Abstract
In 1975 Gunther S. Stent, then professor of molecular biology at the University of California at Berkeley, published in Science an article in which he argued that (a) the influence of positivism which informed the first centuries of the natural scientific enterprise is waning; that (b) structuralism (of which conceptualism is a type) has become a plausible alternative to positivism; and that (c) the theory of evolution can resolve the dilemma inherent in structuralism's assertion of innate ideas. He then concluded that because the brain has evolved as a survival organ to process information in a particular way, its innate structures are not particularly adept at scientific inquiry insofar as that inquiry attempts to grasp reality on scales much beyond the brain's immediate experience, and that certain areas will be forever closed to the scientific method.