The Human Sciences in A Biological Age

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Culture & Society
The Human Sciences in a Biological Age

Nikolas Rose
Theory Culture Society 2013 30: 3
DOI: 10.1177/0263276412456569
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The Human Sciences in

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DOI: 10.1177/0263276412456569
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Nikolas Rose
Kings College London, UK
Abstract
We live, according to some, in the century of biology, where we now understand
ourselves in radically new ways as the insights of genomics and neuroscience have
opened up the workings of our bodies and our minds to new kinds of knowledge and
intervention. Is a new figure of the human, and of the social, taking shape in the 21st
century? With what consequences for the politics of life today? And with what
implications, if any, for the social, cultural and human sciences? These are the
issues that are discussed in this article, which argues that a new relation is requred
with the life sciences, beyond commentary and critique, if the social and human
sciences are to revitalize themselves for the 21st century.
Keywords
biology, body, brain, ethics, human, social
What kinds of creatures do we think we are, we contemporary human

beings?1 How have we come to understand ourselves in these ways? And
with what consequences? Of course, there is no single answer to such
questions: multiple differences disturb all attempts to speak of a singular
we. Nevertheless, from their birth, the sciences of the social and moral
orders have had their own views about the nature of the human beings
whose social and mental lives they studied. And, from their inception,
these sciences have had to negotiate their relationship with biology.
Biology in two senses: (1) biology as the field of positive knowledge of
living beings that we give that name; and (2) biology as the reality of
those beings themselves humans who are, after all, animals, living creatures, who are born, live, sicken and die. To think of the human as
animal: over the second half of the 20th century, such ideas became
associated with essentialism, determinism, reductionism, fatalism, with
the naturalization of human delinquencies from sexism to warfare, and
Corresponding author:
Nikolas Rose, Kings College London, K4L.17 Kings Building, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK
Email: [email protected]
http://www.sagepub.net/tcs/
Theory, Culture & Society 30(1)
with a bloody legacy of horrors from racial science to eugenics. But in

what some have termed the century of biology (Venter and Cohen,
2004), this issue is being re-posed in politics, in the life sciences and
in the human sciences.
Contemporary biopolitics centres not on death but on life that is to
say, it is organized around dilemmas concerning human vitality: human
rights to life (a dignified life, a quality of life), the equality of all humans
as particular kinds of living creatures (human rights), the value of life, the
future of life, and what can be done to the lives of some to facilitate the
lives of others (pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, stem cells, organ
transplants, donations of body parts) (Rose, 2007). This focus on the
vitality of the living body is also becoming central to the human sciences.
Nowhere was the discursive turn more problematic than when debates
over the body seemed to deny any powers to the bloody thing itself. But
over the last decade a number of social theorists and feminist philosophers have come to realize that it is not reactionary to recognize the
reality of our fleshly nature, and to examine the possibilities and constraints that flow from it (Blackman, 2008, 2010; Braidotti, 2002; Grosz,
1994; Massumi, 2002; Thrift, 2007; Wilson, 2004b). Along similar lines, a
radical movement in philosophy is rethinking the place of the animal in
contemporary thought, rethinking the founding distinction of the human
sciences that between us tool makers, sign makers, language speakers
and other animals (e.g. Calarco, 2008; Daston and Mitman, 2005;
Haraway, 1991, 2007; Wolfe, 2003). No longer are social theories
thought progressive by virtue of their distance from the biological.
Indeed the reverse assumption is common it seems that constructivism
is passe, the linguistic turn has reached a dead end and a rhetoric of
materiality is almost obligatory.2
Many things have led to this reframing of the human. Some have to do
with the cycles of theoretical fashion in the human sciences. Some stem
from a new sense of our precariousness as a species in the face of ecological threats and climate change. Others arise from a belief that the
embodied nature of human beings generates creative forces that can lead
to political resistance and change. Some of this work makes reference to
developments in the life sciences. But most authors derive their instructions on bodies and brains from philosophy. And when those from the
social and human sciences do turn to biology, there is an understandable
tendency to draw upon books about the life sciences written for nonspecialists, and to select those themes that match their theoretical or
political aspirations. The specialist literature on such issues as genomics,
epigenetics, neurogenesis and brain plasticity is large and growing, with
new findings announced on a daily basis, with implications that are often
hard to evaluate. And today, as never before, the sciences of the living are
connected up in different ways with many other disciplines from
informatics to engineering, from mathematics and physics to complexity
Rose
science. Indeed, there is no one biology in this biological age. But despite this heterogeneity, thought styles are emerging in many areas of
contemporary biology that offer the opportunity for a new relationship
between the human sciences and the life sciences. We can point to three
key features of that biology that can underpin that new relationship.
First, the contemporary life sciences in genomics, in the understanding of the cell and the processes of development and differentiation, in
molecular neuroscience reveal multiple affinities between humans and
other creatures, and throw new light on their differences.3 These issues
now appear in a way that is not amenable to the simplifications of sociobiology, not least because, in the age of genomics and epigenomics, the
old tropes of biological or genetic determinism can no longer be scientifically supported. Further, in the styles of thought of the contemporary
life sciences there is a pervasive tension between the experimental reductionism that has always been anathema to the human sciences and an
awareness of complexity and emergence an open dynamism that is less
familiar. On the reductionist side of things, we have seen the rise of a
molecular and neuromolecular style of thought that analyses all living
processes in body and brain in terms of the material properties of cellular
components DNA bases, ion channels, membrane potentials and the
like. This molecular vision of life can be traced to the 1930s. It was given
great momentum by developments in molecular biology that followed
Crick and Watsons work in the 1950s, and the invention of neuroscience
by Francis Schmitt and others in the 1960s. And it has been made even
more powerful by its convergence with the technologies of the information age, rendering living processes into digital elements that can be freed
from organic origins and manipulated and circulated as mere data.
Yet alongside this reduction of life to the interaction of its smallest
components, another style of thought has taken shape. This way of
thinking construes vital properties as emergent, and living organisms as
dynamic and complex systems, located in a dimension of temporality and
development, and constitutively open to their milieu a milieu that
ranges in scale from the intracellular to psychological, biographical,
social and cultural.4 One of the key conceptual struggles in the sciences
of the living which one can find in almost every area concerns the
relations between these two visions. The human sciences, with their grasp
of the multiple ways that living organisms shape and are shaped by their
milieu across space and time, could play an important role here, if they
were willing.
Today, to deem something biological is not to assert destiny or fatalism, but opportunity. As the corporeal becomes construed not as mystery
but as molecular mechanism, organisms, including human organisms,
seem amenable to optimization by reverse engineering and reconfiguration at this molecular level. Hence, second, we have seen the technologization of vitality in the life sciences. It is not only that to know is to
intervene, although that is crucial: one knows life today only by intervening in it. Gaston Bachelards view is as true as it ever was: a concept
becomes scientific according to the proportion to which it has become
technical, to which it is accompanied by a technique of realization
(Bachelard, 1969 [1938]: 61, quoted from Rheinberger, 2005: 3201).
Intervention is not just to know, but also to do: knowing life at the
molecular level has been intrinsically related to an enhanced capacity
to act upon it at that level. Life itself that is to say, the living of the
living organism seems to have become amenable to intervention and
open to projects of control. Developments such as Ian Wilmuts cloning
of Dolly by inserting the nucleus from a somatic cell taken from the
mammary gland of one sheep into an unfertilized enucleated egg cell
from another (Wilmut and Highfield, 2006) and Craig Venters creation
of Synthia a bacterial cell controlled by a chemically synthesized
genome (Gibson et al., 2010) have led some to suggest that nothing
is biologically impossible, and only our own imagination and our own
ethical and social constraints set the limits on what we can do to our
vital existence and that of other animals. Wilmut subtitles his autobiography Dolly and the Second Creation. Venter, too, is routinely credited
with such beliefs. These fantasies of omnipotence, while they inspire
much utopian and dystopian speculation, grossly overestimate both
our knowledge and our technical capacities. Nonetheless, a global bioeconomy has taken shape around the manipulation of biology, and biological knowledge has become highly capitalized. Paths to the creation of
biological truths have been shaped by promises and predictions of the
biovalue to be harvested enhanced crop yields, bioenergy, bioremediation, and, of course, advanced medical and health technologies based on
biology. Companies, nations and regions compete in this global bioeconomy, arguing that developments such as synthetic biology will underpin a new industrial revolution welding together the dreams of patients,
politicians, researchers and capitalists in what Carlos Novas has termed
a political economy of hope (Novas, 2006).5
There is much value in the work we now do to maintain ourselves as
living beings. The medical and healthcare segments are the most lucrative
zones of the global biotechnology market: in 2008 they generated 69
percent of the markets overall revenues. By 2011, the global market
for pharmaceuticals was around $500 billion, and that for medical
devices about $150 billion.6 This is indicative of a third feature of contemporary biology that calls for attention by the social and human sciences: the salience that the biological and the biomedical has achieved in
practices of self-management and self-governance. Not just in the West
but also in many other regions, individuals are coming to understand
themselves in the language of contemporary biomedicine, to judge themselves in terms of the norms articulated by biomedical experts, to modulate their bodies and minds with products that are the product of
Rose
biomedical belief systems, to use new reproductive technologies to

manage procreation, to consider replacing worn out body parts with
artificial hips and knees, to think about reducing risks of disease with
diet and exercise, and to worry, individually and collectively, about
Alzheimers and the dementias, maybe even to take up Sudoku and
mind gyms in the belief that if they act this way, they may be saved. In
this sense, personhood itself is becoming increasingly somatic (Novas
and Rose, 2000).
Over the 20th century, at least in the countries of Europe, North
America and their colonies, individuals sense of themselves was profoundly shaped by the rise of the psy sciences: assorted elements from
the different schools of psychology became integral to their forms of life
and to the way they were understood and governed by authorities (Rose,
1999). It is not surprising, then, that psychological conceptions of personhood became the often unarticulated presuppositions of the social
and human sciences. But as the 20th century came to an end, another
ethic came to the fore, linked to the belief that, while the domain of mind
remained crucial, key features of our identify as persons were grounded
in the flesh (Rose, 2007). In some respects, our bodies were our selves,
although not quite in the sense meant by the Boston Womens Health
Collective three decades earlier (Boston Womens Health Book
Collective, 1978). Of course, there is nothing new about an emphasis
on bodies, their management and their sculpting, action on the body in
order to avert disease and maintain health (Porter, 1999). But today this
somatic ethic is underpinned by an unparalleled truth discourse about the
human body arising from the life sciences and biomedicine, disseminated
through a network of injunctions from experts of the somatic, deemed to
be a matter of state as well as of the individual, and embedded in multiple
sites from home and school to workplace and leisure. To live well today
is to live in the light of biomedicine.
Bookshelves groan under the weight of popular science discussing this
new knowledge of our biology, and speculating about the implications
for our capacity to understand and control everything from our cognitive
capacities to ageing and death. The belief in the implications of advances
in the life sciences for our everyday lives is exacerbated by the translational imperative the obligation on researchers in biology and biomedicine to promise to funders, to research assessors, to their university press
offices and to the media that the results of their work on the fly, the
worm, the mouse or the macaque will soon reach the clinic usually
in three to five years. This is a fantasy of course. The more we know, the
more we realize how little we know. Each dream of control over body or
mind is soon met with downsides, side effects and disappointments.
When it comes to human vitality, there is much that cannot be controlled
or re-engineered according to our own desires, and much does remain
biologically impossible. There is no simple progression from the ability
to tackle simple problems to the conceptual and technological capacities

needed to tackle complex ones, no golden path to ever-expanding
powers, but many distinct and substantial biological barriers that are
hardly understood, let alone overcome.7 Further, as I have already
stressed, the life sciences do not constitute a homogeneous field, but a
tangle of diverse and often incompatible disciplines and sub-disciplines,
theories, concepts, arguments, bodies of evidence, experimental set-ups
and so forth, riven with controversies over some rather fundamental
issues. Nonetheless, despite the exaggeration, the idea that all living
organisms, including humans, can be understood as biological beings,
that their nature is not a matter of mystery but of mechanism, lies at the
heart of the claim that this will be the century of biology. As does the
further claim, even if it remains implicit, that so much that is specific
about our humanity, our individual existence and collective arrangements can be understood in terms of our characteristics as specific
kinds of living beings.8 How should those from the human and social
sciences respond?
Biology and Sociology

Biology and sociology were born close together in the first half of the
19th century: biology in 1802, as the name for a new science of living
entities dividing nature into two kingdoms those possessed of life
and those without it; sociology, as the scientific study of the development
of human societies, conventionally ascribed to Comte in 1839. From
birth, sociology has been haunted by biology. Across the 19th century
there was a double move on one hand, attempts to differentiate the
sciences of the moral or social order from the strictly biological to
argue that the laws of association among human beings were sui generis.
And, on the other, to model sociology on biology, to think of the social
order as in some way or other analogous to the biological realm, with
structures, functions, organic connections between parts, subject to laws
of development that could be described in the language of evolution, and
having a potential only possible for living entities: to be normal or pathological, healthy or sick.9
While the styles of thought of the biology of the 19th century infused
the new science of sociology, the social sciences grew, at least in part,
because of their biopolitical role. That is to say, they claimed to be able
to provide the know-how to govern those aspects of the individual and
collective lives of human beings arising from, their nature as living beings
racial types, sexual desire, procreation, disease and epidemics in towns
and cities, and of course the whole problem of the population, of its rates
of increase and decline, of the consequences of differential fertility,
degeneracy, eugenics. . . One only needs to list them for the intensity
of those relations between the social sciences and the government
Rose
of humans as biological, vital, living creatures to become clear.

This question was central to sociology as it became a discipline in the
first half of the 20th century. Despite much vagueness as to what sociology actually was (Abrams, 1981; Rocquin, 2006), the sciences of society
in the first half of the 20th century remained haunted by biology. This
was not just in the notion that society could be pictured as a kind of
organism, or in the recurring themes of social evolution. Their recurrent
question was biological a question of population (Osborne and Rose,
2008). Population was often addressed in terms of eugenics, though not
always as we think of this now. At the London School of Economics, for
example, William Beveridge, as Director of the LSE from 1919 to 1937,
sought funding for a professorship in social biology (genetics, population, vital statistics, heredity, eugenics and dysgenics) to complet[e] the
circle of the social sciences.10 But he appointed Lancelot Hogben a
fierce opponent of eugenicists because he believed that population
problems could only be properly understood once the rubbish about
allegedly biological laws of population growth was sorted out: human
genetics was a morass of surmise and superstition . . . The rationalisation
of race prejudice by appeal to biological principles was then plausible
only because human genetics was so immature (quoted in Keynes, 2001).
Alexander Carr-Saunders, successor to Beveridge as Director of LSE,
who was a key figure in many official bodies exploring the question of
population,11 wrote extensively on eugenics and was president of the
Eugenics Society between 1949 and 1953. While he was consistently critical of that form of eugenics which calls to mind proposals for getting rid
of persons with undesirable innate qualities and for encouraging the
bringing into the world of well-endowed children (Carr-Saunders,
1926: 18), he concluded his Hobhouse memorial Lecture in Cambridge
in 1942 under the title The Biological Basis of Human Nature:
It is nearly eighty years since Galton set the eugenic movement on
foot. He may . . . have been overhasty [but] it appears that we now
have sufficient information upon which to begin to take action if we
so wish . . . The Romans, it has been said, prided themselves on
being the degenerate descendants of the gods; we pride ourselves
on being the very creditable descendants of apes. We shall cease to
be a credit to our ancestors if we allow our genetic inheritance to
deteriorate. (Carr-Saunders, 1942: 24)
When John Maynard Keynes presented Carr-Saunders with the first
Galton medal in 1946 1946! Keynes described Galton as the founder
of the most important, significant and, I would add, genuine branch of
sociology which exists, namely eugenics (Blacker and Glass, 1967:
368).12
10
From the 1950s, things changed in the light of the murderous consequences that seemed to be associated with conceiving of human qualities
in biological terms. Many post-war continental philosophers argued that
Nazi Germany was characterized by a spiritualization of the biological,
and biologization of the spiritual the animalization of human character,
will, value and virtue. This seemed to reveal, for all time, the consequences of a way of thinking in which the person and the body
became seen as one, where the central task of politics was the shaping
of the biological life of the race and the nation. It is true that biological
metaphors remained common in the sociologies of the 1950s and 1960s
for example, in Talcott Parsons fascination with ideas of organic and
homeostatic systems, and his metaphorical and typological uses of the
language of functions and of evolution. However, by the 1970s it became
sociological common sense that fatalism, determinism, reductionism,
sexism a naturalization and legitimation of existing relations of
power would follow inescapably from any engagement with the reality
of human biology as either an ontological question what were
humans really like? or as an epistemological one what can biology
tell us about the forms of life that humans have made for themselves?
Human biology was relevant only in that it provided the preconditions
for language, meaning and culture, whose form and content must be
accounted for in non-biological terms. The controversies that flowed,
notably over race and intelligence, seemed to confirm this negative judgement on those who imported vulgar biological notions into their diagnoses of the social (Kamin, 1974; Lewontin et al., 1984), as did the
simplifications of sociobiology, evolutionary psychology and doctrines
of the selfish gene (Rose and Rose, 2000). The evidence of two centuries
seemed to place references to the biological on the side of a reactionary
politics that tied humans to a fixed nature to be progressive, to aim for
social change, justice and equality, required keeping biology in its place.
And yet, as the 20th century closed, there were signs that this sociological common sense was coming into question.13 While many initial
concerns with the theme of embodiment elided that fleshy, bloody,
animal thing itself (famously Butler, 1993), the living body was directly
at issue in the many ethnographic studies that traced the ways in which
biological knowledge was managed, lived, employed, contested, intricated into the lives of women in reproduction, kinship and parenthood
(Franklin, 1995; Martin, 1987; Rapp, 1999), and others that examined
the new relations between biological knowledge, medical intervention
and the management of bodies, in sites ranging from HIV and AIDS
to brain death (Epstein, 1996; Lock, 2002; Martin, 1994). It became
common sense to argue that the capacities of the body were shaped
by cultural expectations, its normalities and pathologies were socially
constructed, and features once considered natural gender, sexuality,
Rose
11
race, age, disability and so forth were actually performed according to

cultural scripts.
Many participants in these debates have recently become critical of
their overly discursive nature and sought to return to some version of
materialism (Bennett, 2010). The tortuous attempts to recognize the
agency of non-human entities scallops, bacteria, climate and the like
(hardly startling news to any social historian) speaks volumes about the
wayward conceptual pathways previously taken in the field of science
studies.14 Others sought more directly to reintegrate themes from biology, and, in the words of Elizabeth Grosz:
to redress the foreclosure, the denial, of the biological forces that
press on and produce life, and thus, ironically, to overturn the
repression of the materiality in its most complex forms that has
dominated the humanities and social sciences in their exclusive
focus on cultural construction at the expense of natural production.
(Grosz, 2005: 44)15
Thus Grosz herself has turned to Darwin and evolution to reconsider
ontology, and to help her conceive of life as a ceaseless becoming in
which essence is transformed into existence, the past and the present are
superseded and overwritten by the future (Grosz, 2005: 36). Elizabeth
Wilson has looked to Silvan Tomkins conception of universal innate
affect systems, together with elements drawn from theories of neural
networks and more visceral versions of psychoanalysis to reclaim aspects
of biology for feminism, as in her project for gut feminism, that aims to
conceptualize the sedimentations of the neurochemical, affective, ideational and social in both the experience of depression and in its pharmacological treatment (Wilson, 1998, 2004a, 2010, 2011).
Others have been less careful in their borrowing from the biological.16 This is especially the case with many protagonists of the contemporary turn to affect.17 It is becoming commonplace for those from
the social and human sciences to allude to biological arguments to support their claim that human beings are not individuated, conscious and
rational, but rather are enmeshed in sensations and contagions, shaped
by affective and non-cognitive force fields (Connolly, 2002; Massumi,
2002). For example, Brian Massumi alludes fleetingly, as Ruth Leys
(2011) puts it, to various findings concerning the role of the autonomic
nervous system supposed to derive from contemporary neuroscience, and
supports his belief in the bodily character of thought by reference to the
highly dubious conclusions that Benjamin Libet draws from his experiments on volition (Libet et al., 1983, 1999). He uses Libets argument that
there is a half-second delay between a decision being manifested in brain
process and it entering conscious awareness to give empirical support to
a philosophical argument drawn from Spinoza and Deleuze, with added
12
support from Gilbert Simondon (Massumi, 2002).18 Libets bizarre reasoning, and his extrapolations from a highly simplistic and artificial
laboratory set-up to general claims about the absence of free will in
human actions and intentions in the everyday world, remain unquestioned. Nigel Thrift also frames his non-representational theory
through a critique of the rejection of biology by social theory:
distance from biology is no longer seen as a prime marker of social
and cultural theory . . . It has become increasingly evident that the
biological constitution of being . . . has to be taken into account if
performative force is ever to be understood, and in particular, the
dynamics of birth (and creativity) rather than death. (Thrift, 2007:
174)19
This is asserted via a mind-bending amalgam of the usual suspects
from philosophy Agamben, Bergson, Deleuze and Guattari, William
James, Spinoza and Whitehead together with references to Simondon
and von Uexkull and a few biologists or neuroscientists: LeDoux,
Damasio, Ekman, the famous autist Temple Grandin, Libet, and of
course the Buddhist neuroscientist Francisco Varela. These figures are
called upon to support the argument that it is only by recognizing the
true nature of human corporeality and the power of the affective that we
will be able to free ourselves from an overly intellectualist and rationalist
account of contemporary politics, economics and culture. Only then will
we be able to grasp, and perhaps to intensify, the non-conscious,
non-intellectual level forces that inspire resistance, creativity and hope.
Biology is translated into ontology, ontology is transmuted into politics.
We have seen a similar move in recent history, appealing to a different
biology, with political consequences that, to say the least, should give
us pause.
A strange form of conceptual gerrymandering seems to underpin such
liberation biology: biological claims evade critical interrogation where
they seem to give support to a pre-given philosophical ethopolitics. This
is a mirror image of the notorious tendency of life scientists to support
socio-political arguments by transposing their research on flies or mice
directly to the realm of human society and culture. Is there a more intellectually rigorous way to connect the human sciences and the life sciences? A few sociologists have called for a material-corporeal sociology
that thinks in terms of an interplay between the biophysiological properties of the human bodies, their shaping by social practices, and their
organization by cultural and linguistic forces which shape individual
lived experiences and identities (Newton, 2003; Williams, 1999). These
modest sociological endeavours are attentive to evidence from biomedicine when they discuss the role of such issues as emotion, stress and social
inequality in accounting for ill health, and muster evidence from research
Rose
13
on psychosomatic conditions and the role of hormones and the immune

system. But such analyses usually conclude merely with the general claim
that human bodies are simultaneously biological and social. They find it
difficult to conceptualize the role that the social sciences might actually
play in their relations with life scientists. Should we do what the life
sciences often ask of us supply them with the factors and variables
that make up the socio-ome? Or should we resist the belief that the
organism, the living individual, is distinct from its eternal milieu and
only interacts with it in the form of inputs and influences?20 Is
there another way of approaching this issue of the relations between
the human sciences and biology? Might things look different if we
approached it from the direction of the life sciences themselves?
Open Biology, Open Vitality

Of course, even in the 1970s and 1980s, some sociologists sought to recognize the biological nature of human beings without lapsing into reductionism and determinism. Thus Social Relations and Human Attributes,
written by Paul Hirst and Penny Woolley and published in 1982, opens
with a quote from the evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky
(Hirst and Woolley, 1982).21 Human society and culture, says
Dobzhansky, are the product of the biological evolution of our species,
but human phenomena Dobzhansky mentions intelligence, the capacity to use linguistic symbols and culture affect the biological evolution of man so profoundly that it cannot be understood without taking
them into account . . . Human evolution is wholly intelligible only as an
outcome of biological and social facts (Dobzhansky, 1955: 320, quoted
in Hirst and Woolley, 1982: 1). This is the central theme of Hirst and
Woolleys argument. Human attributes are, as they put it, directly conditional upon mans animal past. But even physical attributes, such as
bipedalism, opposable fingers and thumb, and the size and capacities of
the human brain, arise from selection pressures from emerging human
forms of life. And as humans developed their distinctive cultural forms,
their attributes have been socially shaped and hence vary greatly between
cultures and across historical time.
We have many empirically rich examples, ranging from bodily comportment (styles of walking, marching, swimming), through the manifestation of distress (in physical or mental symptoms and syndromes), to
a sense of personhood (as individual, unique, autonomous) (Mauss,
1979). Indeed, as we can see from the numerous examples of children
brought up in the wild or confined away from human contact, some
attributes that we think of as quintessentially human speaking, sexuality, the sense of self do not appear at all in the absence of social and
cultural shaping. Referring to the work of many anthropologists, psychiatrists and doctors of the first half of the 20th century, Hirst and
14
Woolley point out that cultures not only shape, in fundamental ways, the
forms of expression of mental distress (Yap, 1951) but also that one can
be brought to death by ones genuine belief that one has been cursed
(Cannon, 1942, 1957). The recognition that the habitus, bodily capacities
and fundamental mental categories of humans require formation that
the envelope of the skin does not, by rights, delineate an enclosed,
autonomous zone is thus by no means new. The human body cannot
be the province of the biologists alone: culture, symbolism and the
imagination are also constitutive, even when it comes to the organization
and properties of basic musculature, hormonal systems, sicknesses and
their cure, its emotional economy and even its passage to death.
In the 30 years or so since Hirst and Woolley wrote their book, these
arguments have become even more telling, not least because they mesh
with the changing thought styles in the heartland of molecular biology
itself. Starting, perhaps, in the 1930s, there was a shift from a molar
image of life, of organs, flows of organs, of muscles, of blood, of
tissue, as represented in the paintings and drawings in the anatomical
atlases of the 18th and 19th centuries, to a gaze that envisions the body at
the scale of the interactions between molecules (Kay, 1993). And the
relations of the social and the biological the selection pressures that
human life exerted on human evolution, and the shaping of human attributes by their milieu have been re-posed in molecular terms (Rose,
2001). Of course, much research over the subsequent 50 years was reductionist in its methods and indeed in its forms of conceptualization, seeking to explain the properties of organisms in terms of the additive
properties of their simplest components. Major advances in our understanding of genetic mechanisms, cellular processes and neurobiology
were achieved through these methods, but they were beset with problems
when they sought to translate these insights to an understanding of the
organism as a whole. And increasingly, as noted earlier, these approaches
are being challenged by another (Woese, 2004). In these developing
thought styles, the organism and its milieu are not construed as realms
external to one another and merely interacting: rather, when it comes to
the living organism, organism and milieu are having to be understood as
in constant and multiple transaction at the molecular level. This opens
some intriguing new possibilities for overcoming the stand-off between
progressive thought in the human sciences and the truth discourses of
biology.22
Consider, for example, the style of thought in social neuroscience.
Researchers seek to account for the distinctively social form of human
existence by identifying evolutionary processes that have selected for the
neural preconditions of sociality, group formation, and even consciousness (Cacioppo and Berntson, 2004; Cacioppo et al., 2011). Humans,
they argue, can become social in the sense of forming cooperative relations with one another because they have the capacity to ascribe
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meanings to the movements or visible features of others, to ascribe these

to their internal mental states, and hence to recognize the intentions and
the feelings of their con-specifics. In a key article in 1990, Leslie Brothers,
who was trained in psychiatry and psychoanalysis, famously argued that:
While many non-primates (for example, ants) can interact in highly
specific ways with others of their kind, it appears that primates,
especially those most closely related to ourselves, have developed
a unique capacity to perceive psychological facts (dispositions and
intentions) about other individuals. This capacity [that she termed
social cognition] appears to distinguish primate social behavior
from that of other orders . . . (Brothers, 1990: 27)
Many of those who have developed these ideas suggest that such
capacities for social cognition have genomic conditions that is to
say, they are rooted in specific molecular sequences that code for the
neurobiological processes that subserve such human sociality. For
example, Klaus-Peter Lesch has suggested that a polymorphism in
one particular genetic sequence of the serotonin transporter gene
(5-HTT), present only in humans and some primate species which
regulates the activity of one important neurotransmitter in certain
regions of the human brain has consequences for embryonic development and brain plasticity, in particular in brain areas related to
cognitive and emotional processes, which transcend the boundaries
of behavioral genetics to embrace biosocial science and create a new
social neuroscience of behavior (Lesch, 2007: S24S28). Here is an
argument from contemporary neuroscience that argues that humans
are evolved to be social and something of the specific form of
human sociality has its conditions in human neurobiology.
Many from the social and human sciences react with horror to this
suggestion that our specifically human social capacities have neurobiological bases.23 At the least, they feel that their space is being colonized,
their expertise displaced. But, more fundamentally, they suggest that the
very nature of human beings is being misunderstood. That, instead of
understanding humans as uniquely speaking subjects, with culture and
history, this kind of analysis reduces them to puppets of their brains,
implying that human sociality is a mere effect of neurobiology. These
critics are concerned that, in claiming that the relations between our
forms of life and those of our animal forebears may not be of fundamental difference but of continuity, we will forget that only humans can
express these relations, communicate them with others, build systems
of morality, law and civility upon them. They fear the consequence of
placing humans among the animals in this way. I understand such arguments but find them unconvincing.
16
Of course, there are plenty of examples of simplistic reductionism

Leslie Brothers herself became very critical of the ways in which social
neuroscience had developed (Brothers, 2001). There is much to criticize,
in particular in the branch of social neuroscience that is enamoured of
brain imaging, which is characterized by gross over-interpretation of
results from imaging experiments in highly artificial laboratory situations, and espouses a kind of blobology that claims that an area of
the brain that shows activity in a brain scanner one containing billions
of synapses at current resolution is the location for this or that human
mental state.24 Imaging technology, however marvellously sophisticated,
cannot make up for the woefully simplistic conceptual apparatus of
many imagers. Words like subserve and phrases such as neural correlates gesture to the explanatory gap that remains between brain processes
and mental processes. Social scientists have given us excellent studies of
the theories, premises, algorithms and assumptions that are built into the
exquisite scanning machines that produce the images (Beaulieu, 2000;
Dumit, 2003) this is indeed Bachelardian phenomenotechnics in
action. It is also a classic example of what Gerd Gigerenzer, a long
time ago, termed tools to theories, a process in which a tool here
the functional MRI scanner that maps patterns of blood oxygenation
in voxels in a three-dimensional space, that are then used to produce
visual images implying activation in different locales then becomes
the basis for a theory about the activity of the brain itself that each
image seems to confirm (Gigerenzer, 1991). And those from the social
and human sciences rightly identify the impoverished sense in which, in
these imaging experiments, social relations are reduced to interactions
between dyads that can be experimentally simulated in a laboratory and
in a scanner (Cohn, 2004, 2008a, 2008b).
But critique is not enough, and nor are the familiar tropes of constructionism. There are opportunities for a more positive relation to these new
understandings of what it is to be human. For example, John Cacioppos
work has focused on the interplay between social interactions at the
level of dyads, through families, neighbourhoods to cities and civilizations and the brain and nervous system of the individual:
through a continuous interplay of neural, neuroendocrine, metabolic and immune factors on brain and body, in which the brain
is the central regulatory organ and also a malleable target of these
factors . . . Social neuroscience is the interdisciplinary academic field
devoted to understanding how biological systems implement social
processes and behavior, and how these social structures and processes impact the brain and biology.25
Further, Cacioppo argues, humans have an evolved human affinity for
social life hence the consequences of human isolation:
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The social environment . . . is fundamentally involved in the sculpting and activation/inhibition of basic structures and processes in the
human brain and biology . . . social isolation or perceived social
isolation (loneliness) gets under the skin to affect social cognition
and emotions, personality processes, brain, biology, and health.26
A pre-eminently culturally shaped human experience not just actual
but perceived isolation configures neural processes at the molecular
level and vice versa. Humans can, indeed, be dying for company
(Cacioppo and Patrick, 2008). If this is not an invitation to the social
and human sciences for engagement in a genuinely transdisciplinary
question, it is hard to see what would be. Indeed, perhaps this is an
endeavour not that different in intention from Georg Simmels (1950
[1903]) classic study of mental life in the metropolis.
Genomics beyond the Gene

The same is true of genomics. We need no reminder of the dispiriting and
often murderous ways in which genetic explanations have entered human
history. But things have changed. Genomics has moved away from a
style of thought that looked for single genes for specific characteristics,
the gene-for paradigm so criticized by social scientists, especially when it
claimed to have discovered the gene for an aspect of the human condition, such as homosexuality or bipolar disorder. While the Human
Genome Project was initially underpinned by the idea that the sequence
of the genome would be the code of codes or the book of life the
digital instructions for making a human being the real itself intervened
to say no. The evidence from sequencing of humans and other organisms
simply did not support the view that genes were distinct units, each of
which coded for a single protein. Instead, it became clear that each
sequence of bases could be read in many different ways, thus enabling
a small number of coding regions to generate a large number of different
proteins. Further, it appeared that single nucleotide polymorphisms, or
SNPs (multiple small molecular variations between species and between
individuals), for example where a C is substituted by a G, or an A is
substituted by a T in the string of bases that make up the genetic code,
shape differences in the way an organism develops leading to a plethora
of genome-wide association studies seeking the algorithms of such variations that could explain why some individuals developed diseases and
others did not (Manolio and Collins, 2007). This led to the first significant mutation in thought styles: a shift away from determinism towards a
probabilistic way of thinking about the relationship between genetics,
development, evolution, organism and life chances.
In a recent review of the impact of the sequencing of the human genome
10 years on, the eminent genome scientist Eric Lander pointed to our
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growing realization of how much we now know that we do not know

(Lander, 2011). While only about 1.5 percent of the genome contains
protein coding sequences the classical genes a further 6 percent is
evolutionarily conserved, and hence biologically functional, but does not
code for protein. This means that there are millions of conserved elements
whose function we do not know: perhaps they are involved in the regulation of transcription in development, perhaps they do something completely different. There are thousands of other sequences that also have
unknown roles in such processes as cell-cycle regulation, or immune
response, or in brain processes. Genomic sequences the codes made
up of G, C, A and T are one-dimensional, but chromosomes in cells have
a topography in three dimensions, and we know little about the implications of chromosomal configuration. We may be beginning to understand
the role of the millions of polymorphisms in genes places where a single
nucleotide changes but we know even less about the effects of copy
number variation, where whole genetic segments are duplicated many
times. We are moving away from the idea that each common disease
will share the same genomic basis even if a complex one to a model
where common diseases are the endpoints of many different, rare genomic
variations. Even in conditions where we have a clear idea of heritability,
such as certain forms of breast cancer, the proportion explained by what
we know of genomics is small and the missing heritability which cannot
be explained by genetics is high, ranging from 50 percent for age-related
macular degeneration, 20 percent in Crohns disease and around 95 percent in elevated lipid levels (Manolio et al., 2009). And so on. The more we
know, the more we dont know. And the more we find ourselves moving
away from the idea that the genome is the prime mover, the uncaused
cause, and towards a style of thought that sees the genome as much
affected and shaped by all around it at the same time as it shapes it.
As it has become clear that variations in the genomic sequence itself,
even at the SNP level, account for only a small percentage of differences
between individuals in disease susceptibility, attention has turned to a
process long known to developmental biologists who study cellular development and differentiation in organisms: epigenetics. This refers to the
processes across the life of an individual in which transactions with its
environment with the cellular, organic, biographical, ecological milieu
modify the DNA itself, accounting for the fact that although every cell in
a multi-cellular organism (in the liver, the heart, the brain. . .) contains
the same DNA sequence, they develop radically different properties.27
Of course, we should be wary of those who celebrate epigenetics as a new
saviour once more, there is much here that is simply not understood.
Yet, at its best, the turn to epigenetics marks a recognition of the inseparability of vitality and milieu which could give a crucial role for the social
and human sciences in accounting for the shaping of vitality at the molecular level.28
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Take, for example, the research undertaken by Michael Meaney and

his group for over three decades on the effects of early experiences on
rodent behaviour (Meaney and Stewart, 1979; Meaney et al., 1985). This
work has focused on the effects of maternal behaviour on the developing
brains of offspring what is now termed epigenetic programming. The
mothers behaviour towards her pup shapes the expression of genes
through altering the methylation of the DNA, and this shapes neuronal
development in the pup (Szyf et al., 2008) and in turn shapes the pups
own behaviour towards its own offspring. By 2009, this group was suggesting that these findings could be translated to humans: there were
common effects of variations in maternal care on epigenetic regulation
in stressed rodents and in suicide victims with a history of child abuse
(McGowan et al., 2009). The brain, it seems, no less than the psyche
before it, is open to environmental inputs, and in yet another blow
to ideas of a one-way traffic between genotype and phenotype these
work at the level of the genome, modulating gene expression with consequences that might flow down the generations (Meaney and FergusonSmith, 2010). Should the social and human sciences react with horror to
such arguments? I dont think so. Is the argument that stressed rodents
share something with stressed humans a threat to the conceptual and
moral delineations of the human? I dont think so. Should we work
with these researchers, help in trying to understand the strengths and
weaknesses of animal models, seek to model more closely the effects of
biography, sociality, culture and history, and guard against the rush to
demand immediate impacts in social policies and practices? Yes. That
would be a way of revitalizing sociology that would not threaten it but
bring it, once more, into alignment with the positive knowledges of the
creatures whose relations we seek to analyse.
In all these areas of the life sciences, despite their differences, a style of
thought is emerging of constant transactions across the apparent boundaries of the organism that constitute, shape and support vitality, at time
scales from the millisecond to the decade, at levels from the molecular to
the cellular, the organ and the organism itself. This is a form of argument
that links to, but goes beyond, the important recognition that human
capacities such as cognition and affect are distributed not the individuated property of singular organisms, but constitutively dependent on
the webs of interactions among multiple organic processes within and
between organisms and other entities in a locale. Of course this thought
style operates in very different ways in different disciplinary domains,
and there is no single way that the social and human sciences might
make their links with them. But it is clear that such links will not be in
terms of the relations of body and society those enticing yet illusory
totalities but at a different scale. Not in terms of the body or the
brain as coherent systems enclosed by a boundary of skin, but of bodies
and brains as multiplicities, of the coexistence and symbiosis of multiple
20
entities from bacterial flora in the gut,29 to the proliferation of neurons in

the brain, each in multiple connections with milieux, internal and external, inorganic, organic, vital, historical, cultural, human. Distributed
capacities in milieux which vital organisms themselves partly create
and which in turn create them and their capacities.
Relationships between the social and cultural sciences and the life
sciences are unlikely to be harmonious. There are many areas where
the human sciences can and must challenge the simplicities of the life
sciences when it comes to history and culture. Consider three examples
from my own recent work on the relations between neuroscience and the
criminal justice system. Neurobiological evidence about the specificity of
the adolescent brain (Casey et al., 2008) is being deployed in the United
States in arguments seeking to mitigate the legal responsibility of young
people. Such work cries out for an engagement from those who know
how historically recent, and culturally specific, is the notion of adolescence itself. Many researchers are enthusiastically searching for neurobiological markers to ground psychiatric diagnoses an endeavour which
radically misunderstands not only the social role of classification but the
very nature of human mental distress (Singh and Rose, 2009). In a related
area, many seek to formulate neurobiological accounts of psychopathy,
which they hope may give rise to strategies of prediction and pre-emption
but these look very different in the light of historical understanding of
the category itself, and a social analysis of the historical conditions that
have given rise to risk predictions of pathology, and an understanding of
conceptual problems and socio-political consequences of the problematics of risk (Rose, 2010). These are just some small empirical examples
of the places where dialogue across the divide, however difficult, is both
conceptually significant and practically relevant.
These indicators of the difficulty of dialogue should not deter those
from the social and human sciences, but incite them. Despite the warnings of those who fear the consequences of placing the human among the
animals, this opportunity for engagement places a certain demand on us
that is both conceptual and ethical. Not that we give up responsibility for
that which is biological, or deny its pertinence for our own investigations,
but rather that we take responsibility for the biological for the social
shaping of the bodies and brains that constitute us as specifically human
animals, whose welfare, in some small way, we hope to foster.
Beyond Vitalism?
Some suggest that, with the emergence of a molecular vision of life, we no
longer need any residual vitalism to understand the processes in which
life consists (Bedau, 2010). Who needs vitalism when the complexity of
living systems can be broken down into describable interactions between
specific kinds of parts, their living processes can be reverse engineered,
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the parts and their properties can be freed from their origins in any
specific organism, and reassembled, first in thought, then in reality, to
produce whatever outcome you can dream up. We see these mechanistic
principles in operation in some ways that animal models are used in
biomedical research, for example where human genes are inserted into
the animal in the hope that it will then be a more accurate model for the
development of particular human pathologies or the testing of drugs. The
implications of the many failures of translation from such animal work
to humans, especially in relation to mental disorders, are the subject of
much debate.30 But perhaps the apotheosis of this way of thinking can be
seen in certain approaches to synthetic biology, based on the explicit
belief that vital processes can be construed as assemblies of parts specified by their gene sequences, and these parts can be fabricated and connected together to make something completely new . . . to create the
organisms that evolution forgot (Baker et al., 2006; Endy, 2005; Royal
Academy of Engineering, 2009). You take the genes for green fluorescence from one organism, the ability to live at 200 degrees from another,
and to digest oil from a third, you insert them into a chassis made from
your organism of choice, and you have a green, heat-loving, oil-eater. Or
so it is hoped. In this flat ontology of life, the belief is that any element
of a living system can, in principle, be freed from its origin in a particular
organism or organ and mobilized, connected into relays, circuits, networks with other such elements and retain the properties that are somehow inherent within the part itself (Rose, 2007).
However, a closer examination of synthetic biology shows how misleading is this fantasy of biological control, and its foundational premise
of life as pure mechanism. As Rob Carlson recently pointed out (Carlson,
2010), a Boeing 747 consists of about 50,000 kinds of parts some 6
million total components and the precise specification of each part is
known and amenable to a quantitative description. A relatively simple
cell, for example yeast, has millions of moving parts, most of which are
unknown: approximately 6300 kinds of genetic parts, of which we can
name about half, but for most we have no design specifications at all, not
to mention all the other parts that are involved the structure of sugars
and lipids for example that are not encoded in the genome, and for
which we have only the vaguest ideas of how they are shaped and how
they work. A human body has something around 1014 or 100 trillion
cells, most of which are as complex as yeast not to mention the
microbes that inhabit us. The human brain contains about 100 billion
neurons, each of which is different, with 100 trillion synapses connecting
them. Social scientists must look beyond the hyperbolic forms in which
some scientific activities are presented in the current climate: we must
work closely with the actual researchers, and explore their operative
philosophy. We will find this more hesitant, more modest and more
open to a genuine conceptual engagement.
22
Conclusion
Of course, there are crucial philosophical issues at stake here. But the
best way to understand them, I suggest, is to proceed by means of what
Michel Foucault, drawing on Bachelard, called field work in philosophy, that is to say, by empirical investigations of the operative philosophy of the biologists themselves. This is not a matter of subscribing to
what the scientists themselves say about their activities when they reflect
on them from their armchairs, in retirement or in their popular writings.
To decipher their operative philosophy, we should ask them, as
Bachelard did, to:
Tell us what you think, not when you quit the laboratory, but
during the hours when you leave ordinary life behind you and
enter scientific life. Instead of leaving us with your empiricism of
the evening, show us your vigorous rationalism of the morning.
(Bachelard, 1940: 11, quoted in Rheinberger, 2005: 318)
In one of his characteristically enigmatic statements, the French philosopher and historian of biological thought Georges Canguilhem
remarked: The thought of the living must take from the living the idea
of the living (Canguilhem, 2008 [1965]: xx). That is to say, at every
historical moment, the ways in which we think about how to think
about vitality must be informed by, underpinned by, shaped by, premised
on, the very way in which vitality itself is understood in the contemporary sciences of life. Our relationship to the forms of knowledge generated
by the life sciences cannot should not, in Canguilhems normative doctrine be indifferent to that knowledge, cannot treat it as merely one set
of claims among others.
Yes, we can identify the conditions of possibility of our regimes of
truth about life. Those conditions not only define the structure of the
rationality of the life sciences but, increasingly, shape our experience of
ourselves and our present. They set a path for the development of biomedicine and biotechnology, and all the ways in which, today, vitality
in plants, animals and humans has become a domain of intervention
and the production of biovalue. In analysing the ways in which the life
sciences are reshaping our experience of ourselves in our present, we can
also identify what those truths about ourselves, our lives, our world, our
reality, make possible or preclude. There is much to be critical of here,
especially if one wishes to reshape those pathways in the service of life,
and not just of reputation, grants or profit. But all truth claims have
conditions, and elegant descriptions of the ways in which our current
biological truths have been created do not suffice for a critical engagement between the social and the life sciences.31
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To paraphrase another of Georges Canguilhems suggestive phrases,

we can say that every mode of biological reason is, in a certain way, also
a philosophy of life.32 A philosophy of life because our way of living, our
sense of how we should live as humans, why we should live as humans, of
what we owe to ourselves and others, of what we can know, what we
should do, what we can hope for: all these have become tangled up
maybe always were tangled up in what we think we are as living creatures. Who can doubt that this is true of all the varieties of reasoning
about vitality, intervening in vitality, and questioning vitality, that constitute contemporary biology?
As we know, there are some who claim that these developments have
put the final stake in the heart of vitalism. Do we now inhabit a fully
disenchanted world, in which we realize that vitality is merely the intelligible result of physical, chemical, mathematical, stochastical processes?
Things are more complex. Of course, our powers to intervene in our
bodies are remarkable: to replace body parts, modulate vital systems
with drugs, tame cancers and much more (Hacking, 2007). As for our
brains, we have a very long way to go (Price, 2011). But simple mechanical reductionism does not capture the operative philosophy of the sciences of life and the forms of biomedicine to which they are linked.
Vitalism will remain as a constant reminder of the self-organizing,
dynamic, self-regulating complexity of living systems, the fact that,
unlike machines, they exist and develop in time and space, and of
the inseparability of organism and milieu in life in the real world. The
social and human sciences need to grasp these operative philosophies of
biology and biomedicine, to explore the philosophies of life which they
embody and the potential forms of life to which they may be linked. But
more than this, our own disciplines need to grasp the shaping and the
all too frequent cramping of human vitality, to engage with the sciences
and play our part in addressing the local, national and global inequities
that devastate the vital lives of so many of our fellow biological citizens.
There are good historical reasons why many in the social and human
sciences have been so critical of attempts to build a positive relation with
the life sciences. But their dread of determinism, reductionism, of the dire
ethical and socio-political consequences of locating humans among the
animals, is now misplaced. It is time for us to configure a new double
relationship with biology. On the one hand, this requires us to subject the
tendentious and exaggerated claims of enthusiasts, popularizers and their
media representations to critical evaluation, and to argue for a sober
evaluation of the current state of the life sciences, recognizing the
limits of their explanatory capacities and the many weaknesses in their
translational achievements. On the other, we must move beyond description, commentary and critique, beyond the study of downstream implications of biology and biomedicine, to develop an affirmative relation to
the new ways of understanding the dynamic relations between the vital
24
and its milieu the vital in its milieu the vital milieu that are taking
shape. This relationship cannot be one of wide-eyed embracing of every
latest pronouncement, let alone the displacement of our own hard-won
knowledge of the social shaping of human lives. An affirmative relationship is one that seeks to identify and work with those arguments that
recognize, in whatever small way, the need for a new and non-reductionist biology of human beings and other organisms in their milieu, and
which can thus be brought into conversation with the evidence, concepts
and forms of analysis developed in the social and human sciences. This
requires us to accept that the social and human sciences are also sciences
of the living, of living bodies, of living matter, of matter that has been
made to live. It is hard to know how such a relationship of critical
friendship will turn out. But the project of creating that relationship is
one of the most important to confront our disciplines today. It might also
restore some of the capacity of those disciplines to help remake our
human world for the better.
In a famous remark, Sigmund Freud encapsulated the blows that
human narcissism has suffered at the hands of science first when
Copernicus showed that our planet was not at the centre of the universe
but just a tiny fragment of a vast cosmic system, and second when
Darwin showed us humans that we were not the privileged beings of
creation and revealed our ineradicable animal nature. But, Freud
continued:
human megalomania will have suffered its third and most wounding
blow from the psychological research of the present time which
seeks to prove to the ego that it is not even master in its own
house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is
going on unconsciously in its mind. We psychoanalysts were not the
first . . . to utter this call . . . but it seems to be our fate to give it
its most forcible expression and to support it with empirical material which affects every individual. (Freud, 195374 [1916]: vol. 15,
2845)
Contemporary life sciences, in claiming that the historical, biographical, social and cultural are written into the interior of the individual in
their biology and their neurobiology, offer a harder challenge to that
human narcissism. But this challenge might be even more important in
the ways it reconfigures the relations between humans and animals,
humans and matter, humans and their milieu, in what it helps us to
understand about our vital existence.
Some will also recall Michel Foucaults words at the end of The Order
of Things (Foucault, 1970: 3867). The figure of the human as the
unique organizing principle of knowledge and morality was, he argued,
held together by a certain historical a priori. In giving the uniqueness of
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25
the human a privileged place as both the subject and the object of positive knowledge, this a priori formed the unspoken premise of the human
sciences. He suggested that structuralism would transform this framework, displacing the figure of man from its throne. Almost half a century later, it is not philosophy but the life sciences that is leading an
epistemic change in our relationship to the human. And if a new figure
of the living is taking shape, effacing the old like a face drawn in sand at
the edge of the sea, what part might the human and social sciences
themselves play in the new figure of the human that is being born?
That is the challenge for those who hope to revitalize our own disciplines
for the 21st century.
Notes
1. An earlier version of this article was given as my inaugural lecture for the
Martin White Professorship of Sociology at the London School of
Economics and Political Science in March 2011. I dedicated that inaugural
lecture which as it turned out was also my valedictory lecture at the LSE
to the memory of two inspiring and generous transdisciplinary intellectuals
who knew so much about the relations of the natural and social sciences,
Paul Hirst and Roy Porter they are much missed. A version was also given
as a keynote address to the International Conference on Knowledge,
Culture and Social Change, Centre for Cultural Research, University of
Western Sydney, 9 November 2011, and published by them as a Working
Paper (available at http://www.uws.edu.au/ics/publications). I am grateful
to the comments from ten referees who read the paper for Theory, Culture &
Society, especially those who wrote at length on the issues I discuss: their
anonymity prevents a proper dialogue, but I have done my best to address
some of their comments while maintaining the overall lecture form of my
argument, which is intended as a statement of position drawing on a decade
of my own empirical work in genomics, neuroscience and synthetic biology.
In important ways, this ethos underpins my newly established department of
Social Science, Health and Medicine at Kings College, London.
2. We can note in passing the point made by one referee that the centrality
that the linguistic turn gave to signs did, in fact, have considerable resonances in the life sciences Canguilhem famously remarking, in the wake of
the work of Watson and Crick on the genetic code, that the science of life
[now] resembles grammar, semantics and the theory of syntax. If we are to
understand life, its message must be decoded before it can be read
(Canguilhem, 1994: 317). While few can doubt the importance of this
moment in the history of the life sciences, perhaps now, while digitization
remains crucial, the science of life itself resembles engineering more than
informatics (cf. Rose, 2007: 44).
3. There are also many problems with animal models, and with translation
from animals to humans, which illuminate precisely the differences between
species: these are discussed in Rose and Abi-Rached (2012: ch. 3).
4. There is a long history of these holistic and vitalist forms of thought in
biology, for example in the work of Kurt Goldstein; these issues are
26
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.

thoughtfully discussed by Georges Canguilhem in the essays gathered
together in Canguilhem (2008 [1965]). The debate between these two styles
of thought has an ambiguous political history; the debates in Germany are
very well analysed by Anne Harrington (1996).
In 2011, the global biotech industry was estimated to have a value of $305.7
billion, an increase of 41.3 percent since 2008, around 60 percent of which is
based in the USA, but China, India, Japan and Brazil are rapidly developing
their biotech sectors. (Data from Research and Markets: http://www.
researchandmarkets.com/reports/41522/biotechnology_global_industry_
guide, consulted 8 March 2011, who also provide the figure in the next
paragraph.)
Data from Ernst and Young, Beyond Borders: Global Biotechnology Report
(2011), available at: http://www.ey.com/GL/en/Industries/Life-Sciences/
Beyond-bordersglobal-biotechnology-report-2011 (accessed October 2012).
Jack Price (2011), a neuroscientist, has recently argued this eloquently in
relation to his own specialism brain reconstruction in the face of damage
from stroke and neurodegenerative diseases.
As one of the anonymous reviewers of this article perceptively remarked,
this focus on knowing and managing living matter, this fascination with the
vital, raises some important issues about the ways that one might approach
the non-vital, matter that is devoid of life, without, as that reviewer put it,
compelling that matter to be vital in order to be of concern to social
science. Perhaps the current interest in the anthropocene illustrates some
of these tensions in the different ways of giving matter its due.
We could point to numerous examples of the intricate relations between
biology and sociology across the 19th century for example the relation
between Claude Bernards and Auguste Comtes notions of milieu, illuminatingly examined by Ed Cohen (2009).
The interplay of biology and sociology in the biographies of key figures
across the first half of the 20th century are worthy of note. Geddes, who
was a co-founder of the Sociological Society in 1903 with Victor Branford
among others, was originally trained as a biologist, as were Carr-Saunders
and Lancelot Hogben. Tom Harrisson, founder of Mass Observation, was
an ornithologist, and Bulmer (1985: 11) describes Mass Observation as a
kind of social bird-watching.
He was chair of the Population Investigation Committee from 1936, and
chair of the statistics committee of the Royal Commission on Population
from 1944 to 1949.
Keynes (in Blacker and Glass, 1967: 368) describes Carr-Saunders as being
by common estimation to-day the most distinguished sociologist in the
country.
Of course, in this paragraph, I can give references to only a fraction of the
books published on these topics!
As one of the anonymous referees of the paper put it, all the intricate
attention to the ordering, compositional and translational work scientists
do along with the modicum of room to manoeuvre that other entities have
been ceded has somehow precluded science studies scholars from ever
actually being greatly provoked or excited by the substantive findings of
Rose
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
27
these sciences. I am particularly grateful to this referee for his or her incisive
and generous comments on my draft.
Another notable figure in Australian corporeal feminism is Vicki Kirby
(see, for example, Kirby, 1997).
The point, says Massumi, is to borrow from science in order to make a
difference to the humanities (Massumi, 2002: 21).
In the remarks that follow, I have drawn on Ruth Leys excellent analysis of
the political claims that those such as Massumi and Thrift make for their
approach to affect (Leys, 2011). Leys takes exception to the apparent denigration of meaning and intentionality in this work, which she traces back to
Tomkins and others who see affects as comprising a set of fixed autonomic
patterns, each triggered by various external stimuli, but which are prior to
any attribution of meaning to those stimuli. She rightly criticizes the evidential base for the argument that that meaning comes later, if at all, as the
subject seeks to give a plausible interpretation to him or herself of their
affective state. While this is not the place to discuss her alternatives, it is
clear that the claim that cognition and emotion form distinct faculties is
neither conceptually nor neurobiologically supportable, and that there is no
reason to accept the suggestion that the mental is identical to the cognitive,
and the cognitive is formed of language-like propositions. For another excellent critique of affect theory, on which I have drawn, see also the detailed
account of the selective use of Antonio Damasio, Joseph LeDoux and
Daniel Stern provided by Papoulias and Callard (2010). Thanks to Lisa
Blackman for thoughtful advice on the current state of affect theory,
which forms the topic of her forthcoming book Immaterial Bodies.
A critical analysis of Libets claims can be found in Rose and Abi-Rached
(2012).
He cites the work of Stephen Turner and Christine Battersby in support
here; this passage is also quoted by both Papoulias and Callard and by Leys,
in the papers cited above.
This is reminiscent of an older debate, in which Claude Bernard rejected
Comte and argued for a distinction between the internal milieu of the
organism and the milieu exterieur which it inhabited (Bernard, 1878) an
argument which many suggest was the condition of possibility for modern
experimental medicine, but which is now hard to sustain (see especially
Canguilhem, 2008).
Paul Hirst wrote several insightful books on the relations and differences
between biological and social theory (Hirst, 1975, 1976).
Of course, this is not a new development within the sciences of the living
see, for example, the work of Kurt Goldstein (1939). Some of these debates
in the 1920s and 1930s which had a very ambiguous relation to ideals of
National Socialism are well discussed by Anne Harrington (1996). One
could also think here about the phenomenon of placebo, which was the
topic of a series of seminars at LSEs BIOS research centre in 2004 organized
by Anne Harrington; see also Harrington (1999, 2008) and Wahlberg (2008).
As do some philosophers, for example Raymond Tallis (2011) and the
Wittgenstein-inspired collaboration between the neuroscientist MR
Bennett and the philosopher Peter Hacker (Bennett and Hacker, 2003).
28
24. For one really bad example, see Eisenberger et al. (2003). Hauke Heekeren
has suggested that this is like trying to work out how an automobile engine
works on the basis of an image gained from a thermal detection device
mounted on a geostationary satellite (he made this comparison at a neuroschool held by the European Neuroscience and Society Network in Vienna
in 2009). Of course, as Heekeren pointed out at the same event, it is not at all
clear what scale would be appropriate it makes no sense to read a newspaper with a microscope, but neither is it sensible to read a book from a
photograph of the bookshelf.
25. See: http://s4sn.org/drupal/ (consulted November 2010).
26. From his website: http://psychology.uchicago.edu/people/faculty/cacioppo/
index.shtml (consulted November 2010).
27. There are many different definitions of epigenetics and epigenesis. In the
current context, the term refers to the ways in which an organisms genome
does not merely express itself during development, but is modified from
conception onwards as a result of its interaction with extra-genomic factors.
The recent book by Nessa Carey (2012) gives an excellent introduction to
the field.
28. For an excellent review of work on epigenetics and human disease, see
Portela and Esteller (2010).
29. For a brief introduction to the microbiome, see Gravitz (2012).
30. On the one hand, at the genomic level, researchers are finding many quite
remarkable continuities between even simple animals and humans
(Amsterdam et al., 2004; Rock et al., 1998). Yet the very wise genomic
scientist Jacques Monod was very wrong when he famously claimed that
what was true for E. Coli a single-celled bacterium was also true for the
elephant (Jacob, 1995: 290). Research using model animals is constantly
confirming the comment made by Georges Canguilhem many years ago:
no experimentally acquired fact (whether it deals with structures, functions,
or comportments) can be generalized either from one variety to another
within a single species, or from one species to another, or from animal to
man without express reservations (Canguilhem, 2008 [1965]: 12). Gradually,
the attention of life scientists is moving from the genome and the cell to the
organism itself the whole living organism, as a vital entity in constant
transaction with its milieu from the moment of conception. The challenge
is to understand that organized, dynamic vitality if we are to have a real
feeling for the organism. These issues are discussed at length in the book
cited in note 3 above.
31. Of course, my argument here is not new: almost a quarter of a century ago,
Donna Haraway was making a similar point:
Feminists have stakes in a successor science project that offers a
more adequate, richer, better account of a world, in order to live in
it well . . . In traditional philosophical categories, the issue is ethics
and politics perhaps more than epistemology . . . So, I think my
problem and our problem is how to have simultaneously an
account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge
claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing
our own semiotic technologies for making meanings, and a
Rose
29
no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a real
world . . . (Haraway, 1988: 579)
Thanks to one of my reviewers for suggesting that I make this confluence of arguments explicit.
32. Actually, Canguilhem wrote: Contemporary biology, read in a certain way,

is somehow a philosophy of life the last phrase of Le concept et la vie
(1968).
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34
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Nikolas Rose is Professor of Sociology and Head of the Department of

Social Science, Health and Medicine, at Kings College London. His
most recent books are Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought
(Cambridge University Press, 1999), The Politics of Life Itself:
Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-first Century
(Princeton University Press, 2006) and (with Peter Miller) Governing
the Present (Polity, 2008). The outcome of his recent ESRC funded
research with Joelle Abi-Rached on the political, social, legal and economic implications of recent developments in the brain will be published
as Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind
(Princeton University Press, 2013).

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The Human Sciences in

Theory, Culture & Society

What kinds of creatures do we think we are, we contemporary human

Theory, Culture & Society 30(1)

with a bloody legacy of horrors from racial science to eugenics. But in

Theory, Culture & Society 30(1)

biomedical belief systems, to use new reproductive technologies to

Theory, Culture & Society 30(1)

to tackle simple problems to the conceptual and technological capacities

Biology and Sociology

of humans as biological, vital, living creatures to become clear.

Theory, Culture & Society 30(1)

race, age, disability and so forth were actually performed according to

Theory, Culture & Society 30(1)

on psychosomatic conditions and the role of hormones and the immune

Open Biology, Open Vitality

Theory, Culture & Society 30(1)

meanings to the movements or visible features of others, to ascribe these

Theory, Culture & Society 30(1)

Of course, there are plenty of examples of simplistic reductionism

Genomics beyond the Gene

Theory, Culture & Society 30(1)

growing realization of how much we now know that we do not know

Take, for example, the research undertaken by Michael Meaney and

Theory, Culture & Society 30(1)

entities from bacterial flora in the gut,29 to the proliferation of neurons in

Theory, Culture & Society 30(1)

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To paraphrase another of Georges Canguilhems suggestive phrases,

Theory, Culture & Society 30(1)

Theory, Culture & Society 30(1)

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Theory, Culture & Society 30(1)

32. Actually, Canguilhem wrote: Contemporary biology, read in a certain way,

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Theory, Culture & Society 30(1)

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Epstein, S. (1996) Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of

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Theory, Culture & Society 30(1)

Keynes, M. (2002) Lancelot Hogben, FRS. (18951975), Newsletter of Galton

Osborne, T. and Rose, N. (2008) Populating sociology: Carr-Saunders and the

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Theory, Culture & Society 30(1)

Nikolas Rose is Professor of Sociology and Head of the Department of

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