Alex WellersteinVerified account

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.