#30764: — 07/04  at  08:31 AM
I thought I should mention in passing (I forgot last time) there is a whole study of genetics and reductionism (by that title) by the UTAustin philosopher Sahotra Sarkar. I don't agree with it all, and some of the issues are above my head genetically, it seems to be an interesting book nonetheless.

Also, I think in all of this discussion it is very important to remember (on all the sides) that scientists are generally speaking horrible at understanding what they are doing. Being an expert in a scientific field does not make one an expert in how science works or in understanding its history. On the other hand, neither does training in social studies of science, either. (And, I might add, in the philosophy of.) An integrated picture is hard to come by.

Raven: Thank you for your comments.

#30767: John Emerson — 07/04  at  08:55 AM
For example, his claim about science and legitimacy contradicts what every political scientist will tell you about how modern societies are legitimized.

I haven't read Lewontin and I'm only moderately up on political science. "Every political scientist" strikes me as a stronger statement than is possible about that field. By and large, I don't think that legitimization is one of those things about which there is, or could be, a firm consensus; it's a subtle and embattled topic.

Beyond that, at the level of application many important government practices are legitimized with science, even if the science is terribly mushy (eg. in education,criminology, and social work).

#30800: — 07/04  at  12:54 PM
I think this thread has nearly exhausted itself. You'll excuse me if these points are obvious, but I wanted to make explicit thoughts hinted at in earlier posts.

Science as currently practiced is an expensive socially funded endeavor. There simply can be no argument, especially so now with the very public furor over stem cell research, that research programs must align themselves with the social order. Whether or not individual researchers FULLY align themselves with such forces, they are obligated to comport with it to the degree necessary to secure funding. The "spin" that scientists integrate into their grant proposals can be subliminal or cynically intentional, but there can be little doubt that it is ubiquitous.

This is not to say that science typically follows explicit social agendas. Rather its typical form is a sort of "research capitalism", by which I mean that research which CAN be done, and which can be effectively sold to the public (& to politicians), is that which IS done. The HGP is a sterling example. It is at least debatable whether sequencing the HG was the most pressing scientific problem facing biology in the early 90s. Also debatable was whether this effort was the most likely (proportional to cost) to shed light on the mechanisms of human disease. But undoubtedly, it was doable (given the state of emerging technologies) and it was sellable, given the widespread public credulousness for the "gene as code" metaphor.

Is it cynical to say that this metaphor was enthusiastically embraced and repeated by the scientists leading the HGP, even though they knew better (though one wonders if they DID know better)? Perhaps. But I was working at Celera when their stock price briefly soared to over $300 per share, and PCR technicians were suddenly paper millionaires. (Don't gnash your teeth in envy; most everyone wouldn't be vested for another 4 years.) You simply cannot underestimate the effect this had on obliterating any reservations about the potential scientific usefulness of this work. Yes, science is as prone to irrational exuberance as the stock market, but this is only obvious when science is traded on the stock market.

On a smaller scale but quite similarly, every scientist, simply as a matter of professional survival, is compelled to plug into what's "fundable" at any moment in time. Kuhn made the point about the importance of "exemplars" in establishing new scientific research programs. Exemplars demonstrate a model for research in a new area, one that can be duplicated by others. Without such exemplars, research programs languish, even when they embrace a worldview that is closer to the "truth" (viewed in retrospect) than the dominant programs with which they compete.

I do not fault scientists for their (subconscious?) pragmatism, but it is naive not to acknowledge its effects and its consequences, which I believe has always been Lewontin's point. Perhaps not ironically, natural selection is as relevant to science as it is to biology. Alon would hold that proximity to "truth" is the measure of fitness in science; the situation is of course much more complicated than that in Lewontin's view. To use the adaptive landscape metaphor, all too often science is driven to a locally adaptive state, which is, unfortunately, remote from the (unreachable?) global optimum of "truth".

#30805: Alon Levy — 07/04  at  01:55 PM
I haven't read Lewontin and I'm only moderately up on political science. "Every political scientist" strikes me as a stronger statement than is possible about that field. By and large, I don't think that legitimization is one of those things about which there is, or could be, a firm consensus; it's a subtle and embattled topic.

Basically, Lewontin claims that science is the primary instrument used to legitimize inequality. While "every political scientist" may be an exaggeration, it is not an exaggeration to say that there's a consensus, even if it's not unanimous, among political scientists that the source of legitimacy of modern societies is the consent of the governed, whereas (pseudo)science is only used as a source of legitimacy in communist states.

Furthermore, a quick reading of revisionist US history will illustrate what capitalists really used to justify inequality. For example, Eric Foner's The Story of American Freedom has a chapter on the Gilded Age, which explains how the rich hammered on the topics of freedom and choice to argue that the poor were poor because of laziness and vice.

Alternatively, look at how conservatives and libertarians try to justify slashing welfare in the United States: for instance, Reagan didn't say people on welfare were genetically inferior to people not on welfare; he said people on welfare were lazy. Saying that some people are naturally superior to others is so politically incorrect in the West that it's a shitty legitimizer. Saying that welfare makes people lazy will get most of the poor to vote against you, but in both the USA and Britain conservatives succeeded turning the top two-thirds of society against the bottom third.

#30834: — 07/04  at  05:38 PM
Alon Levy wrote:
<blockquote>But it isn’t ideology; Dawkins would only be guilty of subordinating science to ideology if he used his genetic determinism to justify inequality or ram religion (which he doesn’t—he uses memetics for that).</blockqoute>

I have not seen Dawkins use memetics to attac religion. At least I would not describe it that way. Dawkins would almost certainly agree that scientific ideas, just like religious ones, are memes that spread in the scientific community as a result of their appeal to scientists.
That science or religion can be analysed in sociological terms no more show that they are wrong than analysing a clock in physical terms shows that it does not measure time.

#30846: — 07/04  at  07:45 PM
I'm going to intrude here. Let me preface my comments by noting that: (1) Alas, I have not actually read Lewontin's book. (2) Alas, I am not a scientist, but a philosopher. (3) Alas, I am not actually a philosopher, but a mere graduate student. But what I lack in actual understanding I make up for in shear brazenness. Bear with me.

On the first point of Levy's rejoinder:
(A) Quoth Lewontin, "What Darwin did was take early-nineteenth-century political economy and expand it to include all of natural economy"
(B) Quoth Levy, "Saying that Darwin applied politics to biology..."
(C) Quoth Levy, "Lewontin doesn't even say something like, 'Because he subscribed to Malthus's views, it was easier for Darwin to make sense of the Galápagos fauna.'"

Again, I haven't read the book- but, based on the material you quoted (in A), isn't the revision from C what Lewontin is saying? You quote him as saying that Darwin expanded nineteenth century political economy (being the combined study of politics and economics) to the natural world, only to claim that he "applied politics to biology," which is very different. It would be one thing to say that Darwin applied some political ideology to biology, but quite another to say that he "extended" a model from political/economic social science into the biological sciences. The latter sounds like your suggested revision in C. From the single quote you offered, it sounds as though Lewontin merely wants to claim, as you allow, that a sociopolitical model aided Darwin's understanding of the biological. Note, he may be claiming something more tenuous in context, but the quotation you provide doesn't seem to support your point that Lewontin is anti-science. Furthemore, Lewontin can still claim that ideology played a significant role in Darwin's choice of model/description *and* that the model/description is objective. I'm going to have to yield the point to someone who knows the material, but the first point doesn't seem to yield an anti-scientific Lewontin.

Second, you claim: "there is a difference between a scientific view and an ideology; in particular, scientific reductionism helped political individualism gain traction but not vice versa. Reductionism got accepted in science because of its own merits." A few thoughts, which you can choose to consider or discard as you please. First off, I'm not sure I grant the claim that scientific reductionism owed nothing to political individualism until I get an answer to a very strange question, the likes of which only a philosopher (in the perjorative sense of the word) could ask: You claim that scientific reductionism was accepted because of its own merits. My question is, what were the merits and, more to the point, what about those merits made them, well, self-evidently meritorious? In other words, what made the reductive explanations the "better" explanations, if there were others available that did the same explanatory work? I ask this question because I think about it quite a lot. Just what makes one explanation the best explanation available? If I were going to look for an intrusion of ideology into science this is roughly where I would look. Did scientists happen upon reductive models, as a preferable choice among a number of equal-footed candidates or were they actively seeking to develop them? I've always thought the latter was more faithful to historical fact, and if that were true, it would suggest that there was a pre-theoretical bias toward one way of organizing the explanation of natural phenomena, and that bias *might* be something "ideological." (e.g. we're individualists at heart, and we prefer explanations in which composite parts take precedence over wholes, or something like that... only more subtle!)

Of course, to say that is, I hope, not anti-scientific either, since it is still compatible with the principle that science is capable of arriving at objective fact. The question is whether the facts (the experimental/observational evidence) are the only active players in the business of formulating scientific theories. I find it hard to believe that they are. In fact, it seems inevitable and relatively uncontroversial that world-views influence what questions are asked in science, what sort of scientific answers are considered optimal, how scientific data is organized and presented, and like. And it seems to me that that's really all you need to build a defense of the claim that science has an ideological dimension, and in that aspect serves to reflect/reinforce concurrent viewpoints.

Now, I'm not a Marxist, and if I can extrapolate from this discussion, Lewontin may advance a number of claims I wouldn't agree with, but I think the claim that ideology has a role in science is defensible and also compatible with a belief in scientific objectivity, however contrary those two claims may sound. I can clarify if need be.

Oh, and cognitive science non-ideological?! Gonna have to beg to differ there. But I've already said way too much for someone who doesn't know what he's talking about...

#30860: — 07/04  at  10:04 PM
Woops... I seem to have missed about 2-3 pages of comments in formulating my post. Ignore the previous post, which retreads ground others had already addressed, and far better than I could.

#30861: coturnix — 07/04  at  10:10 PM
NO, your post should not be ignored as it is really good.

#30876: Alon Levy — 07/05  at  02:45 AM
You claim that scientific reductionism was accepted because of its own merits. My question is, what were the merits and, more to the point, what about those merits made them, well, self-evidently meritorious? In other words, what made the reductive explanations the "better" explanations, if there were others available that did the same explanatory work?

Basically, scientific reductionism began with Newtonian theory, which purported at the time to reduce everything in the world to three laws of motion plus the law of universal gravitation. Newtonian theory itself had several flaws, for instance its failure to explain gravity, but it was extremely simple, applied equally to terrestrial and celestial mechanics, made very accurate predictions. Newton postdated Francis Bacon's kickstarting of a reaction against holism, but still, the main reasons Newtonian mechanics got accepted were its simplicity and its predictive power.

That was in essence the beginning of scientific reductionism. It was in light of that theory and its refinements that Laplace proposed his demon, which could calculate the entire universe by knowing the position and velocity of every particle in it. And it's in reference to that form of reductionism that I claim that greedy reductionism is 200 years dead.

The important thing is that political individualism only emerged after Newtonian theory had been accepted, which contradicts Lewontin's statement that scientific reductionism is driven by a liberal (i.e. individualist) ideology.

Oh, and cognitive science non-ideological?! Gonna have to beg to differ there. But I've already said way too much for someone who doesn't know what he's talking about...

I'm intrigued... can you explain to me how cognitive science is ideological?

#30882: Arun — 07/05  at  06:45 AM
I'll be brief because I certainly don't know what I'm talking about - I tried to read the Turkheimer paper for which Alon provided the URL, and as far as I understand it, it does not meet my naive expectations for a innate capacity model.

Briefly, what I'd expect is that for the high Socio-Economic Status cohort, I'd expect virtually all environmental channels to increase IQ are saturated - parents who read to the kids, good teachers at school, less exposure to heavy metal pollution, nutrition, whatever. Thus the only source of variation in IQ is primarily genetic, and IQ is highly heritable. For low SES cohort, the genetic diversity is no less, but the variation due to environment is increased. Thus, for the low SES cohort, IQ is less heritable because the variation due to environment has increased, not because of any change in genetic variation.

What the model in Turkheimer's paper has (as far as I understand) is that while heritability behaves as expected (figure 3), the variances do not (figure 2).

#30935: Alon Levy — 07/05  at  04:02 PM
On second reading, Arun, I see what you mean... But what it does imply is that beyond a certain mostly genetically determined point it's impossible to increase IQ by the usual social methods. In the long run technological advances can improve IQ (the Flynn effect is independent of the poverty rate), so the innate capacity metaphor need not strictly hold. But in the short run it does, because the traditional environmental variables people look for get saturated at a certain point, as you say.

Now, Johan, the reason I suspect Dawkins uses memetics to bash religion is that as far as I know, he analyzes how religious memes spread but stops short of similarly analyzing atheism.

#30941: — 07/05  at  05:37 PM
Terminological issues all around, methinks.

The first point:
"Basically, scientific reductionism began with Newtonian theory, which purported at the time to reduce everything in the world to three laws of motion plus the law of universal gravitation."

Someone made a point that the use of the word "reductionism" is used in multiple senses, and that scientists and philosophers in particular may diverge here, so, there's a godo chance we'll talk past each other on this point, but... I believe I'm right in thinking that the *ontological* reductionism Lewontin is concerned with (the view that the parts are more significant than their composite wholes for the sake of scientific explanation) is much older than Newton, going back as least as far as the Ancient Greeks. The same cannot be said for political individualism, because the Greeks and Romans were generally not individualistic in their political thought- but the Christians were when they arrived. The point being that the two strands, ontological reductionism and ethical/political individualism, can be shown to predate Newton, albeit perhaps not in a highly developed form, and are at some point they became part and parcel of how we westerners tend to think about the world. This in itself is neither surprising nor disturbing. So we move along.

The methodological imperative of reductionism that you point to, to explain all the phenomena in the world by means of as few theoretical constructs as possible, is also interesting, but I don't believe its what Lewontin is after. The reductionism he wants to talk about seems to be the attempt to reduce the explanation of a complex, higher-order phenomena to the relationships among lower-order phenomena. Or, perhaps better stated (by Lewontin himself!), reductionists "try to explain the properties of complex wholes--molecules, say, or societies-- in terms of the units of which those molecules or societies are composed." The point for Lewontin is that our imperative to seek this kind of explanation of phenomena is at worst influenced by individualistic thought in non-scientific realms, and *at least* reinforces said thought elsewhere. And I'm afraid I believe the worst case scenario probably obtains, although I don't think that prevents science from being objective- it merely sets up a structure that guides and shapes the description of objective facts.

Now, critically, as I may have said before, I'm not a Marxist, and I would certainly resist saying that Science (taken as a whole) is uniformly reductionistic in this ontological sense. In fact, someone noted earlier that virtually no-one is reductionist in this sense: most of us recognize there are emergent properties and entities that have some kind of ontological status and play an important role in explanation. I say virtually and most because I do think there are hardcore reductionists out there. But they're wrong, and thankfully in the minority. If most scientists *were* hardcore ontological reductionists, they would have a hard time explaining, e.g. the ability of fiber optic cables to transmit information (you need the higher-level morphology of the cables), the failure of most square pegs to fit in most round holes (again, need macroscopic morphology), or the function a carburetor (need info about the various other parts of a car engine and their functions)- all stock examples. But the fact that most of us recognize that reductionism in this sense is limited doesn't negate the suggestion that it still often serves as a regulative ideal for scientific theories, and that this may reflect and reinforce our culture's salient individualism.

To put it over-simply, we all want to get to 'the bottom of things,' but it turns out that's not *always* where the action is... (how's that for hackneyed?)

Now, the second bit, in brief: "I'm intrigued... can you explain to me how cognitive science is ideological?"

Sort of. I will caution that I'm not an expert here either, and that I think what is going on is in fact that we have two different notions of "ideological." When I attempt to say that some science or another is in part ideological, I mean it is guided and informed by a pre-experimental/pre-theoretical bias toward a particular explanation or style of explanation. This makes it fairly trivial that all science is in part ideological because, well, how could it not be? It would be impossible to make sense of scientific data if one was utterly lacking in a conception of how to organize that data. And this is naturally different from the claim that a science is directly informed or acting in the service of an ideology, although that has happened, as you point out, at specific moments in history. Still, the explanatory biases that science brings to the table can have broader ramifications, inasmuch as the enter the public purview and influence the way people conceive of their world.
That said, what's the deal with cognitive science? Well, this: like any science, I have supposed, cognitive science is guided by a particular pre-conception of its subject matter. Most cognitive science operates on an assumption that there is representational mental content, and that human thinking essentially involves the manipulation and representation of said content, which may ultimately be implemented by physical structures in the brain. The computational-representational model is not, I think, anything that has been confirmed against all of its competitors in any scientific fashion (and it might be hard, at this point, to conceive a test of its relative strengths against other models), but it is certainly the preferred mode of explanation of cognitive science in spite of having a few detractors in the philosophical world- Burt Dreyfus and John Searle being the two names that spring immediately to mind- who have variously claimed that mental representations/computations are neither necessary nor sufficient to capture the essence of human thought. Dreyfus and Searle, of course, have scores of detractors (and I may be among them when I finally form an opinion), but what strikes me about this circumstance is that the debate about which model is going to do the best explanatory job has occupied a place in philosophical discussions, and *not* strictly scientific ones (which is not to say that cognitive scientists haven't taken part, because they surely have). And for that reason, I think of cognitive science, like any other respectable science, as being informed by an ideology, even (in this case) a relatively controversial one.
It's admittedly not a political ideology per se, but that doesn't prevent it from lending support to particular political viewpoints insofar as it reflects a more general outlook on how the world is structured. To give an example of this, I don't think cognitive science is particularly good news those whose political beliefs are founded on an assumption of human free will- and this could be a lot of people- whereas I think Dreyfus' views require some intelligible notion of free will in order to make any sense, prima facie. So, I think there are relationships between the guiding ideals of science and beliefs people hold in other areas- and I'm open to the possibility that reciprocal relationships may hold among these. That is, if I've surmised Lewontin's direction accurately, he may be partly right.


Note, I discovered I have in fact encountered Lewontin's views, in a reader entitled, _The Study of Human Nature_ edited by Leslie Stevenson. A pretty scattered volume that was required reading for an undergraduate course I took (which was also quite scattered). The essay there is a collaborative piece by Steven Rose, Lewontin, and Leon J. Kamin entitled "Not in our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature." The quotation above is from this source.

#32316: — 07/18  at  05:31 AM
This debate seem to have died out but I will make some comments anyway. One should distinguish between a number of claims. I will give three claimzs that are important not to confuse. I will also say what I think of the claims.

1. Science is a social process. True. I think this is obvious. Science is done in the scientific community and pretty.

2. Science is biased. True. Science is biased towards accepting simple theories before complex ones for one thing. Science is probaly also biased towards accepting sexist theories before non-sexist ones. That has definitly been the case historically.
Bias of course does not mean that thet results of science are predetermined. If the evidence is clearly enough against a theory it will be rejected even if it appeals to some of the many different biases of science. Note also that I have not been talking about discrimination of female scientists or about whether any currently accepted scientific theory is wrong and should be replaced by a non-sexist one.
My thoughts on this matter have been heavily influenced by what I have read about machine learning.

3 Science legitimizes the current political structures. Wrong. I agree with Alons criticism on this score.

4. Science always agrees with the dominant ideology. Wrong. Science often diasgrees with the conventional wisdom. And explanations linking atomism with liberalism are a bit strained I must say.

Trackback: Super-Adequate Structural Homologies, or The Ornithorynchus Shuffle Tracked on: Acephalous (66.151.149.25) at 2005 07 22 01:15:17
Frank Sulloway titles his recent review of James Secord's Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation with brazen inaccuracy: He Almost Scooped Darwin. In his response to my contribution to