Richard Lewontin- Two senses of social?
Richard Lewontin explains the two senses of social institution in Biology as Ideology to further explain social aspects of science. Science is a social institution in relation to many views. Lewontin uses this concept to explain in two senses where science has ties socially and need to look further than science to come to a conclusion. His two senses are that scientists are people first and that science is a human activity that takes time and money.
Both views described by Lewontin explain that we first need to look at the greater perspective even when using science. The first sense described by Lewontin explains that scientists are people first, which implies an understanding of having morale and conducting science first in an ethical manner before the fabrication of results. The second sense Lewontin describes is that science is a human activity that takes time and money. This is a valid point when science is being conducted to its full potential. True understandings in science require time to focus and go over information before it is deemed valid or proven in any sense, of course through the misconducts of science which occur, representation of this sense lacks. Manipulation of findings in science generally does not take time and money as true findings would.
Looking further back in the course at the Robert Merton discussions on his “Science and the Social Order” (1938), we can debate further Lewontins ideologies on whether or not his two senses of social institution contain validity. Merton believed that assuming a scientist’s own explanation and analysis of how science works based on their own standards and why it was successful was enough. Meaning, a scientist could conduct science on their own beliefs and it would be deemed as truthful. Though Merton had his own four standards of science (universalism, communism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism) and his own ideologies on good and bad science which contained ethics, in comparison to Lewontin, his ideas still lack morale.
Using CBC Ideas podcast “The Gender Trap” as a gender and science contrast with Lewontins understanding of science as a social institution, it is possible to argue Lewontins explanation. Within the podcast it depicts how science was manipulated for approximately 20 years to explain traits through the use of biology by scientists and how only recent to when the podcast was released is when shifts in these ideas began. This rids the idea of any form of moral and sense of being a person before the realms of science. This also creates falsity in the idea of science being a human activity that takes time and money, if it can be manipulated how you please, this explanation would be invalid also. “The Gender Trap” does explain how these are not valid methods of conducting science and we now understand that using such explanations to represent traits in gender is for the most part biased to the scientists’ understandings. Although the podcast does provide a counter argument to Lewontins senses of social institution, it still depicts how science is a social institution, simply in a more political way that Lewontin was describing.
Richard Lewontins concept of Science as a social structure contains valid points. His concepts however are more recent and I would argue are a more modern view of what science is and how it should be conducted. Science in the past was not considered to be interconnected with society whatsoever but as we progress, the two concepts become less detached from one another.
