Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

The place of the sciences of man in the system of sciences 39
only in the last resort, to the sciences dealing with human societies as complete
structures. On the other hand, and above all, the methods employed give rise
to more and more frequent exchanges between the natural sciences and the
sciences of man. We shall enlarge on this point shortly.
The main reason for opposition between these two groups of sciences lies in
the r61e and attributes of the ‘subject’, and this is why the degree of opposition
depends upon the extent to which the cultural circles in which the sciences of
man are studied are swayed by the attractions of metaphysics. For the unshakeable
champions of ‘Geisteswissenschaften’, seen sui generis, the ‘subject’ is not
a part but an observer and sometimes even a creator of nature, whereas for
supporters of continuity, the fact of man’s subjectivity is a natural phenomenon
among others and does not prevent the subject from dominating or from modifying
nature, nor from carrying out a11 the activities which traditional philosophy
assigns to ‘subjects’. This is the full range of the problem.
However, since the times when it was sought to oppose the subject and nature,
and to make of this conflict a field of study reserved to those sciences of the
mind which were closer to metaphysics than to those known as ‘natural’
sciences, many changes have taken place in the evolution of the sciences in
general, so that current trends, while stressing the specificity of problems at all
levels of reality, are far from favouring a mere dichotomy.
A first fact to be noted - and it is fundamental - is the evolution of biology,
the present contributions of which are of great importance in the interpretation
of the formation of the ‘subject’. The neo-Darwinism of the beginning of the
century saw in the evolution of the organized being the resultant of two fundamental
factors to which the animal as a subject was wholly foreign: firstly,
random variations or mutations (as opposed to re-combinations of the common
genetic pool of the population, on which increasing emphasis is being laid today),
and secondly a selection imposed by the environment but conceived as an
elementary weeding-out process leading to the survival of the fittest and the
elimination of the others. The behaviour of the animal was thus seen only as a
very secondary factor, which had some effect on survival but no essential causality.
We are led to believe today, on the contrary, that selection is basically
related to phenotypical variations, themselves interpreted as ‘responses’ of the
genome to environmental pressures (Dobzhansky, Waddington, etc.). Now the
phenotype already includes behaviour, since both are of an adaptive nature. In
addition, selection is understood today to include feedbacks and reverse actions:
the organism selects and modifies its environment as much as it is influenced
by it. But among other things, the selection and modification of the
environment depends on behaviour, which is seen as a factor of increasing
importance in the process of evolution. In addition, objective research has been
carried out (J. Huxley, Rentsch, etc.) on the concept of ‘progress’ - which was
rejected by formal neo-Darwinism after the excessive optimism of the early
days of the theory of evolution - and the criteria used naturally referred also to
behaviour. For all these reasons, zoopsychology or ethology plays an increasingly
vital part in zoological biology, while botanists insist more and more on
reactive processes. Zoopsychology already gives us a fairly impressive picture of