Notes

1. . J. D. Watson's “double helix” is an unusually good example of this phenomenon.
2. . A useful summary of this process was published in Science 207 (1980): 394–95. Thomas Maugh, a science reporter, carefully summarized the results of the findings of the National Academy of Sciences report but mentions the considerable difficulty getting appropriate governmentally organized departments to respond to the threat that the continued use of fluorocarbons represents.
3. . David Hume's Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals and A Treatise of Human Nature represent an excellent early discussion of the problems of the relations of “is” and “ought.” In the latter he is noted for first stating what has become known as “Hume's Law”:…“I am surpriz'd to find that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, 'tis necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it” (bk. 3, pt. 1, sec. i).
4. . The problem of moving from “is” to “ought” has been addressed in one form or another in a wide variety of contexts throughout the history of Western philosophy and religion. Briefly stated, in normative ethics there are two principal perspectives used for justifying the rules for human conduct. One perspective, the deontological, argues in favor of fundamental laws which are to be adhered to without question. Within religion the Ten Comandments of the Old Testament are a primary example, and within philosophy Immanuel Kant's categorical imperatives provide an important case. The other perspective, the teleological primarily articulated in more modern times by Mume, implies that morality can be operationalized to its products and is related to the development and fulfillment of natural human tendencies. Later under the nineteenth‐century utilitarians this becomes modified into themes stressing greatest good for the greatest number of society in the work of Jeremy Bentham. While this emphasis on the ends rather than the means and the ends has been criticized, the concept of the division between the two perspectives in normative ethics extends into the twentieth century as well. In formulating metaethical theories G. E. Moore in his Principia Ethica in a sense suggests that rather than use our knowledge of what is in its greatest sophistication we instead should depend on an intuitive sense of the “is” to derive what obvious “oughts” must be present. It is possible that in modern philosophical terms there appears to be a much more rational assessment of the relation of “is” to “ought” and, more important, a reassessment of the validity of categorizing “what is” as a special unbiased fact. (See Philip Hefner's “Is/Ought: A Risky Relationship between Theology and Science,” in The Sciences and Theology in the 20th Century, ed. A. R. Peacocke [London: Oriel Press, 198l]). Actually both the deoptological and teleological perspectives share themes related in part to modern evolutionary theory. The latter as developed in this paper and in several others I have published in Zygon (“Evolutionary Perspectives on Purpose and Man,” Zygon 8 [1973]: 325‐40; “The Dehumanization and Rehumanization of Science and Society,” ibid. 9 [1974]: 126‐38; and “Toward a New Science of Humanity,” ibid. 10 [1976]: 12–31) suggests that a major shift in technology occurred around the neolithic in which the adaptive success of the individual as a member of a small group became complicated by an ever‐increasing emphasis on the sociocultural dimension of adaptability. This was particularly important as small groups coalesced into more sedentary populations of agriculturalists. Thus for most human evolution the adaptive strategies involved an emphasis on the individual and upon those features which in a utilitarian sense satisfied natural human tendencies. However, as more complex postneolithic societies evolved, individual needs and tendencies became increasingly counterbalanced by those of the larger group. The codification of the latter resulted in new balances between the individual and his society. In other words the net gain to the individual of greater insularity from the selective pressures provided by the natural environment was counterbalanced by the increased selective pressures on his behavior provided by increased social regulation which allowed for new levels of biosocial evolution. Since the codification of absolutes for the control of individual behavior in larger groups appears to have evolved principally from the requirements of the sociocultural dimensions, it may help to explain the deontological perspectives in normative ethics that morality is controlling and even oppressive to human nature. This theme recurs in the work of more modern philosophers. E.g., the intuitionists, emotivists, and even the existentialists each take a fundamental position on the relations of the individual to his society and attempts to build a framework which emphasizes one or the other without resolving the origins of the relations of the two. This appears to be the case whether it is the intuitive derivation of goodness that Moore attempted to show as indefinable or the emotivist attempt as in the work of A. J. Ayers to isolate moral judgment as any kind of rational act which is independent from human perception and nonrational, emotionally based human values. Also the same theme arises in the existentialist argument that disavows general moral principles since the objective examination of all moral problems is made foremost by an individual who is caught in a rapidly changing twentieth‐century world view.
5. . Emile Durkheim first articulated this theory in his De La Division Du Travail Social (Paris: Alcan, 1893).
6. . Another reason that this has not worked relates to the problems inherent in utilitarianism.
7. . One of the recent challenges to the uncontrolled growth of knowledge by science is Robert L. Heilbroner's An Inquiry into the Human Prospect (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1974). The papers of an Institute on Religion in An Age of Science symposium on this topic are in Zygon 10 (September 1975).
8. . This traditional process of transfer refers to those social institutions which gradually incorporated newly developed knowledge into the core of fundamental information that allowed the continued existence of the particular sociocultural system. The advent of science beginning with Copernicus and the associated technological change have continued to accelerate social change to the point where the role of religious institutions as the traditional conservators of well‐tested knowledge steadily declined.
9. . Durkheim.
10. . Loren Eiseley documented this very well in Darwin's Century (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1958).
11. . This section of the paper dealing with the historic development of the field is adapted from a longer discussion in a paper I presented at the Centre International d'Etudes de Rio‐Anthropologie et Anthropologie Fondamentale at Abbaye de Roya‐mont, France, in 1972. Subsequently the paper was published in French, German, Spanish, and Japanese editions under the title “The Unity and Diversity of Man from the Point of View of Social and Cultural Anthropology,” in Unite de I'Homme, ed. M. Piatelli‐Palmeri (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975).
12. . Alfred I. Hallowell, “Self; Society and Culture in Phylogenetic Perspective,” in The Evolution Of Man: Man, Culture, and Society, ed. Sol Tax, Evolution after Darwin, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), pp. 309–71.
13. . Ruth M.Renedict, “Anthropology and the Abnormal,” Journal of General Psychology  10 (1934): 79.
14. . See Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism (New York: New American Library, Signet Books, 1961).
15. . Claude Ikvi‐Strauss, “French Sociology,” in Twentieth Century Sociology, ed. G. Gurvitch and W. Moore (New York: Philosophical Library, 1945).
16. . Anthony F. C. Wallace, Culture and Personality (New York: Random House, 1961). See also Noam Chomsky, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (The Hague: Mouton, 1964).
17. . See M. Harris, Culture, Man and Nature (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1971).
18. . Katz, “Evolutionary Perspectives” (n. 4 above).
19. . See the paper that Donald T. Campbell has presented on this theme in this symposium.
20. . See Ernst Mayr, Animal Species and Evolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963). While parts of the synthetic theory recently have been challenged by the growth of new knowledge in genetics, embryology, paleontology, and geology, the major role of selection appears to play just as important a role on behavior as it did when Mayr first wrote this hook. (For further information on this topic see the summary of the Chicago meeting on macroevolution in Science 210 [1980]: 883–87.) Also see Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975).
21. . See Mary Midgley, Beast and Man (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978).
22. . While it is not the task of this paper to suggest a solution, it is useful to suggest that there is a need for some kind of evolutionary source of oughts in which the individual reward is understood well enough to encourage participation in the oughts for the continued dynamic homeostasis of the human ecosystem.
23. . Heilbroner (n. 7 above).
24. . There is considerable evidence that such destruction of the ecosystem is taking place. E.g., there is growing concern that a rapidly increasing number of animal species are significantly declining such that it is unlikely they ever will recover.
25. . See discussion in n. 4 above particularly as it pertains to twentieth‐century schools of philosophy.
26. . Two useful summaries of their work appear in W. F. Frankena's “Recent Conceptions in Morality,” in Morality and the Language of Conduct, ed. H. N. Castenada and G. Nakhnikian (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963), and M. Warnock's Ethics since 1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960).