As the early decades of the 20th century progressed, biology lost its explanatory role within the social sciences. The narrative told today is that this was purely a matter of better science discrediting pseudoscientific theories that had been motivated by racism. But Degler found that there was actually little new scientific work involved in the shift to the new paradigm: “What the available evidence does seem to show is that ideology or a philosophical belief that the world could be a freer or more just place played a large part in the shift from biology to culture. Science, or at least certain scientific principles or innovative scholarship also played a role in the transformation, but only a limited one. The main impetus came from the wish to establish a social order in which innate and immutable forces of biology played no role in accounting for the behaviour of social groups.” (Degler 1991: viii)