This paper is programmatic in its intent. I have avoided extensive literature-citations and, in some areas, resorted to rather tendentious assertion rather than thorough argumentation. My purpose is to `place on the table' a project for re-conceptualising the relationship between sociology (together with related social science disciplines) and the biological sciences. Of course, this relationship has a lot of history behind it, some of it not at all pleasant. Necessarily, therefore, I will have to preface my positive proposals with a brief account of that history, and my own interpretation of its significance. Before I try even to do that, however, I will say something about our present situation in the social sciences, and what seem to me the pressures within it towards a recasting of the established division of labour between biology and the social sciences.