ABSTRACT
The various social sciences emerged as distinct modes of inquiry in the latter part of the 19th century. Enlightenment thinking about the inevitable march of human progress was coupled with a metaphorical use of concepts and terms from the other established sciences of physics and biology. The transfer of metaphors between areas of inquiry, back and forth and back again, has characterized scholarly discourse on nature, society, and humans. As this volume seeks to demonstrate, this discourse has entered a new, and potentially revolutionary, phase. Yet in the past, images and concepts that described one phenomenon were borrowed as analogies to describe the other. When the discrepancies between the images of such analogies and the objects they were supposed to represent, as well as the implicit values attached to them, became apparent, biology and the social sciences diverged. Thus, the question of the role of biological thinking in the social sciences is as old as the social sciences.
