ABSTRACT

The philosophical reductionism of Jacques Monod and Francis Crick has helped establish the tone, conceptual language, and agenda of problems to be solved both for molecular biology and for its technological spin-off, genetic engineering. Molecular biology, by closing the last loopholes in Darwinian Theory, has delivered the death blow to all religious beliefs and their philosophical substitutes, by destroying the "anthropocentric illusion" upon which all "animisms" are based. In 1966, for example, Crick observed that many of our social problems, as those relating to aggressiveness and sexual behavior, are caused by the conflict between naturally selected behavior patterns and the modern social environment. A similar shift of interpretation concerning the social implications of biology, in which an increasing biological determinism is advocated as an authoritative guide for a crumbling social and cultural order, is found in the writings of Monod.