agree with Wagner on these points, held some rather unpleasant ideas about humanity, such as that most humans were not above the level of the animals (Kaufmann W 1966 p. 299). Of course, none of them was directly responsible, and none of them could have foreseen what was going to happen. In spite of this, both Nietzsche and Wagner inspired, with their rather inhuman ideas, Hitler and his collaborators to develop their Nazi ideology, and even if they did not do so alone, their ideas were important in that both of them were made heroes by the Nazi party. In psychotherapy, as is already pointed out, Carl Gustav Jung has a renaissance, a man which held about the same ideas as many of the more cultivated Nazis did, even if he was probably no Nazi himself.

Also the view of Democracy today is similar to that of the twenties. It is claimed to be ineffective. Today's governing political ideal based on the industrial management methods of governing and deciding, bear striking similarities to Hitler's and Mussolini's ideals and policies. The well fare of the state is inextricably tied to that of the industry, just as in Germany and Italy during the twenties and thirties. The power of labour unions must be broken. Some people are more valuable than others, and ideas about equal rights are very viewed as old fashioned today.

Relativism was also the philosophy of the Fascists and of the Nazis. In Mussolini's Italy and in Hitler's Germany, the will of the leaders was the truths, and hence everything was relative to the opinions of the leaders.

If theories and reality have nothing to do with each other, if knowledge is nothing but socially constructed ideas, then there is no knowledge, then power determines knowledge. This is the ultimate result of total epistemological relativism, even if one were to view it as a question of negotiations, which some relativists have suggested as the best way of cooping with the fact that there is no truth.

We should not wonder about the fact that Neo–nazis are again marching in our streets, making the Hitler gesture and that bands of hooligans are again beating up what they view as inferior humans, immigrants and homosexuals, all around Europe. The over all intellectual trend is now promoting their ideology (Schmidt M, 1993).


Why does biologism/evolutionism reocur?
The development of biology as a new scientific ideal is due to many factors. Among other possible ones, the following factors that have contributed to this development can be mentioned.


Internal scientific factors
1) Genetics and molecular biology has made tremendous progress these last decades, and biology therefore has become a very interesting science from the commercially point of view. Money is therefore invested in more biological research, which in its turn draws more money and more gifted scientists to the fields. The HUGO–project aimed at screening all human genes is an example of the giant financial investment into biomolecular research.

When a scientific field of research has proven successful, researchers and students of other fields of research usually turn to the successful discipline to get impulses, to borrow its theories and models, in order to associate their own field with the successful one, and in the hope of sharing some of the money put into the successful research, and also in making the same progress.

2) The fact that we have lost our faith in science because of epistemological relativism, gives us two options, either we find a new road to truth, or we turn to mysticism. Both phenomena are seen today. Scientists who are not tempted by the latter alternative, may perhaps choose the former instead, hoping that evolutionism/biologism could offer a better basis for an optimistic epistemology.


External factors also contribute when a discipline is welcomed and becomes viewed as important. Today biology is probably also supported as a new scientific ideal because:

1) Sociobiology, which is already accepted, is using the same mathematical models as those recommended and used by contemporary students of political economy, These models have been in use around the world for several decades now. Political economy and sociobiology therefore share the same view of what a human being is namely a selfish profit maximiser. Darwin's theory of evolution and classic laissez–faire economics are both founded in Smith's and Malthus' ideas from the eighteenth century, and hence these disciplines are knitted together by a common history.

2) The increased interest in environmental problems and the increased worry about the pollution of the earth has resulted in the promotion of a holistic world picture. The view that everything is connected to everything else in the world also contributes to the acceptance of a more biology oriented world picture.

3) The fact that the time when biologism caused so much trouble to so many humans, and caused so many deaths, is now forgotten, and people do not have the same inhibitions towards explaining all kinds of social and political phenomena according to biology and theory of evolution.
According to a newly made study of the world picture among Swedes, most people today have accepted the thought that humans are simply a species among all other species (Uddenberg Nils, 1993, 1995).

All these factors can be expected to support and strengthen each other. When even the layperson is more inclined to explain everything from this point of view, biology must become a more pronounced part of life, and also of moral an ethical judgements.


What can be gained from the
evolutionary perspective?
We have several reasons to believe that many people today are interested in increasing the status of biology, and we can certainly expect a new era of intense biologism.

Scientists in the fields of biology will gain more status when other researchers and students turn to biology for new perspectives also in their fields of research. This is also strengthening the process of putting more money into biological research. Also industrial and stock owners will promote this development in the hope of increasing their profit.

Non scientists will be interested in getting better medicines, and medical methods of treatment of different diseases. When their world picture becomes even more biologised they will tend to use biology in order to support their political ideals.

Environmentalists are interested in the spreading of an organismic world picture, which also fits in with biology and with biologism. They believe that, as more people realise how serious the threat towards our earth really is, this will result in reductions in environmental pollution. Some of these people are optimists as far as development is concerned, and they will turn to science and technology in their search for methods to create a sustainable development. Others are pessimists and they will turn against science and technology. These people will develop their organismic thinking and use it to protest against science and against the polluting industries.

Neo– racists and neo– nationalists gain from the new biologistic intellectual trend as the organismic world picture fits their interests very well.

Economists and right–winged people are satisfied with current biologistic, organismic world picture, and they will turn to sociobiology or to ethology in order to get support for their ideas about how a sound society should be organised. Neo classic liberals also welcome the biologistic trend. They will use sociobiology to argue that humans are exactly the way economists tell us, why a laissez–faire economy is the only natural system.

People with conservative ideas about the differences between the sexes will also find a good support in biology for their views.

The current situation then, is very favourable to the acceptance of biology as a new foundational ideal, for politics as well as in science, even though people in these rather different fields have markedly different ideas about how biology can support their interests.

The fact that just now researchers also in fields traditionally not linked to biology, are preparing projects in which biological models are important, will result in many biologistic results in a few years time, which will be published and popularised. We will then face an increasing amount of biological explanations of an increasing amount of social and psychological as well as political and economic phenomena. This will unavoidably result in an intensified biologistic world picture.

Historically scientists, researchers, and philosophers have been fore runners concerning development of intellectual trends. Last time biologism was the dominating trend, or the one put into political practice, scientists and physicians had been the fore runners.


Holism contra reductionism
Ironically molecular biology and genetics, the most successful biological disciplines, are not holistic disciplines, while holistic approaches are a fashionable in so many other disciplines these days. On the contrary molecular biology and genetics are pronouncedly reductionistic disciplines. Even if the HUGO project sometimes result in conclusions about human traits and their heritability, it is a fact that researchers in most disciplines outside genetics and molecular biology can not gain from using models from these disciplines in their fields of research. What use could a humanist or a social researcher have for a model of the DNA–molecule? When researchers in other fields turn to biology in order to borrow models and theories then, they have only one possibility, to turn to the theory of evolution. Some of them turn to Darwin's books and use his suggestions in their research, but usually they simply use a very simplistic VSR–model (variation, selection, retention).


Problems with the evolutionist perspective
The problem of curse, is that even if there are processes of variation, of selection and of accepting the successful variants in many field of life, all processes that can be viewed in this way are not necessarily the same, are not following the same natural laws or principles. We can as well choose to say that all processes are flows of energy, of information, are feed back processes etc. What we choose to use as explaining models is not unimportant, as our choices are also determining what kind of societies we build for ourselves, (a statement that is not relativistic, a question I am not discussing here though). When choosing VSR–models this will unavoidably lead to inhumane consequences as it automatically leads to the conclusion that some people must be winnowed out. Every time evolutionism has been the dominating intellectual trend, it has led to a dehumanisation of this society. The process of dehumanisation is going on all around us just now, and it happened to be coupled with an evolutionistic/biologistic trend. This is not surprising as inhumane thoughts and evolutionism can be traced back to the same sources and hence are closely knitted together. The idea underlying the theory of evolution was earlier presented by Malthus (1976, orig. 179() and it was first applied to society during the famine period in England and Ireland at the beginning of the nineteenth century. (Adrian D/Moore J 1992 p. 153–154) Consequently no one realised the possibility of saving people by distributing food also to the poor, by increasing the supply of food or by decreasing fertility in a more humane way. Instead the famine was viewed as part of the law of population growth and periodical famines as the result of competition about limited resources, that Malthus had suggested a few decades earlier.

This is very similar to the evolutionism of the behavioural sciences of today, inspired as it is by sociobiology, with its focus on competition about limited resources. If it is stipulated that all problems faced by humankind, are due to conflicts about limited resources, the conclusion that there is nothing we can do in order to make life more comfortable for more than a limited amount of humans, is not only easily drawn, it is a logical outcome of that premise.

However congenial the theory of evolution ever is, it nevertheless suffers from serious problems both with respect to explaining the evolution of species in detail, and in explaining behaviour. First we do not know exactly how this evolution of the species took place, even though we know much more about genes today than Darwin. Second the theory of evolution allows an unlimited amount of hypotheses about how every species did evolve, and even hypotheses which are contradictory. The theory, although it is probably true on the macro level, is not exact enough to determine which of several possible histories of evolution a certain species has gone through. In order to find out, we have to have empirical material. But even if we have such material, we do not know why a certain species changed the way it did, or exactly how the change came about, physiologically. The latter may be possible to tell in future, but as it is now, we have no possibility of knowing this.

The theory, according to scientists, has told us that human beings are monogamous, now it tells us that we (men that is) are polygamous. It has been used to explain that we got our big brain because of combats between groups of humans and that we have got this brain because we once were on our way to return to the sea. It has been said to prove that women are inferior to men intellectually and to prove that we are equal to men in this respect. In short, the theory can be referred to in order to prove nearly anything a person wants to prove, and it is not exact enough to discriminate between these different hypotheses about our nature. Had it been, the problem about this nature would have been solved already. It is simply not enough that a hypotheses is compatible with the theory of evolution, as there are too many different hypotheses about the same thing which fill this request.

The suggestion, so common today, that we have turn to our history of evolution in order to find out who we are, what our true biological nature is, is simply naive. We do not know this history of ours, we do not even agree on how we are by nature today, so how could we explain this unknown nature by turning to something we do not know anything about with any certainty?

The theory of evolution certainly can result in some interesting hypotheses about our nature, but it can never solve the problems we have in deciding what this nature looks like, but it can also, if it dominates our research on this issue, limit our views so that we do not manage to see other possible, and perhaps more probable solutions.


Biologism our new macro paradigm?
In 1962 Thomas Kuhn suggested that scientific knowledge did not grow cumulatively, as had been taken for granted earlier, but that it grew through scientific revolutions when one paradigm was replaced by another, and that the new paradigm is often incommensurable with the old one. New paradigms focuses on other issues, solves different problems and makes several of the problems of the old paradigm inaccurate.

Kuhn was severely criticised because he used the concept "paradigm" too vaguely and to imprecise. He was also criticised concerning details. Researchers maintained that many of his theses about how science had been done were wrong and that it was not possible to detect other such revolutions than The Scientific Revolution during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This revolution, was a special occasion, and it was claimed that there has been no such revolutions within the different disciplines. Moreover, it was argued that it is impossible to demonstrate the occurrence of revolutions if they exist, because of the vagueness of the concept.

Despite this criticism, the "paradigm" concept became widely used and it has been a fruitful concept if not understood to narrowly. Sometimes one has to rise above the details in order to see over all tendencies. I myself have found it practical to talk about "macro paradigms" and "micro paradigms". The Scientific Revolution which started with Copernicus and was completed by Newton, is a macro paradigm, while if such radical changes of views are detected in special scientific disciplines, they are to be viewed as micro paradigm.
If this distinction is accepted we may posit that there was a pronounced micro paradigm shift in ethology for example, when ethologists changed from the old Lorenzian paradigm to the sociobiological one, a process that started during the fifties and is still not completely finished, even if most ethologists had changed their paradigm around the mid eighties (Berminge K, 1988 p. 82–84).

A macro paradigm shift is a much more prolonged process. The Scientific Revolution lasted about two hundred years, or even three hundred. During that revolution modern scientific thinking developed and physics became the ideal of science. Every new discipline tried to imitate physics, to use the models of physics in order to become accepted as a true scientific discipline.
If we look at our own time, and do not care to look too close at details, but at what is happening on the macro scale, I believe that we may posit that we are at the end of a second macro revolution, namely the biological revolution. It started with Darwin (or perhaps some fifty years earlier with Malthus and Lyell) and it is still going on.

If this is true, the decades after the Second World War were simply a short break in a development which has been going on for about 150 to 200 years already, and we may now have its end in sight. The question now is simply whether this revolution will result in a fusion between physics and biology, or if biology will deliver the leading paradigm at the end, and for a rather long time. If I dare to make a guess, I would suggest that, after a short period of a pronounced biologistic/evolutionistic trend, we will shift to a physico–biological macro paradigm.


Thankyou Les Williams for control of the English text in this paper.

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