How can we combat the spread of misinformation?

This is a serious question. We (Sandwalk readers) know that there's a lot of science misinformation being spread in the popular science literature.¹ So far, scientists have been spectacularly unsuccessful in stopping it.

The misinformation covers all aspects of science but my particular bugaboos are evolution, genomes, and junk DNA.

I'm going to quote the first few paragraphs from an article on the Knowable Magazine website. It seems to be associated with Annual Reviews and it certainly looks like it should be a credible source of science information.

The article is The silent majority: RNAs that don’t make proteins. The author is Christina Szalinski and here's how she describes herself on her website.

I know science.

I became a science writer in 2013 after finishing my PhD in cell biology at the University of Pittsburgh. So when it comes to writing, I can shake out the molecular tangles, unravel the cellular threads, and wade through the formidable details of scientific studies.

Is it wrong to specifically identify science writers who are spreading misinformation? Is it cruel or mean to imply that they don't understand their subject?

Do other science writers and their organizations have any obligation to police their own discipline to ensure scientific accuracy?

Does anybody have any good ideas on how to clean up this mess?

Here's an excerpt from the article. I don't think I need to explain what's wrong.

When scientists first cracked the genetic code, they expected a simple story: DNA makes RNA, and that RNA, known as messenger RNA, makes proteins. Proteins would do all the important work — building tissues, fighting infections, digesting food.

But when the DNA of our genome was finally sequenced, researchers encountered a head-scratcher: The 20,000-plus genes that carry instructions for making our proteins account for less than 2 percent of our DNA. What was the rest of it good for?

For years, the remaining 98 percent was dismissed as “junk DNA” — evolutionary debris, filler. But as sequencing technology improved, a startling picture emerged. Our cells were busy making RNA copies of all those expanses, not just making messenger RNA — or mRNA — from the protein-coding genes. They were churning out vast quantities of RNA molecules with no known purpose.

The question became: Why would cells waste so much energy on copying that junk?

Today, however, the importance of this non-coding RNA — the catchall term for RNA molecules that don’t carry instructions for proteins — is undeniable. Non-coding RNAs turn out to regulate everything from embryonic development to immune responses to brain function. They help determine which genes get turned on and off, and when. They can promote cancer or suppress it.

I contacted the author last week to warn her that I was about to publish this post. I asked if she wished to comment or to provide the source of her information on the history of the field. I did not get a reply.

The problem with this kind of description is that it misrepresents the way science is done. Most scientific models are due to slow and steady, incremental advances building on previous studies. That kind of science is (usually) self-correcting—when new information becomes available, the old models are revised.

The picture that is being presented to the general public is that old scientists were pretty stupid because they thought there was only one kind of gene (protein coding) and that everything else in the genome (98%) had to be junk. According to that false history, the old fuddy-duddies were shown to be totally wrong when the human genome was sequenced and thousands of non-coding genes were discovered for the first time. That disproves junk DNA according to the false history.

Is there a way of writing the true history in a way that's accessible to the general public? I don't know but I thought I would give it a try in order to try and show modern science writers how it coould be done.

It's not easy. Read my attempt below and let me know if it works.

Scientists were actively working out the functions of DNA back in the 1950s and 1960s. By the mid-1960s they had discovered two kinds of genes. The majority encoded proteins but there were also non-coding genes that specified important RNAs such as ribosomal RNA (rRNA) and transfer RNA (tRNA) that were used in protein synthesis.

Scientists also established that DNA contained regulatory elements that controlled the expression of those two types of genes. Other functional DNA elements were also identified at this time.

Most of this work was done in bacteria and their viruses where genes took up a very large percentage of the DNA in their chromosomes. However, it soon became apparent that this was not the case in humans where the coding regions of the protein-coding genes seemed to account for only 2% of the genome. (The genome is the total amount of DNA in all chromosomes.) Other functional elements, such as non-coding genes and regulatory sequences only accounted for a bit more of the genome.

This gave rise to a model developed by the leading experts of the time, including several Nobel Laureates. They proposed that only 10% of the human genome is functional and 90% is junk DNA. Based on a lot of experimental data, they estimated that there were about 30,000 genes in the human genome.

Additional non-coding genes specifying regulatory RNAs were identified at this time (early 1970s) but the biggest advance in this area ocurred in the 1980s with the discovery of a host of genes specifying various new RNAs. Some of these new non-coding genes specified RNAs that acted like protein enzymes to catalyze biochemical reactions. Others were involved in regulating gene expression and still others were structural components of large cellular complexes.

These results, and others from the 1990s, raised the number of non-coding genes in humans to as many as several thousand but they still only accounted for a fraction of the total number of protein-coding genes.

The first draft of the human genome was published 25 years ago and it confirmed the model developed more than 50 years ago. There were about 30,000 genes, just as the experts had predicted, and most of the human genome was junk.

Subsequent work on identifying features of the human genome have, by and large, confirmed this model but there are scientists who are skeptical.

Most of the human genome is transcribed into RNAs—a fact that was known 50 years ago—but many of the leading experts concluded that most of those RNAs were probably junk RNA of various sorts. The idea here is that the human genome is very messy and it gives rise to lots of spurious, accidental RNAs that are not biologically relevant. Most of those RNAs are present in small amounts and they are rapidly degraded. They are not conserved in our closest relatives. (Sequence conservation is a good indication of function and lack of sequence conservation is a good indication of junk.)

The skeptics, on the other hand, argue that most of those RNAs have a function and there are far more non-coding genes than protein-coding genes. The debate continues to this day.

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1. And, unfortutnately, in the legitimate scientific literature.

How can philosophy contribute to science?

I've written quite a bit about the perceived conflict between science and philosophy and defended my view that science is best described in broad terms as a way of knowing that requires evidence, skepticism, and rational thinking. As far as I know, there is no other way of knowing that has produced true knowledge.

In this sense, the proper practice of philosophy has to involve science—and by that I mean evidence— if the results are going to produce knowledge. There's lots to debate on this topic, including discussions about the meaning of "knowledge" [Is science the only way of knowing?].

But that's not what I want to talk about today. Today's topic is about the contribution that philosophers can make to science. I'll focus on philosophers of biology and on scientific topics that I'm knowledgeable about and I'll assume that most philosophers agree with Elisabeth Lloyd when she says, "As a philosopher of science, I have always been oriented towards addressing problems that scientists have, not so much problems that philosophers have. That is how to do good philosophy of science."¹

Now, let me be clear about the issue. It is blindingly obvious that philosophers could use their deep understanding of logic and argumentation to make significant contributions to biology, especially in cases where scientists are misusing logic. The question is not whether philosophy is incapable of ever contributing to biology but whether it is actually fulfilling that potential.

Do the indigenous people of British Columbia have a special way of knowing that's better than science?

I once participated in a discussion about introducing indigenous ways of knowing in the Ontario science curriculum. The idea was to have high school students visit local indigenous (First Nation) communities and talk to the wise elders of the community in order to learn their insights into topics such as evolution.

I pointed out that one of the main goals of education is to teach critical thinking and reasonable skepticism. If we are succeeding in that goal, then we should expect our students to ask embarrassing questions, such as what evidence to the elders have to support their myths about evolution and any other "ways of knowing" that conflict with science.

The proposal was dropped.

Glyphosate (Roundup®) is safe

There have been dozens of studies on the possible harmful effects of glyphosate. There are many well-funded organizations and tons of lawyers who would like nothing better than to sue Monsanto/Bayer into bankruptcy for promoting Roundup® and there are many environmental and health organizations who claim that glyphosate is harmful to humans.

The claims that glyphosate causes cancer and other ill effects in humans fall into three main categories.

How glyphosate (Roundup®) works

Glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup®, is back in the news in the United States so I think it's time to repost an article from almost twenty years ago where I explain how glyphosate works.

I'll follow up with links to all the articles showing that glyphosate is safe for humans. This is important because there's a lot of misinformation out there and the news media are not doing a very good job of countering the hype against glyphosate by presenting the consensus views of the scientific community. It's time for scientists to push back and make sure the the media are doing the job they're supposed to do; informing the public.

Glyphosate is a relatively simple chemical called N-(phosphonomethyl) glycine. It is a potent inhibitor of one of the key enzymes in the pathway for synthesis of the aromatic amino acids, tryptophan, phenylalanine, and tyrosine [How Cells Make Tryptophan, Phenyalanine, and Tyrosine].

Specifically, the herbicide blocks the activity of EPSP synthase, the enzyme that catalyzes one of the steps leading to chorismate. Chorismate is the precursor of all three aromatic amino acids so by blocking this enzyme, the synthesis of three plant amino acids is prevented.

Plants need to synthesize all 20 amino acids so this blockage causes plants to die.

The glyphosate mechanism is well known from studies of the homologous bacterial versions of EPSP synthase. An example of glyphosate bound to the active site of the E. coli enzyme is shown on the right. When glyphosate is bound, the enzyme can't catalyze any reaction.

Animals have lost the ability to synthesize chorismate and the aromatic amino acids so they require tryptophan, phenyalanine, and tyrosine in their diet. What this means is that the potent herbicide, glyphosate, has no effect on animals since they have already dispensed with the EPSP synthase enzyme. That's one of the reasons why Roundup® is so safe for humans.

Those of you who have used Roundup® on your driveways and walkways know that it kills all plants indiscriminately. You'd better not get it on your wife's favorite roses (... not that I'm admitting anything, mind you).

You can't spray it on crops, such as soybeans, corn, cotton, granola, and wheat to get rid of weeds because it kills the crops as well as the weeds. Wouldn't it be nice to have Roundup® resistant crops so you could spray them to control weeds?

Monsanto makes Roundup® and and they thought so too. That's why their scientists searched for, and found, bacteria that were resistant to Roundup®. Then they transferred the gene for the resistant EPSP enzyme to various crop plants in order to make them resistant to Roundup®. [Roundup Ready® Transgenic Plants]

These Roundup Ready® crops are now found everywhere in Canada and the United States. Farmers routinely spray these crops with Roundup® in order to kill all the weeds in a field while saving the crop.

Since these farmers are handling tons of Roundup® every year, they would make a good group to examine for any adverse health effects, don't you think?

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Skip the hard bits! (The Two Cultures)

I've been reading Mathew Cobb's biography of Francis Crick and a sentence in the Prologue caught my eye.

Cricks' scientific writings and ideas are described in a way that should be easy for the general reader to understand, but if you find yourself struggling, follow Crick's advice to readers of his own books and skip the hard bits.

I meet regularly with a group of retired professors to discuss a wide range of topics. Yesterday we talked about misinformation and how to deal with it but the discussion brought out the differences between dealing with misinformation in the humanities and in medicine or the natural sciences. This led to a diversion that focused on The Two Cultures.

These AI predictions are becoming ridiculous!

The first issue of Nature in 2026 has an article by science writer David Adam.

The Science of 2050
Nature explores the future breakthroughs that could shape our world.

The online version has a different title and subtitle but the text is the same. It begins with a quote from "futurologist" Nick Bostrum.

“There’s a good likelihood that by 2050, all scientific research will be done by superintelligent AI rather than human researchers. Some humans might do science as a hobby, but they wouldn’t be making any useful contributions.”

There's no attempt in the article to apply critical thinking to such a ridiculous prediction and the author doesn't consider the implications. If Bostrum (whoever that is) is right then that's the end of graduate studies and after 2050 nobody will be getting a Ph.D. in physics, biology, geology, or chemistry.

I hope I live long enough to see AI collecting and analyzing fossils in Greenland or studying volcanoes in Hawaii. Maybe I'll still be around when AI figures out how memories are stored or which transcription factor binding sites are functional in the human genome. And if I'm very, very lucky I'll see live to see all of my colleagues in the Department of Biochemistry abandon their labs and take up some scientific hobby like alchemy or intelligent design.

David Adam and the editors of Nature should be ashamed of themselves for publishing such nonsense.

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Teaching the nature of science vs the scientific method

There's been a lot of talk about how to teach science literacy. The discussion in the USA centers around STEM (science, engineering, technology, mathematics) and this acronym has also spread to other countries. It's an unfortunate development since there's a big difference between teaching science and teaching those other three topics.

Most studies suggest that we focus on teaching The Nature of Science (NOS). There's no definition of this topic that everyone agrees to but the essence is that students need to understand how our society generates knowledge. In the context of the natural sciences, this means understanding the process of discovery. There's general agreement that what this means is critical thinking that's evidence-based. It's another way of saying that we need to teach critical thinking and the importance of using evidence to back up and test your claims of knowledge. "Appreciating the scientific process can be even more important than knowing scientific facts. People often encounter claims that something is scientifically known. If they understand how science generates and assesses evidence bearing on these claims, they possess analytical methods and critical thinking skills that are relevant to a wide variety of facts and concepts and can be used in a wide variety of contexts.”

National Science Foundation, Science and Technology Indicators, 2008

The reasoning behind this emphasis is based on two pedagogical facts. The first is that it's impossible to teach all the facts and theories of a typical scientific discipline like astronomy or geology. It's pointless to make students memorize information that they will forget as soon as the class is over, Instead, as the argument goes, we need to teach students to understand how evidence is gathered and how it becomes fact. Teach students how to appreciate science and its power to create knowledge. That's something that will stick with them all their lives.

Predatory journals are helping to spread misinformation in the scientific literature

At the end of last year (2024) I posted an article about distinguished molecular biologist William Hasletine who published an article in Forbes about A New Dogma Of Molecular Biology: A Paradigm Shift. The article was about overthrowing the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology because of the discovery of thousands of non-coding genes. There is no paradigm shift. It's a paradigm shaft. [William Haseltine misrepresents molecular biology and calls for a paradigm shift]

Why Trust Science?

Bruce Alberts,¹ Karen Hopkin, and Keith Roberts have published an essay on Why Trust Science.

In this essay, we address the question of why we can trust science—and how we can identify which scientific claims we can trust. We begin by explaining how scientists work together, as part of a larger scientific community, to generate knowledge that is reliable. We describe how the scientific process builds a consensus, and how new evidence can change the ways that scientists—and, ultimately, the rest of us—see the world. Last, but not least, we explain how, as informed citizens, we can all become “competent outsiders” who are equipped to evaluate scientific claims and are able to separate science facts from science fiction.

Most of the essay describes an idealized version of how science works with an emphasis on collaboration and rigorous oversight. They claim that the work of scientists can usually be trusted because it is self-correcting.

Should Scientific American endorse United States political candidates?

Scientific American has endorsed Kamala Harris, a candidate for president of the United States. I think this is a mistake and so do many other scientists and even journalists [Scientific American Didn’t Need to Endorse Anybody].

I agree with those who say that science should stay out of politics as much as possible. But this is just one of many indications that Scientific American is sliding rapidly downhill and no longer qualifies as a real science magazine.

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Western scientists should continue to cooperate with Chinese scientists

China has become a science powerhouse and it achieved this goal, in part, by sending its young scientitsts abroad to train in universities in Canada, Australia, United States, and Europe. Many of these countries have signed scientific cooperation agreements with China but some of those agreements are in danger of lapsing as China is increasingly seen as an untrustworthy enemy.

Do you understand the scientific literature?

I'm finding it increasingly difficult to understand the scientific literature even in subjects that I've been following for decades. Is it just because I'm getting too old to keep up?

Here's an example of a paper that I'd like to understand but after reading the abstract and the introduction I gave up. I'll quote the first paragraph of the introduction to see if any Sandwalk readers can do better.

I'm not talking about the paper being a complete mystery; I can figure out roughly what's it's about. What I'm thinking is that the opening paragraph could have been written in a way that makes the goals of the research much more comprehensible to average scientifically-literate people.

Weiner, D. J., Nadig, A., Jagadeesh, K. A., Dey, K. K., Neale, B. M., Robinson, E. B., ... & O’Connor, L. J. (2023) Polygenic architecture of rare coding variation across 394,783 exomes. Nature 614:492-499. [doi = 10.1038/s41586-022-05684-z]

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified thousands of common variants that are associated with common diseases and traits. Common variants have small effect sizes individually, but they combine to explain a large fraction of common disease heritability. More recently, sequencing studies have identified hundreds of genes containing rare coding variants, and these variants can have much larger effect sizes. However, it is unclear how much heritability rare variants explain in aggregate, or more generally, how common-variant and rare-variant architecture compare: whether they are equally polygenic; whether they implicate the same genes, cell types and genetically correlated risk factors; and whether rare variants will contribute meaningfully to population risk stratification.

The first question that comes to mind is whether the variant that's associated with a common disease is the cause of that disease or merely linked to the actual cause. In other words, are the associated variants responsible for the "effect size"? It sounds like the answer is "yes" in this case. Has that been firmly esablished in the GWAS field?

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Birds of a feather: epigenetics and opposition to junk DNA

There's an old saying that birds of a feather flock together. It means that people with the same interests tend to associate with each other. It's extended meaning refers to the fact that people who believe in one thing (X) tend to also believe in another (Y). It usually means that X and Y are both questionable beliefs and it's not clear why they should be associated.

I've noticed an association between those who promote epigenetics far beyond it's reasonable limits and those who reject junk DNA in favor of a genome that's mostly functional. There's no obvious reason why these two beliefs should be associated with each other but they are. I assume it's related to the idea that both beliefs are presumed to be radical departures from the standard dogma so they reinforce the idea that the author is a revolutionary.

Or maybe it's just that sloppy thinking in one field means that sloppy thinking is the common thread.

Here's an example from Chapter 4 of a 2023 edition of the Handbook of Epigenetics (Third Edition).

The central dogma of life had clearly established the importance of the RNA molecule in the flow of genetic information. The understanding of transcription and translation processes further elucidated three distinct classes of RNA: mRNA, tRNA and rRNA. mRNA carries the information from DNA and gets translated to structural or functional proteins; hence, they are referred to as the coding RNA (RNA which codes for proteins). tRNA and rRNA help in the process of translation among other functions. A major part of the DNA, however, does not code for proteins and was previously referred to as junk DNA. The scientists started realizing the role of the junk DNA in the late 1990s and the ENCODE project, initiated in 2003, proved the significance of junk DNA beyond any doubt. Many RNA types are now known to be transcribed from DNA in the same way as mRNA, but unlike mRNA they do not get translated into any protein; hence, they are collectively referred to as noncoding RNA (ncRNA). The studies have revealed that up to 90% of the eukaryotic genome is transcribed but only 1%–2% of these transcripts code for proteins, the rest all are ncRNAs. The ncRNAs less than 200 nucleotides are called small noncoding RNAs and greater than 200 nucleotides are called long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs).

In case you haven't been following my blog posts for the past 17 years, allow me to briefly summarize the flaws in that paragraph.

• The central dogma has nothing to do with whether most of our genome is junk
• There was never, ever, a time when knowledgeable scientists defended the idea that all noncoding DNA is junk
• ENCODE did not "prove the significance of junk DNA beyond any doubt"
• Not all transcripts are functional; most of them are junk RNA transcribed from junk DNA

So, I ask the same question that I've been asking for decades. How does this stuff get published?

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Jupiter weighs two quettagrams

New names for very large and very small weights and sizes have been adopted.

Last November's meeting of the General Conference on Weights and Measures wasn't covered by the major media outlets so you probably don't know that the mass of an electron is now one rontogram and the diameter of the universe is about one ronnameter [SI units get new prefixes for huge and tiny numbers].¹

The official SI prefixes for very large things are now ronna (10²⁷) and quetta (10³⁰) and the prefixes for very small things are ronto (10^-27) and quecto (10^-30).

This is annoying because we've just gotten used to zetta, yotta, zepto, and yocto (adopted in 1991). I suspect that the change was prompted by the huge storage capacity of your latest smartphone (several yottabytes) and the wealth of the world's richest people (several zeptocents). Or maybe it was the price of houses in Toronto. Or something like that. In any case, we needed to prepare for kilo or mega increases.

The bad news is that the latest additions used up the last two available letters of the alphabet so if things get any bigger or smaller we may have to add a few more letters to the alphabet.

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1. A friendly reader has pointed out that my title should have been "The mass of Jupiter is two quettagrams." My bad.

Publishing a science book - Lesson #1: The publisher is always right about everything

Don't bother trying to reason with a publisher. All of them have different views on proper style and every single one of them is absolutely certain that their style is the only correct one.

I'm in the middle of the copyedit stage of my book. This is the stage where a copyeditor goes through your manuscript and makes any corrections to spelling and grammar. This is a lot of work for any copyeditor having to deal with one of my manuscripts and I greatly appreciate the effort. My book is a lot better now than it was a few weeks ago. (Who knew that there was only one l in canceled?)

It's also the stage where the publisher imposes their particular style on the manusript and that can be a problem. I'll document some of the issues in subsequent posts but to give you an example, consider the titles of books in the reference list. I wrote it like this: The Selfish Gene and Molecular and Genome Evolution. This is not in line with my publisher's handbook of style so the titles were converted to lowercase as in: The selfish gene and Molecular and genome evolution. I objected, pointing to numerous other science books that used the same titles that are on the covers of the books and suggesting that my readers were more familiar with The Selfish Gene than with The selfish gene.

I was overruled by my publisher who noted that they make their style choices for good reasons—it's for "consistency, clarity, and ease of reading." I assume that publishers, such as Oxford, would make the same argument while insisting that the title should be The Selfish Gene.

In case you ever find yourself in this position, you should keep in mind that your contract will almost certainly say that the publisher has complete control of your book and they can make any changes they want as long as it doesn't affect the meaning of what you wrote.

Here's what it says in my contract, "The Publisher shall publish the Author's work in whatever style and format it thinks most suitable ... While the Publisher may, in its sole discretion, consult the Author with respect to said style and format, the Publisher retains the right to make all final decisions on matters of format, design, selling price and marketing."

I was aware of some issues with inappropriate covers and tiles in the past so I had an extra sentence added to the contract that said, "The Publisher and Author will discuss and agree upon the title and cover design." It's a good thing I put that in because the publisher was pressuring me to change the title of the book and I was able to resist.

Authors can't win most fights over style and format. I've been discussing the publishing of science books with a number of other authors over the past few months and several of them told me not to bother trying to argue with a publisher because they will never give in. They have a set style for all books and they won't make an exception for an individual author no matter how good an argument you make.

I didn't listen to those other authors. Silly me.

I'm thinking of trying to write a standard set of guidelines that scientists could put into their contracts to cover the most egregious style restrictions. It might be helpful if all science writers would insist on inserting these guidelines into their contracts.

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How not to write a Nature abstract

A friend recently posted a figure on Facebook that instructs authors in the correct way to prepare a summary paragraph (abstract) for publication in Nature. It uses a specific example and the advice is excellent [How to construct a Nature summary paragraph].

I thought it might be fun to annotate a different example so I randomly selected a paper on genomics to see how it compared. The one that popped up was An integrated encyclopedia of DNA elements in the human genome.

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What I'm reading these days

So many books ... so little time.

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Is science the only way of knowing?

Most of us learned that science provides good answers to all sort of questions ranging from whether a certain drug is useful in treating COVID-19 to whether humans evolved from primitive apes. A more interesting question is whether there are any limitations to science or whether there are any other effective ways of knowing. The question is related to the charge of "scientism," which is often used as a pejorative term to describe those of us who think that science is the only way of knowing.

I've discussed these issue many times of this blog so I won't rehash all the arguments. Suffice to say that there are two definitions of science; the broad definition and the narrow one. The narrow definition says that science is merely the activity carried out by geologists, chemists, physicists, and biologists. Using this definition it would be silly to say that science is the only way of knowing. The broad definition can be roughly described as: science is a way of knowing that relies on evidence, logic (rationality), and healthy skepticism.

The broad definition is the one preferred by many philosophers and it goes something like this ...

Unfortunately neither "science" nor any other established term in the English language covers all the disciplines that are parts of this community of knowledge disciplines. For lack of a better term, I will call them "science(s) in the broad sense." (The German word "Wissenschaft," the closest translation of "science" into that language, has this wider meaning; that is, it includes all the academic specialties, including the humanities. So does the Latin "scientia.") Science in a broad sense seeks knowledge about nature (natural science), about ourselves (psychology and medicine), about our societies (social science and history), about our physical constructions (technological science), and about our thought construction (linguistics, literary studies, mathematics, and philosophy). (Philosophy, of course, is a science in this broad sense of the word.)

Sven Ove Hanson "Defining Pseudoscience and Science" in Philosophy of Pseudescience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem.

Is science a social construct?

Richard Dawkins has written an essay for The Spectator in which he says,

"[Science is not] a social construct. It’s simply true. Or at least truth is real and science is the best way we have of finding it. ‘Alternative ways of knowing’ may be consoling, they may be sincere, they may be quaint, they may have a poetic or mythic beauty, but the one thing they are not is true. As well as being real, moreover, science has a crystalline, poetic beauty of its own.

The essay is not particularly provocative but it did provoke Jerry Coyne who pointed out that, "The profession of science" can be contrued as a social construct. In this sense Jerry is agreeing with his former supervisor, Richard Lewontin¹ who wrote,

"Science is a social institution about which there is a great deal of misunderstanding, even among those who are part of it. We think that science is an institution, a set of methods, a set of people, a great body of knowledge that we call scientific, is somehow apart from the forces that rule our everyday lives and tha goven the structure of our society... The problems that science deals with, the ideas that it uses in investigating those problems, even the so-called scientific results that come out of scientific investigation, are all deeply influenced by predispositions that derive from the society in which we live. Scientists do not begin life as scientists after all, but as social beings immersed in a family, a state, a productive structure, and they view nature through a lens that has been molded by their social structure."

Coincidently, I just happened to be reading Science Fictions an excellent book by Stuart Ritchie who also believes that science is a social construct but he has a slighly different take on the matter.

"Science has cured diseases, mapped the brain, forcasted the climate, and split the atom; it's the best method we have of figuring out how the universe works and of bending it to our will. It is, in other words, our best way of moving towards the truth. Of course, we might never get there—a glance at history shows us hubristic it is to claim any facts as absolute or unchanging. For ratcheting our way towards better knowledge about the world, though, the methods of science is as good as it gets.

But we can't make progress with those methods alone. It's not enough to make a solitary observation in your lab; you must also convince other scientists that you've discovered something real. This is where the social part comes. Philosophers have long discussed how important it is for scientists to show their fellow researchers how they came to their conclusions.

Dawkins, Coyne, Lewontin, and Ritchie are all right in different ways. Dawkins is talking about science as a way of knowing, although he restricts his definition of science to the natural sciences. The others are referring to the practice of science, or as Jerry Coyne puts it, the profession. It's true that the methods of science are the best way we have to get at the truth and it's true that the way of knowing is not a social construct in any meanigful sense.

Jerry Coyne is right to point out that the methods are employed by human scientists (he's also restricting the practice of science to scientists) and humans are fallible. In that sense, the enterprise of (natural) science is a social construct. Lewontin warns us that scientists have biases and prejudices and that may affect how they do science.

Ritchie makes a diffferent point by emphasizing that (natural) science is a collective endeavor and that "truth" often requires a consensus. That's the sense in which science is social. This is supposed to make science more robust, according to Ritchie, because real knowledge only emerges after carefull and skeptical scrutiny by other scientists. His book is mostly about how that process isn't working and why science is in big trouble. He's right about that.

I think it's important to distinguish between science as a way of knowing and the behavior and practice of scientists. The second one is affected by society and its flaws are well-known but the value of science as way of knowing can't be so easily dismissed.

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1. The book is actually a series of lectures (The Massey Lectures) that Lewontin gave in Toronto (Ontario, Canada) in 1990. I attended those lectures.