ABSTRACT
The writings of the molecular biologists and sociobiologists, however, reflect a quite explicit break with, and hostility toward, what they variously term "Christian," "Western," or "literary" culture. To the extent that modern culture diverges from biological interests, whether because of human intellectual perverseness or the rapidity with which cultural evolution takes place, it too is dangerously flawed and must be reconstructed. English-speaking scholars have also tended to overlook both the interest of Karl Marx and Engels in evolutionary biology for what were essentially ideological and metaphysical reasons, and the enthusiastic reception of Darwinism by German liberals and radicals and later by the German working class. The construction of scientific mythologies to anchor "scientific" hopes and "scientific" moralities constitutes the thread that unites a century of social biological theorizing, but the efforts of molecular biologists and sociobiologists clearly differ from those of their predecessors.
