Of course, you can’t have science without flesh-and-blood scientists. Yet, in broad terms, it can still be said that science is an abstraction which has been derived from the work of many individual scientists over hundreds of years.
Science is science.
And scientists are scientists.
So it’s wise not to confuse what an individual scientist states — or believes — with science itself.
The evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis once said that Richard Dawkins is “arrogant” and “solipsistic”. Richard Dawkins, in turn, said that Margulis is an “extremely obstinate” person who “doesn’t listen to argument”. These two examples — among many others — help show us that scientists are emotional creatures. They also often have fragile and/or large egos — just like you, me and all the other readers of this piece.
Scientists also hold strong political and moral views. Arguably, those views sometimes impinge on their science. And that’s precisely why the distinction between science and scientists should be made…
All this basically means that Stephen Hawking wasn’t theoretical physics. Michael Mann and James Hansen aren’t climatology. And Richard Lindzen and Freeman Dyson aren’t climatology either. Richard Dawkins isn’t evolutionary biology or Darwinism. And Stephen Jay Gould isn’t evolutionary biology either. Anthony Fauci isn’t immunology or medical science…
And Brian Cox, Nigel DeGrasse Tyson and Michio Kaku aren’t the whole of science.
To state the obvious: scientists are human beings. So, like all human beings, they’re emotional creatures who also have strong political and moral views. Not only that: those views sometimes impinge on their science…
And — again — that’s precisely why the distinction between science and scientists should be made.
It’s also worth making a distinction here between the following:
(1) Those scientists who use science (or specific scientific theories) to advance their prior political goals, values and ideologies.
(2) Those scientists who believe that science itself is always political (i.e., regardless of the specific goals, values and ideologies of particular scientists).
Of course, there can be much overlap between (1) and (2).
Some commentators believe that science itself is (always) political. In that, they’re following the footsteps of Soviet agronomist and biologist Trofim Lysenko (1898–1976), who divided science into “bourgeois science” and “proletarian science”. (Lysenko had a problem with the Darwinian notion of competition too.) And other commentators — even some scientists — speak of “gendered science” and “white male science”. [See note.]
However, most scientists wouldn’t say that science itself is political. They may, instead, say that science can be politicised. However, it can be argued that some (perhaps even many) scientists do use their scientific theories to advance their prior political goals and values…
Of course, highly-politicised scientists (or those activist scientists who use science for political ends) may argue that these distinctions are naive or problematic…
But they would do…
Wouldn’t they?
And all that, again, is a good reason to distinguish science itself from the words and theories of individual scientists.
Note:
Take this passage from an article published by the Times in the 1930s, which discussed the views of Nazi scientists and mathematicians:
“[L]ogic alone was no sufficient basis for them, and that the German intuition which had produced the concepts of infinity was superior to the logical equipment which the French and Italians had brought to bear on the subject.”
