ABSTRACT
An appreciation of the conditions under which an attitude developed and attained cultural prominence in the midnineteenth century can help us better to understand analogous developments in molecular biology and the biology of behavior. Molecular biology, as the revolutionary discipline came to be known, had at last discovered the missing link in Darwinian theory—a physicochemical theory of heredity—the implications of which, both philosophical and technological, appeared too many to be enormous. The philosophical and methodological reductionism that has guided the scientific research and social teachings of the founding theorists of molecular biology is not unique in the history of biology. In the political and intellectual climate of the late 1930s, the metaphysics of complementarity was clearly meant to sanction a morality opposed to the racist biocultural determinism of the Nazis. By holding to the metaphysical principle of complementarity, Niels Bohr believed several important social and moral consequences followed immediately.
