Genetics and Freedom: A Critique of Sociobiological Claims

Abstract

The question of whether matter and its structure is a sufficient explana tion of human behavior is a recurring question within human history.¹ Within the last decades this question has received a new emphasis and focus from the discipline of sociobiology which approaches the question from a biolog ical perspective. But while the focus has shifted from physics to biology as the normative framework, the answer remains relatively constant: one does not need to look beyond matter and its structure to explain human behavior in all its complexity and subtility.

God’s Grandeur Gerard Manley Hopkins. The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. ([11], p. 27).