Biological determinism

Biological determinism is the position that human behavior, psychology, and social organization are fundamentally shaped — or fully determined — by biological factors: genetics, neuroanatomy, evolutionary history, or physiology. It stands in contrast to cultural relativism and social constructivism, which locate the primary causal forces in cultural transmission, socialization, and institutional structure. The debate between biological and cultural explanations of human behavior is among the oldest and most politically charged in the human sciences, because it intersects directly with questions of individual responsibility, group difference, and the possibilities of social change.

Biological determinism has appeared in several historical forms, ranging from Victorian craniometry and eugenics (which used crude biological proxies to justify racial and class hierarchies) to contemporary behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology (which make claims of varying sophistication about heritable contributions to behavior). Each version has been attacked on methodological grounds by social scientists and on political grounds by those who argue that biological explanations are systematically deployed to naturalize existing hierarchies. The methodological critiques are often well-founded; the political critiques, however, do not refute the empirical claims and should not be confused with doing so.

The historiography of the debate is a case study in how scientific questions become culturally captured: positions in the biological-versus-cultural dispute correlate more reliably with political commitments than with evidence, which suggests the evidence alone does not determine the outcome.