This is a historical paper I wrote today as part of a college course, History 411: History of Science Activism with Professor Sigrid Schmalzer.
Word Count: 1802
I argue that merit in scientific research happens against a backdrop of context; truth holds its value (merit) not only through traditional methods to approach objectivity like replicable procedures and agreements, but also through recognizing truth’s relationships with forces which socially constructed it.
Pamela Paul, an Opinion Columnist of The New York Times, published “A Paper That Says Science Should Be Impartial Was Rejected by Major Journals. You Can’t Make This Up” on May 4, 2023. Paul, also a previous editor of The New York Times Book Review for nine years and author of eight books about book, family, and lifestyle, (outside the academia) argued in this opinion essay that scientific research should be evaluated by its objective merits, rather than by the scientists’ political beliefs. For this essay, Paul reviewed papers of several journals, analyzed and racial and gender demographics of current academia, and conducted interviews with scientists. Founded in 1851, The New York Times has been working with journalists reporting history from every corner of the world to present truths and inspire changes. Its mission is to “seek the truth and help people understand the world has remained constant.”
The paper Paul mainly reviewed was “In Defense of Merit in Science,” (Abbot et al.) published in The Journal of Controversial Ideas (founded in 2021) on April 28, 2023 by a team of 29 authors, made up of mostly scientists. This journal intends to “promote free inquiry on controversial topics” from a neutral stance of “political, philosophical, religious and social views” and calls for papers “addressing issues that have implications for society at large.”
In the paper, the authors presented how “research is increasingly informed by a politicized agenda, one that often characterizes science as fundamentally racist, and in need of ‘decolonizing.’” They argued that “science should instead be independent, evidence-based and focused on advancing knowledge” and that “ideological concerns are threatening independence and rigor in STEM. Though the goal of expanding opportunity for more diverse researchers in the sciences is laudable, it should not be pursued at the expense of foundational scientific concepts like objective truth, merit and evidence, which they claim are being jeopardized by efforts to account for differing perspectives.”
These efforts include expanding positionality statements from social sciences to hard sciences and medicine, citation justice that aim to reference research produced by balanced demographics when mostly white male now publish research and wrote the foundational theories, and writing personal statements of diversity, equity and inclusion that do not align with personal beliefs when applying for jobs and funding.
While these efforts created problems like loss of faith in science, denying the work of scientists, and the risk of being fired if not committing to the statements of DEI, these problems appeared because the efforts were inadequate in addressing the political nature of science and sometimes executed to extremes. They did not appear as a result of merely rejecting the possibility of impartial science.
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (a prominent mainstream journal) argued against Abbot et al. (2023) that “the problem is that this concept of merit, as the authors surely know, has been widely and legitimately attacked as hollow as currently implemented.” In other words, merit is meaningless; what people value in science is hard to portray; current executions of evaluating valuable research are useless.
This generates the question of what merit means in science. Abbot et al. (2023) argued that “however imperfect, meritocracy is still the most effective way to ensure high quality science and greater equity….The focus should be on improving meritocratic systems rather than dismantling them.”
One of the authors, Anna Krylov, a chemistry professor at the University of Southern California, told Paul in a phone interview that those who rejected that science is impartial “denied that objective truth exists.” Krylov continued that this denial is problematic, but did not elaborate on the exact problems. Krylov fights for the equity of women in science and “prefers to be judged on the basis of her achievements, not on her sex. ‘The merit of scientific theories and findings do not depend on the identity of the scientist.’” Krylov expressed her belief in the meritocracy of science without defining merit or exploring what makes an achievement; so did Marisol Quintanilla, an assistant professor of nematology at Michigan State University. She argued that to advance science, people need to “hire the best qualified candidates.”
While the authors mentioned above believed in impartial science and related the merit of science to the vague concepts of achievements and qualifications, Ruth Hubbard, previous activist and professor of biology at Harvard University, challenged “contemporary biological thinking about sex differences and sex roles” (1) as she reviewed Darwinism, and suggested how science and reality are socially constructed, rather than impartially observed. This article, “Have Only Men Evolved?” (1979), was published in Women Look at Biology Looking at Women.
Hubbard argued that “there is no such thing as objective, value-free science. An era’s science is part of its politics, economics, and sociology: it is generated by them and in turn helps to generate them.” (10) She continued that “the mythology of science holds that scientific theories lead to the truth because they operate by consensus: they can be tested by different scientists, making their own hypotheses and designing independent experiments to test them….Scientists do not think and work independently. Their ‘own’ hypotheses ordinarily are formulated within a context of theory, so that their interpretations by and large are subsets within the prevailing orthodoxy. Agreement therefore is built into the process and need tell us little or nothing about ‘truth’ or ‘reality.’” (10) On reality, Hubbard argued that “what we notice and how we describe it depends to a great extent on our histories, roles, and expectations as individuals and as members of our society….our science is increaly affected by the ways in which our personal and social experience determine what we are able or willing to perceive as real about ourselves and the organisms around us.” (10)
Hubbard argued that science goes much further from discovering the truth; it actively shapes it. “What is often ignored is that science does more than merely define reality; by setting up first the definitions – for example, three-dimensional (Euclidian) space – and then specific relationships within them – for example, parallel lines never meet – it automatically renders suspect the sense experiences that contradict the definitions.” (9) Together with “lumping certain perceptions together and sorting or highlighting others,” science translates “sense perceptions into scientific reality.” (10)
In her comics “Science Under the Scope: Putting Science in Perspective,” Sophie Wang, like Ruth Hubbard, challenged the objectivity of science and revealed the political nature of science in terms of who the scientists are, where science happens, who science benefits, who science harms, and what knowledge people are using. Wang argued that objectivity in science is “a background, keeping bias and emotion from interrupting and changing the conversation between the scientist and the truth.” Some of the ways to achieve objectivity include random sampling, double-blind trials, and repeated trials. Wang describes herself as “a big nerd and small zine gremlin who challenges our taken-for-granted assumptions about western science through comics and zines.” This comic was published for activist collective Free Radicals. In its vision statement, Free Radicals “envision an open and responsible science that works toward progressive social change.”
Further, Wang explained the implications of claiming objectivity of science, “the biggest danger of objectivity is that it allows us to pretend that science is entirely neutral, that we can separate ourselves from our experiences, perspectives, society, and humanity (we can’t, this will never happen)….We’re liable to draw conclusions that we shouldn’t be drawing, or ignoring parts of our science that we shouldn’t be ignoring. We need to recognize that we always exist in context.”
The new generation of Science for the People, which the old generation was active during the 1970s US, also wrote on the implications of claiming impartial science, in a critique of the March for Science in the essay “Which Way for Science?” published four days before the March.
SftP argued that “Science is inherently political. What is studied, to what end, by whom and under what conditions, are all political questions integral to the very nature of science. By denying this fact, we risk erasing the struggle of scientists of color, women, disabled scientists, and scientists from the LGBTQ community who have had to fight for education, credibility, funding, and job opportunities within science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Concordantly, we risk ignoring and diminishing the struggles of scientists who have resisted the use of science for making war, exploitation of workers, the enabling of environmentally destructive resource extraction, and the support of industries that harm people and the planet.” SftP continued that “as the Flint, Michigan, water crisis and the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) fight have shown us, now is not the time for scientists to sit on the sidelines, claim neutrality or objectivity, and remain silent. Silence amounts to acceptance of the status quo, which could mean life or death for people and the planet.”
Science for the People argued that valuable science itself includes equity and fights for equity and social justice. This argument was not directly made, but is suggested by questions like “How can we enhance science access to local disenfranchised communities (e.g., indigenous, low-income, Black, Latinx) and how can we work with and for those communities? How can science serve humanity and the planet? Is it possible for scientists who desire meaningful social change in our society to put their talents to work for a movement capable of achieving that change, or must “politics” remain split off from their work? Can we ensure the use of evidence-based, ethical decision-making in public policy?”
Dr. Marc Edward’s argued that the merit of science lies in the context of the public. Valuable science is a public good, and scientists should strive for higher goals than fame and funding. “Dr. Marc Edward’s, in an interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education about his and Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha’s investigation that revealed the deliberate inaction of the city and state government to address the lead contamination of Flint’s water supply, shared:
I am very concerned about the culture of academia in this country and the perverse incentives that are given to young faculty. The pressures to get funding are just extraordinary. We’re all on this hedonistic treadmill—pursuing funding, pursuing fame, pursuing h-index—and the idea of science as a public good is being lost. [emphasis added]”
Pursuing the value of science and recognizing the social construction of truth do not contradict each other. Rather, they are in an active interplay and should be considered in terms of each other. Problems arise when rejecting this interplay and using inadequate approaches to address it.
Bibliography
Pamela Paul, “A Paper That Says Science Should Be Impartial Was Rejected by Major Journals. You Can’t Make This Up.” The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/04/opinion/science-evidence-merits.html
McMahan, Jeff, Francesca Minerva, and Peter Singer. “Journal of Controversial Ideas.” Accessed May 20, 2023. https://journalofcontroversialideas.org/page/135.
“Scientists Defend Merit in Science.” Accessed May 20, 2023. https://indefenseofmerit.org/
Science for the People editorial team, “Which Way for Science?”, https://scienceforthepeople.org/2017/04/18/which-way-for-science/
Brian Martin, “The Critique of Science Becomes Academic,” Science, Technology, & Human Values 18.2 (1993): 247-259.
Sophie Wang, “Science Under the Scope,” https://freerads.org/science-scope-full/
Ruth Hubbard, “Have Only Men Evolved?” 1979.