Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
in which sociology would appear as history's scientific capstone, it could not
sustain the patronage needs of natural scientists.
Thus while evolutionism has similar cultural roots, it represents a dif-
ferent evolutionary branch of the displacement that began in the Enlighten-
ment and came to fruition in positivism. Positivism and evolutionism are
only cultural evolutionary cousins—similar enough to warrant comparison
but different enough to produce distinctive rhetorical outcomes. The posi-
tivist branch that sprang up in the writings of Comte and Saint-Simon was
destined to mature in the social theories of Karl Marx and various kin-
dred thinkers. Like Marxism, classical positivism appealed to the epistemic
authority of science in an effort to uphold world-building aspirations on the
broadest possible scale, but when carried forward to its logical conclusion,
it did not elevate natural scientists as its heroes but rather political figures
like Lenin and Mao Zedong, latter-day Comtes who derived their charisma
from their apparent embodiment of a social scientific philosophy. The natu-
ral sciences have often prospered in societies dominated by positivism, but
positivist symbol systems nest the natural sciences within some larger con-
stellation of scientistic ideas that may just as easily smother them. Aspects
of this pattern certainly manifested in the suppression of “Jewish science”
by the National Socialists, who believed that their political ideology was
informed by a higher racial science, and something analogous transpired
in the Soviet Union when Mendelian genetics was outlawed in favor of the
more socialist-friendly science of Trofim Lysenko.
