Prosthetic technology for people with missing limbs has made great progress in recent decades. However, acceptance rates and user satisfaction are not only dependent on technical aspects, but also to a great extent on social and psychological factors. We propose that these factors should receive greater attention in order to improve prosthetic care and give recommendations how to incorporate the findings from social science in research and development (R&D) and in care practice. Limited access due to high costs of new prosthetic technology combined with rising costs in health care systems in general is a further issue we address. Our legal and ethical analysis of the reimbursement process in Germany shows that this issue requires further empirical investigation, a stakeholder dialogue and maybe even policy changes. Social science knowledge and participatory methods are of high relevance to answer questions about the benefit of prosthetics for users, based on individual needs and preferences, which should be at the core of debates on ethical resource allocation.

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Since the 19th century, numerous approaches have been developed to determine the relationship between Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and humans as cultural beings. All reductionist approaches, from Social Darwinism and its normative claims to Sociobiology and Memetics, have been subjected to considerable criticism, such as that of being subject to a naturalistic fallacy or assuming a simplifying and empirically untenable genetic or otherwise biological determinism. In more recent approaches, such as the Cultural Evolution Theory (CET), this criticism has been considered to the extent that culture is recognized as a distinct sphere with its own principles. Nevertheless, CET is also still intended to be a naturalistic approach, aspiring to bridge the gap between the natural sciences and the social sciences. In this paper I will (I) analyse what kind of naturalism underlies the CET approaches, (II) consider how this naturalistic claim relates to the thesis of unification and (III) argue that CET is not a bridge to the social sciences, but at least in some respects a social science itself. The quest for a bridge between the natural sciences and the social sciences is reasonable for the purpose of intensive cooperation, but not in the sense of an ontological or methodological naturalization.