ABSTRACT
On 28 February 1912 William Bateson delivered at the University of Oxford a prescient address entitled “Biological Fact and the Structure of Society.” He was not a social Darwinist in the extreme or pejorative sense, and disagreed with Herbert Spencer’s laissez-faire political economy. But Bateson believed that the quality of human life in the long run required that social policies respect biological facts. His thesis, that human welfare requires that social policy be consistent with biological fact, is a corollary of biocracy—a proposition that the principles of law and policy governing human society should be consistent with the facts of life as revealed by biology. The arrival of the biological and behavioral sciences to prominence in modern society has induced a chain of consequences which continues to lengthen and proliferate. A critical problem in clarifying the relationships between science, morality, and politics is the criteria for credibility.
