Social Theory and the Second Biological Revolution.

This article shows the importance of biological research to the reformulation of the hypothesis of human uniqueness since the nineteenth century. Issues involving philosophical anthropology have never gone away, and neither, therefore, has the question of human uniqueness. There is bound to be resistance within the social sciences to the discoveries furnished by biology. One reason humans have done so may be because they are the only species that can recognize the contexts in which they find themselves by attributing meaning to the information they process, a capacity that enables them to alter the course of their evolutionary development willfully. The ability of humans to use powers of mind and self to interpret the world turns out not to be a relatively insignificant quality of the species, but rather a crucial aspect of what has made it possible for this one species to evolve in ways so different from other species over so short a period of time.