Alex WellersteinVerified account

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.)