Alex WellersteinVerified account

She also has science degrees, but that is less relevant than people seem to think (a degree in STEM does not by itself tell one how science works historically or across disciplines). So attacks against her expertise are at best mislaid, at worst seem heavily tinged with sexism.

That aside: When Audra says that science has always been political, she is not saying that science is always "tainted" by politics, or that it is always *partisan*. She is saying that claims to nature have always been joined with claims to power of some sort.

"Politics" as understood in academia is not just the "high-level," party politics of the sort that is paralyzing world discourse at the moment. Politics is about power, in the end, and that manifests on many different scales (as anyone who has worked in an office will know).

So even the most seemingly apolitical science comes has aspects of politics to it. Let's take an easy and well-documented example: "some diseases are caused by microbes."

Let's ignore, for the moment, all of the social and political work that was needed to make that fact appear true for the first time (it is hardly self-evident; for most of human history, it was unknown), and just take it as a given fact.

What are the implications of this fact? Some are explicitly in the realm of what people think of as politics: there are sanitary standards needed for hospitals, food production, etc., that flow from this kind of fact. There will be costs associated with that, and thus politics.

Sometimes the politics is specific to a historical moment. E.g., pre-germ theory cholera was understood as a disease that came from the bad *morals* of the poor. Germ theory refutes that, which many moralists & politicians didn't like, because it shifted blame to infrastructure.

Sometimes the politics is related to issues of expertise. One of Pasteur's arguments at the time was that if you want to know why your livestock are getting sick, don't go to a veterinarian, go to a microbiologist. That's a form of politics, albeit a subtle one.

(Some references for discussions so far, if people want to follow up: Latour, Pasteurization of France; Rosenberg, The Cholera Years.)

And most subtle is the politics inherent in any statement of fact, of "nature." These are statements about mastery, about "the way the world is." It is not at all infrequent that such statements butt heads with other interests in the world, or other sources of expertise.

This is the source of all of those hoary historical analogies to Galileo and Darwin and whomever — scientist says something true, people who have been displaced by it as a source of expertise (religion, state, etc.) react badly.

It is worth noting, as an aside, that the scientists in many of these cases were VERY AWARE that this is what they were doing. Galileo *deliberately* picked his fight with the Church. Darwin sat on his work for decades because he *didn't* want to pick a fight.

Stating that doesn't make them wrong about nature (or foolish about politics) — it's just an acknowledgment that these dead scientists were WELL AWARE of what Audra's bunny was saying: claims to nature are always political on some level, sometimes QUITE political.

(If this doesn't jibe with your understanding of Galileo or Darwin, the odds are you have a bad understanding of the actual history. Science textbooks and popularizers have tended to misrepresent these cases — for a variety of reasons. The real history of science is messy.)

(On Darwin, see Browne, The Power of Place. On Galileo, there are many good works — Feldhay, Galileo and the Church, is a pretty interesting place to start.)

Subtle politics aside, let's return to the initial question of how the science gets done. Science is a human activity. (What else could it be?) It is a set of practices, norms, institutions, methods, ideals, and so on, that evolved over thousands of years.

(Aside: Most of what we consider to be the hallmarks of science today did not solidify as commonplace until the mid-19th century, when Western science "professionalized" and was exported globally as a product of and response to colonialism/imperialism.)

(This is not a slander against science, just the way it has evolved over time. Yet another political wrinkle. Today Western science has become sufficiently "global" to just call "science," I think. Separately, it is worth saying that nobody here is "attacking" science.)

The practices of science (which are not codified into a single "method" that is used for all fields/places/times) are necessarily embedded in a very human world. That means, always, a very political world, because humans always exist in worlds with power issues.

This means that funding sources, sites of research, and even the context of the questions being asked are in some way impacted by the external world. Sometimes it is very subtle, often it is not.

Anyone who has actually been a practicing scientist will agree that sources of funding, and the institutions in which work is done, affect the direction — to some degree — of the work being done.

Sometimes it is a very strong influence, sometimes it is just something the scientist has to work with in order to do what they really want to do. It is not just a case of "guided" research. Remember: politics is subtle, and scientists are human agents (and thus crafty).