ABSTRACT
From a totally different (Marxist) viewpoint, and from a different age and culture (our own), I read . . . reductionism resorts to more or less vulgar simplifications which, in the prevailing social climate, become refracted into defences of the status quo in the form of biological determinism, which claims that the present social order, with all its inequalities in status, wealth and power between individ·uals, classes, genders and races, is 'given' inevitably by our genes. This limit to the scientific vision is compounded by the closed recruitment process into science as an institution which effectively ensures its preservation as the privilege of the western white male (Rose, 1987).
