Alex WellersteinVerified account

(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).