DISPUTE OVER HUMAN RACES AND ITS CONSEQUENCES FOR SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

The subject of this paper is the dispute over human races taking place in biology and the social sciences. In particular, it concerns such issues as: the concept of race, the existence of races and racial differences. In the second half of the XX century that dispute was strongly influenced by 'external' factors - i.e. socio-political - because of its political incorrectness. The intensity of those factors was so great, that it made impossible to solve this problem 'within' science - i.e. using scientific methods. In the author opinion, it was the result of, as he called it, the strategy of social survival. It is a case of biological influence on social structure and, as consequence, on the extent of scientific knowledge. Such issues could be the subject of research of a new scientific field which he postulate in this paper - namely the socio-biology of knowledge, which is a synthesis of socio-biology/evolutionary psychology and the sociology of knowledge.