The Bioscience Resource Project, Ithaca, NY
A rare recent ray of light from Science magazine, from Sheila Jasanoff and others:
“The pandemic has seen much hand-wringing about Americans’ unwillingness to “accept science” and follow public health directives…….It is tempting to treat matters of health, safety, and environmental policy as if they are primarily about facts, because this transforms intractable social disputes into seemingly answerable technical questions. But such moves are inimical to democracy. When the key issue is who decides, acting as if disagreements are mainly about evidence is bad politics and bad social science. It turns expertise into an object of distrust and exacerbates American culture’s tendency to alienate people from the perceived elitism of science (2). This creates fertile ground for alternative facts and conspiracy theories that reframe problems and relocate the focus of blame.
Science advice thus occupies a precarious position on the boundary between asserting facts and making policy. It faces the structural problem of being authoritative without becoming authoritarian. It divides power between scientists, who are mainly accountable to their peers, and authorized political representatives, who are accountable to the citizens they serve. This allocation of authority is fundamentally political, even constitutional. We should not be surprised if expert advisers find their claims being questioned, given their consequential role in contemporary governance.”
Worth reading in full and digesting at length IMO. Its at:
Jonathan
Jonathan Latham, PhD
Executive Director
The Bioscience Resource Project,
Ithaca, NY 14850 USA
Websites:
www.independentsciencenews.org
www.poisonpapers.org
Notice: Please forgive any delays and slow news. I am writing a book about genetics and genetic determinism.
It is provisionally titled: The Myth of The Master Molecule: DNA and the Social Order
The contention of the book is that the key organising principle of Western thought is the seemingly innocuous and seemingly simple idea that our personal qualities are biologically inherited. That is, our character derives from our ancestors rather than being an always-adapting product of our own experiences, decisions, and education. The book makes the case, first, that genetic determinism is a scientific fallacy. Organisms are self-organised systems and therefore are not genetically determined. Second, the explanation for the myth, which predates Mesopotamian cities of 6,000 years ago, is its utility. Genetic determinism rationalises political systems based on genetic privilege. The result of the emergence of genetic determinism was the dismantling of ancient cultures based on inclusiveness and egalitarianiism and their transformation into rigid structures of authoritarian domination based on separation and division: into families, classes, races, nations, sexes (i.e. patriarchy), and species. The final proposition of the book is that propagating the myth was the chief aim of Zoroastrianism and the subsequent Abrahamic religions. Since the 1850s, this role has been appropriated by science. By recognizing how the founding myth of Western civilization is being re-told in the language of science we can start to dismantle and replace it with a more humane and scientific understanding of the world.
Jonathan Latham, PhD
Executive Director
The Bioscience Resource Project,
Ithaca, NY 14850 USA
Websites:
www.independentsciencenews.org
www.poisonpapers.org
Tel: 1-607-319-0279
Skype: jonathanlatham2
Twitter and Facebook: @Biosrp
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