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Metascience (2012) 21:171174
DOI 10.1007/s11016-011-9535-3
BOOK REVIEW
Ideology and science
D. R. Alexander and R. L. Numbers (eds): Biology and ideology: From Descartes to Dawkins. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010, 453pp, 22.50 PB
David E. Packham
Published online: 5 April 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
The term ideology often carries negative connotations, but when introduced at the end of the eighteenth century, it simply meant the Science of Ideas. There is some oscillation in different parts of Biology and Ideology between the neutral and the derogatory use of ideology. In their introduction, the editors discuss the ideas of Thomas Kuhn, Robert M. Young and of sociology of scientic knowledge school. These recall the inuence that society has in constructing scientic knowledge and argue that ideology is ubiquitous in intellectual life. Ideology, as such, is not reprehensible, it is inescapable.
Thus, ideology, in the neutral sense, is intrinsically linked with biology and with science in general. Biological ideas can be taken and adapted for use in ideologies which are primarily political, racial, social, religious or antireligious in nature. The stated purpose of the book is to caution biological scientists about such ideological uses to which their scientic theories may be put, and further to encourage critical attitudes more generally among non-scientists towards utilisation of biological ideas in this way. Biology and Ideology seeks to do this by presenting thirteen diverse essays by different authorities giving a historical perspective of the close links which have often bound a range of extra-scientic ideologies with concepts current in contemporaneous biological science. These fascinating, well-referenced, discussions, covering such causes clbres as Paley, Lysenko and Dawkins, will surely be of value to the teacher and student, to practising scientist and those interested in the relationship between science and society.
D. E. Packham (&)
Materials Research Centre, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, UK e-mail: [email protected]
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Social engineering
The full title of Darwins famous book was On the origin of species by means of natural selection or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life [emphasis added]. Is there a thread linking Darwin to Auschwitz? In his essay on genetics and the Holocaust, Paul Weindling argues that Darwinism did not cause...