From the lack of a true social theory comes the debilitating failure of the social sciences to communicate with the natural sciences and even with one another… the disciplines of both need to be defined by the scales of time and space they individually encompass and not just by subject matter as in past practice, and then they need to be connected.
A convergence has in fact begun. The natural sciences, by their own swift expansion in subject matter during past several decades, are drawing close to the social sciences. Four bridges across the divide are in place. The first is cognitive neuroscience, with elements of cognitive psychology… The second is human behavioural genetics… influence of the genes on mental development. The third… is evolutionary biology, including the hybrid offspring sociobiology… set out to explain the hereditary origins of social behaviour. The fourth is the environmental sciences. The connection of the last field to social theory may at first seem tenuous, but is not. The natural environment is the theatre in which the human species evolved and to which its physiology and behaviour are finely adapted. Neither human biology nor the social sciences can make full sense until their world views take account of that unyielding framework.
~ Edward O Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998)