ABSTRACT
Natural science had a mighty struggle to get established in medicine, and still has many bitter disputes in the battle with 'clinical experience'. Natural and social science when applied to medicine modify both the evolution of our own species and that of others. Natural science for all its deliberate separation, is still intimately bound into the lay world, but social science enjoys or suffers from an even closer relationship. Economists and demographers are particularly notorious for their many failures here-but this is merely because they have cast their predictions in a precise, quantified form; something which sociologists typically avoid. The crucial independence of theory and research in the natural sciences stems in large part from quite separate, independent disciplines such as physics and chemistry. The fundamental psychology and ethology of human species is, however, no more than a dream as things stand at present.
