ABSTRACT
The ever-expanding, ever-improving body of knowledge produced by the sciences is to human ignorance what “The Blob” was to small towns in cheesy horror movies. From Galileo’s simple physics, the blob that is scientific knowledge has expanded relentlessly, touching and absorbing field after field until almost nothing is left outside. Science, of course, is a type of social discourse and a sort of culture. Although this kind of thing is often said to denigrate science, to remove the specialness of its claims to knowledge compared to those claimed by, say, the humanities or religions, in fact the statement does no such thing. The hubris of the sociobiologists in the 1970s was to suggest that they could absorb and even preempt the social sciences without first taking into account what really is special about human society and culture.
