We need the help of the sciences now more than ever, what with the various coronavirus pandemics and other global diseases; repeated economic downturns; environmental pollution and global warming; racial, ethnic, and other sources of social unrest; the ever-present threat of cyberattacks; and much, much more. Yet the sciences these days are suffering from their own set of problems, and have even contributed in significant measure to many of these problems that now beset us (cf. Chapter 10). Are the sciences, therefore, up to the job we need done right now, or can they be helped to be up to that job, and if so, how? These are serious questions that a socially relevant science studies should take up. What might be philosophy of science’s role in that endeavor? This is my topic. But the scene is extremely complex. So it is best to start at the beginning.

The Way Science Was Supposed to Be

Let us begin, therefore, at the dawn of modern science. For it was then that a promise was made: If society would but support the new enterprise, society would be richly rewarded not only with unprecedented insights into the workings of the universe but also with all the benefits such insights would provide. Indeed, Francis Bacon, one of the chief architects of the new experimental science of the seventeenth century as well as one of its more exuberant press agents, promised that the knowledge science would offer would “establish and extend the power and dominion of the human race itself over the universe” for the benefit of all humankind (1960/1620: 117–119). What did Bacon mean? The problem, as he saw it, was that the human race had been thrust into “immeasurable helplessness and poverty” by the Fall from Eden and needed to be rescued. And science would be the rescuer. In other words, science would provide a solution to the plight of humankind (Bacon Reference Bacon and Farrington1964/1603).

To explain how this would go, Bacon offered a blueprint for the new science, a blueprint that was later adopted by the Royal Society as well as other early scientific societies and that is still in effect today. In it he included illustrations of the benefits he expected from the new science. Science, Bacon suggested, would make possible the curing of diseases and the preservation and prolongation of life; science would produce the means to control plant and animal generation; science would lead to the development of new materials, including new building materials and new clothing materials; and science would provide new modes of transportation (“through the air” and “under water”) and even new modes of defense (Bacon Reference Bacon2008/1627). In all these ways and others too, science would make humans once again the masters of nature as they had been in the Garden of Eden, and hence once again “peaceful, happy, prosperous and secure” (Bacon Reference Bacon and Farrington1964/1603).

True, religion would have to play an important role in this achievement. In fact, Bacon emphasized the theological dimensions of the scientific activities he supported. For him the study of nature, the study that would bring all manner of practical benefits, would also be the study of the Creation, thereby increasing human knowledge and glorification of the Creator and thus adding to the justification of the study. Moreover, this study would require spiritual as well as intellectual discipline, and would involve spiritual as well as intellectual purpose. “We have certain hymns and services,” Bacon had the scientists in his utopian New Atlantis report, “which we say daily, of Lord and thanks to God for his marvellous works: and forms of prayers, imploring his aid and blessing for the illumination of our labours, and the turning of them into good and holy uses” (2008/1627). So religion was to be a necessary complement to the new science (McKnight Reference McKnight2005), but a religion very much reformed – “purified” – by the dominant intellectual movement of the day: humanism. Indeed, Bacon’s promise regarding what science would achieve for humanity incorporated central tenets of Renaissance humanism: that humans were essentially good, or at least deserving of the benefits that God had placed in nature for their use (the benefits that Bacon’s science would uncover and further develop); that God had given humans vast intellectual and creative powers, powers that should be cultivated to the fullest (just the powers that Bacon’s science would require); and that such powers should be used to improve the lot of humanity – their intellectual and physical worlds as well as their moral and social ones (which was at least a good deal of what Bacon’s science was about). Without these humanist tenets, in fact, Bacon’s promise would not have been nearly as compelling (see for further details Sargent Reference Sargent2002; Reference Sargent and Koertge2005; Reference Sargent2012).

At the dawn of modern science, then, Bacon promised all manner of societal benefits if science were supported. And over the next four centuries many other distinguished representatives of the scientific establishment made that same promise. One of the most famous of these in the twentieth century was Vannevar Bush, the engineer and inventor who headed the United States Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II. At the end of that war, Bush sent a report to President Franklin D. Roosevelt that became the basis of US science policy for much of the twentieth century. In it Bush promised that, if science is supported by society but also left free of societal control, its advances will bring

What’s more, Bush added, such advances in science will be crucial for attaining these benefits. “Without scientific progress no amount of achievement in other directions can insure our health, prosperity, and security as a nation in the modern world” (1945: 11).

So, here was Bacon’s promise again. The seventeenth-century theological infusions were gone, to be sure, but so much else, including so much of Renaissance Humanism, remained. Indeed, where Bush now promised “health, prosperity, and security” for people as a result of science, Bacon had promised that they would be “peaceful, happy, prosperous and secure” as well as healthy; where Bush now promised that science would banish the “deadening drudgery” of their pre-science existence, Bacon had promised that science would end the “immeasurable helplessness and poverty” of that existence; and so on.

Bush’s promise did depart from Bacon’s in one respect, however. It had to do with what counted as legitimate science and how social benefits would arise from it. For Bacon, scientific research was all about – should be all about – attending to the needs of society:

If such research (inspired by humanism as well as religion) were supported, Bacon promised, science’s social benefits would result. For Bush, on the other hand, the most important kind of scientific research, the kind on which other scientific research depends, was all about freely pursuing “the truth wherever it may lead.” “Scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown” (Bush Reference Bush1945: 12). And only if society supported that kind of research would science’s social benefits result.

By the end of the twentieth century, however, “the free play of free intellects” was no longer considered “the best precondition for maximizing the utility of science” (Rohe Reference Robbins and Rohe2017: 745; see also Gibbons Reference Gibbons1999; Guston Reference Guston2000a; Krishna Reference Krishna2014; Sarewitz Reference Sarewitz2016). Science had just gotten too big and too costly, with no end in sight to its continued and ever-increasing demands for support. As a result,

No matter. Whether the free play of free intellects was what yielded the social benefits of science (as Bush had claimed) or whether they resulted most reliably only from research explicitly aimed at them (as Bacon had suggested), Bacon’s promise – that such benefits would result if science were supported – was still very much taken for granted.

The Way Science Is Now

Today, well into the twenty-first century, Bacon’s promise has never been more important, what with the problems mentioned at the outset: global diseases such as COVID-19; repeated economic downturns; environmental pollution and global warming; racial, ethnic, and other sources of social unrest; and all the rest. And yet, the obstacles to the fulfillment of that promise have also never been greater, even with the support lavished on science by society. Of course, there have always been obstacles. Bacon himself recognized obstacles – such as the “idols of the mind,” the various sorts of errors in human reasoning (whether innate or acquired) that are part and parcel of the human condition, and “the dullness, incompetency, and deception of the senses,” “by far the greatest hindrance and aberrations of the human understanding” (1960/1620: 52) – and Bacon sought ways to overcome them (Sargent Reference Sargent2002). Still, those obstacles seem modest in comparison to the obstacles that now confront scientists. If we are ever to be “healthy, happy, prosperous, and secure” as a result of science, as Bacon promised, the current crop of obstacles must also be addressed.

Consider, then, the current obstacles to the fulfillment of Bacon’s promise – or at least some of the most pressing of them – and consider, in particular, the scene in North America, the place I know best. There, during the last decade or so, those in the science and science studies communities have been anxiously discussing a variety of problems within the sciences – actually a variety of sets of such problems – that they say are of great consequence for society. Indeed, taken together these problems may very well undermine the possibility that science will be able to help us deal with the global challenges that now confront us.

A Role for Philosophy of Science

The foregoing concerns three sets of problems currently at the forefront of discussion. These are not the only obstacles to the fulfillment of Bacon’s promise now facing the sciences, of course. There are also the problems of androcentrism, sexism, heterosexism, and a variety of related LGBTQ issues that feminist scientists and philosophers and historians of science have been discussing for decades (e.g., Harding Reference Harding1986; Creager, Lunbeck, and Schiebinger Reference Creager, Lunbeck and Schiebinger2001; Kourany Reference Kourany2002; Fausto-Sterling Reference Fausto-Sterling2020). There are the problems regarding the science carried out in the private sector – problems of so-called commercialized or commodified science – that have also been the subject of discussion for decades (e.g., Mirowski and Sent Reference Mirowski and Sent2002; Krimsky Reference Krimsky2003; Radder Reference Radder2010). And there are the problems more recently under discussion – the now mostly unfulfilled need for interdisciplinary collaboration to solve multidisciplinary problems sometimes called the silo problem, the problem of so much science kept secret by government or industry or locked behind paywalls, the problems stemming from the public’s distrust of science, and so on (see, e.g., Galison Reference Galison, Proctor and Schiebinger2008; de Melo-Martin and Intemann Reference De Melo-Martin and Intemann2018; Worthy and Yestrebsky Reference Worthy and Yestrebsky2018; Brown Reference Brown2020). Still, the foregoing three sets of problems are thought by many to connect more closely than any of these others to our present most pressing global challenges, the challenges for which we need science at its best to help us (witness just the terms – the war on science, the (replication) crisis in science, the hostile climate of science with its messages of (Black) deficiency, pathology, and inferiority, etc. – used to represent these problems). And this makes our three sets of problems especially worrisome, and their resolution especially urgent. Might philosophers of science have a role to play in this effort? The problems, after all, concern threats to science as a knowledge-producing activity, threats so serious that scientists are now devoting considerable attention to them. But the focus of philosophy of science is precisely on science as a knowledge-producing activity. So, these threats to science should claim attention from philosophers as well. What contributions might we make to deal with them?

Fortunately, we don’t have to start from scratch. The current discussions that take up these problems also offer solutions to them, or at least strategies to consider. Science journalist Shawn Otto, for example, ends his 2016 War on Science book with fourteen “battle plans” to “beat back the war.” These include such initiatives as science-informed policy debates for candidates for public office, pro-science pledges for the successful candidates, religious institutions that integrate the results of scientific investigation rather than function at odds with them, and the formation of chambers of progressive commerce (or boards of progressive trade) for business leaders. Historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway end their war book with what amounts to an historically informed tutorial for the public on how to recognize the legitimate scientific experts on an issue, so that the public will be able to tell whom to listen to and whom to ignore when it comes to issues such as global warming. And scientists have sought to beat back the war on science in still other ways, such as by galvanizing public sentiment and public pressure against the war. Recent examples of this strategy are impressive: the march Canadian scientists organized in 2012 that involved 2,000 scientists, a coffin, tombstones, and a mock funeral on Ottawa’s Parliament Hill to commemorate, as they said, the “death of evidence” brought about by funding cutbacks and other actions of the Harper administration (for accounts of it, see Pedwell Reference Pedwell2012 and Smith Reference Smith2012), or the “March for Science” American scientists organized post-Donald Trump in 2017 that took place in Washington, DC (where 100,000 people gathered) and more than 600 other cities all across the globe – the largest science demonstration in history (March for Science 2017; Smith-Spark and Hanna Reference Smith-Spark and Hanna2017). Examples also include ongoing statements by the Union of Concerned Scientists and other scientific organizations, public letters of protest signed by hundreds of scientists from all over the world, lectures and interviews on the internet, and other public outreach activities by scientists, all in response to the war on science (especially memorable was the open letter to Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper signed by more than 800 scientists from 32 countries; see Chung Reference Chung2014).

Scientists have directed their attention to the scientific community rather than the public in their response to the second and third sets of problems discussed in this chapter. Regarding the second set – more specifically the “perverse incentives” currently pervading science – scientists have suggested such possibilities as a funding system for science that, lottery style, randomly determines which of a group of acceptable proposals should be funded, or that funds particular scientists or particular labs for specified periods, perhaps especially excellent (“rigorous,” “efficient,” “effective” as well as “original” and “innovative”) scientists or especially well-run labs, independently of their announced projects, or that privileges new fields or fields that are high risk, or that leaves it up to research to determine the best way to fund research. To combat the “replication crisis,” on the other hand, scientists have suggested ways to make replication studies easier, such as by requiring authors of publishable papers to be more detailed and transparent about the methods used in their research, by encouraging them to share their data, and even by encouraging them to have engaged in at least one replication study themselves before publication. And to combat what some have called a “broken” peer review system, scientists have suggested such possibilities as posting “pre-prints” of articles to be evaluated by a wider audience before formal peer review, “post-publication” peer review to continue the peer review process on the web even after publication, and either a more anonymous system of peer review in which reviewers don’t know authors or a less anonymous system in which authors also know reviewers (see, e.g., Alberts et al. Reference Alberts, Kirschner, Tilghman and Varmus2014; Baker Reference Baker2016; Belluz, Plumer, and Resnick Reference Belluz, Plumer and Resnick2016; Munafò et al. Reference Munafò, Nosek, Bishop, Button, Chambers, du Sert, Simonsohn, Wagenmakers, Ware and Ioannidis2017; Ioannidis Reference Ioannidis2018). To these suggestions of scientists, moreover, a number of science policy analysts have added ways to steer science specifically to solve socially important problems (e.g., Sarewitz Reference Sarewitz2016, Korte Reference Korte2019).

Finally, to deal with the third set of problems discussed here – the racism both in and outside of science – scientists, particularly Black scientists, have suggested such possibilities as research programs in psychology that investigate the nature of racism in all its forms, its wide-ranging effects, and the most successful methods to eradicate it,Footnote ⁴ funding programs in economics that commit to multiyear or recurring support for actively anti-racist science initiatives,Footnote ⁵ and outreach programs in biomedical research that encourage and enable those in various minority communities to join research efforts (such as clinical trials) that can improve their health and well-being.

These proposals from the science and science studies communities offer a wide range of strategies to (in the words of one of the contributors) “save science.” But do they save Bacon’s science, the specifically humanist science Bacon promised? Certainly, some of them do, or at least try to – such as the third set of proposals supporting research efforts to fight racism and increase the health and well-being of minorities, and the proposal from the second set supporting organizational efforts to resteer science more efficiently toward socially important problem solutions. But many others do not. The second set of proposals supporting such strategies as lottery-type research funding systems, greater transparency in research, and longer peer reviews, for example, may increase the reliability of research results, but they include no commitment to also promote the human flourishing Bacon promised. And similarly for the first set of proposals, the ones aimed at educating the public using such strategies as public policy debates, history tutorials, and science marches. Those proposals, like the ones of the second set, are intended to loosen the hold on the sciences of a whole battery of values not frequently conducive to widespread flourishing – corporate interests, fundamentalist Christian values, right-wing political values, and anti-regulation, market fundamentalist values (those are the values that loomed large in the war reports), as well as the perverse incentives and nonincentives pervading contemporary science (those are the values of current scientific culture that lie behind the replication crisis, broken peer review system, and inconsequential busywork of much contemporary science). But such proposals do not at the same time strengthen the hold on the sciences of the legitimate social values that are to replace the others, or even help to make explicit what those legitimate social values are.

By contrast, distinguishing between research shaped by legitimate social values and research shaped by illegitimate ones, and distinguishing between the legitimate and illegitimate ways in which such shaping is to occur, are important projects in contemporary philosophy of science – are, in fact, the “new demarcation problem” many philosophers of science are now investigating (e.g., Holman and Wilholt Reference Holman and Wilholt2022). And feminist as well as other philosophers of science have already made important contributions to the project (for recent contributions concerned with race, or both race and gender, see Fernandez Pinto Reference Fernandez Pinto2018; Kourany Reference Kourany, Kourany and Carrier2020; Biddle Reference Biddle2020; Havstad Reference Havstad2021). At the same time, many other philosophers of science are now committed to dealing with a wide range of other socially important projects connected with this one, as shown by the workshops, publications, and other activities of groups such as the Consortium for Socially Relevant Philosophy of/in Science and Engineering, the Joint Caucus of Socially Engaged Philosophers and Historians of Science, and the Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice.Footnote ⁶ And, of course, all these philosophers of science are especially well equipped to deal with such projects. For normative questions, ethical/political as well as epistemic, and the arguments and counterarguments that go along with them, are emphasized in the training of philosophers of science, as in the training of all philosophers, which is just the kind of background that is helpful here.

So, strengthening the hold on the sciences of the legitimate social values that are now missing from science is a project to which we philosophers of science might very effectively contribute. Done successfully it will help to prevent the three sets of problems previously described from continuing (hence, call it the prevention project). But it will not dispel the damage already done by those problems – the “contestable, unreliable, unusable, or flat-out wrong” (Sarewitz Reference Sarewitz2016) information that is now part of our accepted scientific knowledge as well as the crucial gaps in information and missed opportunities that are also there. Is some sort of rectification now called for, and if so, what sort of rectification and how might it be accomplished? This is a second project to which philosophers of science might contribute, and it is especially pressing with regard to the third set of science’s problems previously discussed: the ones having to do with race. In order to see this, start with a thought experiment.

Imagine a race in which half the runners have been made to carry heavy weights on their shoulders, and imagine that midway through the race there is a desire to make the race a fair one. What might be done to achieve this goal? One possibility would be to stop the race, take the weights off the shoulders of the runners who are carrying them, and then resume the race. This would hardly do the trick, however, for the disadvantage of the weights for the first half of the race would not have been overcome. A second possibility would be to stop the race, transfer the weights from the one group of runners to the other, and then resume the race. This would equalize the disadvantage of the weights for the two groups and thereby yield a fair race, but at the cost of treating the previously unweighted runners in the same cruel way the first group had been treated. By contrast, a third possibility would avoid this problem while still producing a fair race. It would be to give the previously weighted runners a head start for the second half of the race, providing an advantage to compensate for the previous disadvantage without harming the other runners in any way.

This last possibility is the idea of affirmative action elaborated during the US civil rights era in Martin Luther King’s 1964 book Why We Can’t Wait and Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 graduation address at Howard University. Both men used a race metaphor to make the justification of their idea clear. King framed it this way: “It is obvious that if a man is entered at the starting line of a race three hundred years after another man, the first would have to perform some impossible feat in order to catch up with his fellow runner.” “Something special” needs to be done “for him now to balance the equation and equip him to compete on a just and equal basis” (1964: 165). Johnson framed the metaphor slightly differently: “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates” (1965). In other words, to make the race of our thought experiment fair the previously weighted runners have to be given “something special,” some kind of head start after their weights are removed – enough of a head start so that they “all … have the ability” to win, that is, are all now as likely to win the race as the other runners.

The thought experiment given here helps us consider how we might deal with science’s centuries-old treatment of Black people and other racialized groups. It suggests and at the same time offers an assessment of three possible responses. The first response amounts to removing all racist values from science (the weights on half the runners) and replacing them with egalitarian values (all runners free of weights, in other words treated equally). Such a response would dramatically increase the gathering of facts serving the interests of Black people and other racialized groups while still continuing the gathering of facts serving the interests of previously privileged groups. It would ensure that all future research would always generate information helpful to all – the prevention plan described previously. But like the first possible fix in our thought experiment (weights removed after half the race is over), it would do nothing to overcome the disadvantages of the past – the huge inventory of facts gathered over the centuries that continue to serve the interests of only some while they undermine the interests of all the rest. The situation portrayed in this first response, in other words, would exactly correspond to the man in King’s metaphor who starts a race three centuries after his fellow runner, though the time difference in this case might be quite a bit longer than three centuries.

But what if the racist values of the past were replaced, now and for the next few centuries, not with egalitarian values but, instead, with values privileging the previously unprivileged, leading to research focused on the previously unprivileged. The facts gathered would then be about their needs and experiences, exploits and accomplishments, with methods and concepts and assumptions and questions supporting that aim. Like the second possible fix in our thought experiment (weights transferred from the one group to the other after half the race is over), this would overcome the disadvantages of the past for all of these individuals, for it would eventually yield equal inventories of facts serving the interests of all. But it would do this at the cost of treating the previously privileged in the same unconscionable way Black people and the other racialized groups had been treated in the past (and in fact are still treated now). Such an inegalitarian science, in short, would be as unacceptable as the present and past inegalitarian sciences.

This leaves the third possible response offered in our thought experiment, the affirmative action response, which seems to be the only acceptable response. It calls for an epistemic affirmative action program for science, one in which research serving the previously privileged would continue while research serving the others would be given extra advantages (like a head start for the previously weighted runners). The problem is that this leaves the nature of the extra advantages completely undefined. It also leaves undefined the conditions under which such an epistemic affirmative action program would be applicable – whether it would apply, for example, to the first (war on science) and second (perverse incentives and nonincentives) sets of problems confronting science as well as the third (relating to social biases such as racism). So, working all this out is a second project – a rectification project – to which philosophers of science might contribute.

At least one additional project might be pursued by philosophers of science: setting out, explaining the merits of, and applauding the many cases of science that do fulfill Bacon’s promise, especially the heroic work currently being done regarding the most pressing global challenges now confronting us (the speed with which the COVID-19 vaccines were developed, their effectiveness, and the antiviral treatments for the disease now available are especially obvious examples). This additional project, this celebration project, would include, as well, an analysis of the political and social (including hiring and funding) conditions under which exemplary science has been enabled. Such a project would be important for a number of reasons. For one thing, it would help to give a concrete understanding of the goal that Bacon defined for science, including real, full-blooded illustrations in contrast to the abstract, utopian characterizations provided in Bacon’s New Atlantis and other works. For another thing, it would anticipate and help to disarm the possible negative use by current science denialists of the prevention and rectification projects’ critical work. For a third thing, it would help to balance the picture of science provided by philosophers of science, allowing science’s strengths and successes to be fully appreciated as well as science’s shortcomings.

In short, three projects – a prevention project, a rectification project, and a celebration project – would seem to be necessary if there is to be any hope of saving the specifically humanist science Bacon promised. And philosophers, happily enough, can have a central role to play in all three.

The New Orthodoxy of Value-Laden Science

In the face of climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and rising anti-science populism, an unlikely alliance of scholars has emerged to “regain some of the authority of science,” as Bruno Latour puts it in an interview with Science (Vrieze Reference Vrieze2017). Historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science, who have long operated in competing intellectual niches, find a common calling in highlighting the existential importance but also increasingly fragile position of science in society. The aim of this chapter is to trace the emergence of this new intellectual orthodoxy and its defense of science in times of global challenges. While the new orthodoxy conveys important insights about the interface between science and society, I argue that it also neglects the roles of science in enabling the exploitation of people and the destruction of ecosystems. I conclude that it is time to move beyond the new orthodoxy by addressing the intricate relationship between science and global justice.

In her TED talk “Why We Should Trust Scientists,” historian of science Naomi Oreskes (Reference Oreskes2014; see also 2021) sets the stage with two salient issues: climate change and public health. Oreskes emphasizes that we need to trust scientists when it comes, for example, to a warming planet or vaccines. This is not because science is infallible, but rather because scientists collectively gather and evaluate evidence. Scientific consensus may be wrong, but it provides the best judgment that societies have when facing complex social-environmental challenges. In his essay “Science as craftwork with Integrity,” sociologist of science Harry Collins (2021: 297) does not only recommend trust but even love for science: “We should love science other than that which is visibly corrupt, because basing political decisions upon it gives rise to the best decisions.” Collins’ love is qualified in ways similar to Oreskes’ trust: Science is not characterized by its infallible objectivity but by its sophisticated craftwork. While science can be corrupted, noncorrupted science provides the best craftwork we have in addressing global challenges such as climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Latour’s authority, Oreskes’ trust, and Collins’ love for science provide a striking contrast with the legacy of the field of science and technology studies (STS). While philosophy of science became increasingly depoliticized in the postwar period (Reisch Reference Reisch2005), STS emerged as an interdisciplinary meeting ground of scholars who were often “involved in or influenced by counter-cultural and radical activities from the late 1960s, ’70s and ’80s” (Taylor and Patzke Reference Taylor and Patzke2021) and challenged science as a social system that is intertwined with oppressive social realities of “racism, imperialism, heterosexism and class oppression” (Harding Reference Harding1991). But the stakes are too high to focus exclusively on critique (Latour Reference Latour2004b). Collins et al. (Reference Collins, Evans, Durant and Weinel2020: 1) even go a step further in arguing that “STS erodes the cultural importance of scientific expertise and unwittingly supports the rise of populism.” History, philosophy, and sociology of science needs to move beyond such a performance of critique, toward a serious understanding of scientific expertise and integrity. As philosopher of science Philip Kitcher (2020: 119) points out, recognition of scientific expertise has become a truly existential matter as failure to respond to climate change will leave us with “a world so bereft of resources, so buffeted by a different climate, that no voice within it could rise to mourn and accuse.”

None of the scholars cited here want to return to an unquestioned authority of science. Science is not properly characterized in terms of value-free objectivity and “scientists invariably bring biases, values, and background assumptions into their work” (Oreskes Reference Oreskes2021: 64). Science is not some kind of infallible “magic” but rather a very specific kind of “craftwork” (Collins Reference Collins, Ludwig, Koskinen, Mncube, Poliseli and Reyes-Galindo2021: 304) that can go wrong and can be corrupted. The answer to global crises is not an old-fashioned scientism that preaches from the pedestal of certainty and value freedom. On the contrary, we need “science with a human face” that is reflexive about its complex entanglement with society, honest about its own limitations, and still able to produce the most reliable knowledge about global challenges such as climate change, food production, loss of biodiversity, public health, social inequality, soil erosion, and sustainable energy production.

In an admittedly polemical simplification, I want to call this broad position the New Orthodoxy of Value-Laden Science. Talk of a New Orthodoxy is apt as the picture is promoted by many of our most prominent science scholars and synthesizes major insights from history, philosophy, and sociology of science. Talk of a New Orthodoxy is polemical as it glosses over the many substantial differences between the scholars that are thereby lumped together. Scholars such as Collins, Kitcher, Latour, and Oreskes engage with science through different intellectual traditions and styles of reasoning that have often created explicit disagreements (e.g., Collins and Yearley Reference Collins, Yearley and Pickering2010 versus Callan and Latour Reference Callan, Latour and Pickering2010) and that remain reflected in overlapping but still distinct communities of research who identify with labels such as “sociology of science,” “science and technology studies,” or “history and philosophy of science.”

However, the intellectual diversity of these scholars makes their converging voices all the more remarkable. From interviews in Science (Vrieze Reference Vrieze2017) to TED talks (Oreskes Reference Oreskes2014) to features in the New York Times (Kofman Reference Kofman2018), disagreements of academic scholarship vanish in the background of a publicly articulated vision of the role of science in society. Roughly, this common vision contains four elements. First, an existential diagnosis of the fragility of science in the face of a planetary crisis. Science is indispensable for addressing global challenges such as climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic but simultaneously threatened by rampant anti-intellectualism and anti-science populism. Second, an opposition to the ideal of value-free science that downplays the historical and social embedding of research in order to present science as an unquestionable authority of pure objectivity. Third, an endorsement of “science with a human face” that acknowledges the deep entanglement of science and values but stresses the epistemic integrity and success of value-laden science that is not epistemically corrupted. Fourth, an emphasis on the public importance of science that requires qualified authority, trust, and even love in the face of existential planetary crises.

The New Orthodoxy synthesizes insights from decades of historical, philosophical, and sociological debate about the nature of science and its relations with society while bracketing remaining scholarly disagreements. Methodologically, it reflects the waning of a simple dichotomy between realist defenders of science who highlight value-free objectivity and constructionist critics who highlight the historical and social contingency of science. While this dichotomy is familiar from debates about the so-called science wars of the 1990s, so is its rejection as a false dichotomy (Carrier et al. Reference Carrier, Dragoman, Roggenhofer, Küppers and Blanchard2004). Yes, science is always embedded in values. Science is always shaped in sociocultural contexts and therefore does not lead to an absolute and subjectivity-free description of “the world as it is independent from our experience” (Williams Reference Williams1985: 139). No, that does not mean that “anything goes” and it does not mean that reality somehow collapses into mere social constructions. It also does not mean that we have to give up on scientific objectivity or that scientists lack epistemic authority when rejecting the claims of climate change denialists or anti-vaxxers.

Politically, transcending “science war” dichotomies also suggests a realignment of the relations between science and society. According to the New Orthodoxy, the question is not anymore whether science needs to be defended against postmodern and poststructuralist obscurantists or criticized as relying on false claims of value freedom and universality. Instead, the question is how to develop a middle ground that aligns science and society in reasonable ways and takes their complex relations into account. Instead of being isolated from society, science needs to inform policy while cultivating reflexivity about its own social character.

Contradictions in Framing Science

The New Orthodoxy provides a reasonable and well-balanced compromise that has been forged through major intellectual controversies about the nature of science and its relations to society. It incorporates legitimate criticism of absolutist interpretations of the objectivity, universality, and value freedom of science while simultaneously articulating a positive vision of the epistemic authority of science that provides a robust response to anti-science populism. The arguments of the New Orthodoxy are well suited to addressing the problem of anti-science populism but their extrapolation into a generalized defense of science risks invisibilizing contradictions that characterize the institutional reality of the science system. The risk of structural blindness is especially pressing in the New Orthodoxy’s lack of engagement with the role of science in society beyond Europe and North America. Programmatic statements in Oreskes’ Why Trust Science, or Latour’s Down to Earth, or Collins et al.’s Experts and the Will of the People depart from a rather uniform set of examples. Brexit and Donald Trump. Climate denialism and anti-vaxxers. Conspiracy theories and social media trolls. The Global South appears only if it conforms to this pattern, such as Jair Bolsonaro’s attack on the Brazilian science system and evidence-based governance. Indeed, the Brazilian case illustrates that anti-science populism is not an issue exclusive to the Global North (Reyes-Galindo Reference Reyes-Galindo, Ludwig, Koskinen, Mncube, Poliseli and Reyes-Galindo2021). However, it is misleading to address global contestations of science exclusively through the problem of anti-science populism.

The New Orthodoxy does not explicitly deny that science has contradictory and sometimes exploitative roles on a global scale. In fact, most proponents of the New Orthodoxy would probably accept many of the arguments of this chapter. However, the New Orthodoxy de facto invisibilizes such issues by simply not talking about the complicity of science in global exploitation while presenting seemingly general defenses of science. This issue of epistemic silencing (Dotson Reference Dotson2011; Spivak Reference Spivak, Nelson and Grossberg1988) becomes most salient when contrasting commentary from the New Orthodoxy with scholar activism that centers on questions of global justice. For example, Colombian post-development scholar Arturo Escobar challenges trust in science by arguing that “science has become the most central political technology of authoritarianism, irrationality, and oppression of peoples and nature” (2018: 89). According to Escobar, the science system is implicated in the production of global injustice in two ways. First, Escobar argues that science often constitutes a vehicle for “violent development” (2018: 89) in the Global South, where it contributes to neoliberal agendas of growth and modernization that deepen global economic inequality while redistributing the social and environmental burdens of biodiversity conservation, food production, and resource extraction onto the Global South. Second, Escobar argues that science functions as “a reason of state” that “even standardizes the formats of dissent” (2018: 89). Alternative visions of societies and environments are commonly articulated by social movements and scholars in the Global South who mobilize local philosophical resources such as Buen Vivir in Latin America (Varea and Zaragocin Reference Varea and Zaragocin2017), Ubuntu in Southern Africa (Simba Reference Simba2021), and Mātauranga Māori in Aotearoa/New Zealand (Watene Reference Watene2016). However, such alternatives remain invisible in mainstream development as they are not couched in academic vocabulary and therefore fail to adhere to formats of dissent that are defined by the science system. Despite notable exceptions in feminist scholarship (Harding Reference Harding2010; Wylie Reference Wylie, Padovani, Richardson and Tsou2015), they also remain invisible in mainstream philosophy of science that theorizes science almost exclusively through its expression in the Global North.

Escobar’s perspective on science as promoting narrow agendas of growth and modernization is mirrored in contributions by scholar activists beyond Latin America, including the work of the Indian ecofeminist Vandana Shiva. Shiva’s (Reference Shiva1991) influential The Violence of the Green Revolution inverts the narrative of agricultural modernization in the second half of the twentieth century as the most shining success of humanitarian research that elevated much of the “Third World” out of hunger and poverty. Written in the wake of the Bhopal disaster and a decade-long armed conflict in Punjab, Shiva states that “two decades of the Green Revolution have left Punjab ravaged by violence and ecological scarcity. Instead of abundance, Punjab has been left with diseased soils, pest-infested crops, waterlogged deserts, and indebted and discontented farmers. Instead of peace, Punjab has inherited conflict and violence” (Shiva Reference Shiva1991: 11). According to Shiva, the web of economic, environmental, social, and religious conflicts in Punjab is not simply a failure of policy but was co-created by a science system that “offers technological fixes for social and political problems, but delinks itself from the new social and political problems it creates” (Reference Shiva1991: 19). Shiva argues that the contradictions of the science system are obscured by a tendency to take credit for its societal benefits (e.g., climate change mitigation, poverty reduction, public health) while externalizing negative and destructive impacts as mere issues of misguided application and policy. “The tragic story of Punjab is a tale of the exaggerated sense of modern science’s power to control nature and society, and the total absence of a sense of responsibility for creating natural and social situations which are totally out of control” (Shiva Reference Shiva1991: 21).

The perspectives of scholar activists such as Escobar and Shiva are also reflected in many social movements in the Global South such as the “Rhodes Must Fall” movement in South Africa. The Fallist movement emerged in 2015 at the University of Cape Town in protest against a statue commemorating the British colonialist and mining magnate Cecil Rhodes (1853–1902) but quickly turned into a broader protest movement against the colonial and apartheid legacy of the South African university system. The omnipresence of Rhodes in South African academia became challenged as representing a university system that served colonial oppression and often still remains inadequate – for example, in its student fees and admission procedures – for purposes of contemporary South African society. As most clearly expressed in a variation “Science Must Fall” (Harris Reference Harris, Ludwig, Koskinen, Mncube, Poliseli and Reyes-Galindo2021), a part of the movement pushed even further in locating the problem not merely in colonial symbols or administrative issues but also in the very structure of South African science – the problems that are prioritized by researchers, the questions that are asked, the methods that are employed, the theories that are taught, the interventions that are derived. In this sense, Harris (Reference Harris, Ludwig, Koskinen, Mncube, Poliseli and Reyes-Galindo2021: 113) describes the Fallist movement as demanding a “path of accommodation and inclusion [that] leaves intact the integrity of scientific explanation while at the same time allowing for the possibility of tapping into African knowledge for a different type of edification.”

Contradictions in the Science System

The examples of Escobar, Shiva, and Fallism exemplify framings that radically differ from the New Orthodoxy as expressed in Latour’s authority, Oreskes’ trust, and Collins’ love for science. Of course, it may turn out that this is just an issue of framing that can be resolved through more nuanced analysis that highlights the qualified character of the New Orthodoxy’s defense of science. Defending science as “craftwork with integrity” (Collins Reference Collins, Ludwig, Koskinen, Mncube, Poliseli and Reyes-Galindo2021), for example, is intimately linked to criticizing science that lacks integrity because it has been epistemically corrupted by corporate influence, political ideology, or other factors. The suggestion is not to trust every scientist but to trust science as a collective endeavor of evaluating evidence and establishing a consensus of experts (Oreskes Reference Oreskes2021).

Highlighting this qualified case for trust may be seen as creating a middle ground for embracing some claims of scholar activists in the Global South, while rejecting others. Indeed, the influence of big corporations in areas such as agriculture and public health is worrying and justifies some of the concerns that Escobar and Shiva are articulating. The legacies of colonialism and apartheid did not magically vanish from the South African university system but require continued scrutiny as exemplified by Rhodes Must Fall. At the same time, science cannot be reduced to issues of corporate or colonial corruption as noncorrupted science remains the most reliable guide for addressing global challenges such as climate change or food security. In this sense, the New Orthodoxy may be seen as offering a compromise that acknowledges the need for critical reflexivity about epistemic corruption while dampening the sharp edges of activist criticism toward the science system as a whole.

Such a compromise fails, however, insofar as it frames all criticism of epistemically noncorrupted science as anti-science populism. For example, consider academic responses to Shiva’s critique of genetic modification and mainstream agricultural development. When invited to speak at an event of Students for a Sustainable Stanford in 2019, for example, forty-five leading scientists from European and North American institutions signed an open letter condemning Shiva’s alleged “use of anti-scientific rhetoric to support unethical positions” based on “preposterous,” “ridiculous,” and “nonsense” statements (Tabliabue et al. Reference Tabliabue and Miller2019). Positioning Shiva as an “anti-science populist” in analogy to climate change denialists or anti-vaxxers is also reflected in an article in the New Yorker with the title “Seeds of Doubt” (Specter Reference Specter2014), in a variation of Oreskes and Conway’s (Reference Oreskes and Conway2010) book Merchants of Doubt, which focuses on epistemic corruption of scientists by tobacco and oil industries rather than the contribution of agricultural sciences to the exploitation of people and planet.

There is plenty of room for criticism of Shiva’s often relentlessly polemic engagement with mainstream agricultural sciences. Reducing her critique to anti-science populism, however, exposes a fundamental misunderstanding that risks being reinforced through the framing priorities of the New Orthodoxy. Contradictions at the interface of science and society are not merely the product of epistemic corruption. They do not only appear when academic integrity is seduced by corporate influence or political ideology. The case of agriculture highlights that the science system as a whole, and not just its epistemically corrupted fringes, is producing contradictions in the sense that scientific knowledge is indispensable for addressing social-environmental crises but is also often a driving force in creating them.

Much of this remains off the radar of public interventions of the New Orthodoxy that tend to focus on a narrow set of disciplines (often climatology and epidemiology) in an equally narrow set of societal contexts (often the UK and USA). In programmatic articulations of the New Orthodoxy, this narrow frame of reference finds a reliable expression in stage setting that involves trustworthy scientific actors such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention versus populist advisories from Trump to anti-vax Facebook groups. If the frame of reference is defined this way, many contradictions of the science system indeed become invisible, and the dominant concern becomes the defense of well-established but publicly contested scientific evidence.

The problem with this frame of reference, however, is that it invisibilizes large parts of the science system that affect social-environmental systems. Addressing this as an issue of reference frames allows an analogy with a familiar debate in the philosophy of science about the diversity of scientific practice (Radder Reference Radder2012). Rather than assuming that a theory of the nature of science in general can be formulated through case studies from fundamental physics or evolutionary biology, philosophy of science has come to emphasize the diversity of disciplines from archaeology to biomedical sciences to engineering sciences to microbiology – not because fundamental physics or evolutionary biology do not matter but because the reality of scientific practice is too heterogeneous to be assessed through a narrow set of reference sciences. By analogy, engagement with the interface of science and society needs to look beyond a narrow set of examples from climatology or epidemiology – not because these fields do not matter but because the political structure of scientific practice is too heterogeneous to be assessed through a narrow set of reference sciences. The following sections, therefore, develop both critical and constructive diagnoses of social roles of science through a focus on disciplines and issues that are largely ignored by the New Orthodoxy.

The Case of Agricultural Production

Agriculture constitutes one of the most important junctions of science and society. The dramatic transformations of agricultural production shape the lives of billions of people around the world. Processes of “depeasantization” illustrate the scale and pace of these transformations: between 1991 and 2017, employment in agriculture fell from 58.01 percent to 36.55 percent in Nigeria, from 69.51 percent to 39.07 percent in Bangladesh, and from 55.31 percent to 17.51 percent in China (World Bank 2021a). However, focusing on depeasantization efforts and declining rates of agricultural employment only scratches the surface of the dramatic social effects of shifting agricultural production. As van der Ploeg (2018: 1) points out, “there are far more peasants in the world than ever before in human history. In absolute numbers, even the most conservative estimates suggest that there are between 500 and 560 million peasant farms in today’s world, and this number is continually increasing.” Peasant farming does not only continue to provide the livelihood basis for roughly two billion people, but depeasantization is also often intertwined with complex processes of repeasantization in the light of consequences such as urban poverty as well as declining profit margins for many farmers who compete on global commodity markets.

Transformations of agricultural production are worlds of contradictions. Scientific contributions to these transformations represent some of the brightest and darkest dimensions of the intersection of science and society. On the one hand, there is a positive narrative about a wide range of disciplines – for example, agronomy, chemistry, engineering, genetics, hydrology, plant breeding, and soil sciences – that have contributed to increasing yields and decreasing rates of hunger. Scientific contributions to pushing the boundaries of agricultural productivity have been so prominent in the challenge of “feeding the world” that they even produced a Nobel Peace Prize winner, Norman Borlaug, commonly described as the “father of the Green Revolution.”

On the other hand, it has become widely recognized that generic appeals to decreasing rates of hunger only tell one part of a much more complex story. Food insecurity has actually been on the rise again since 2014 (von Grebmer et al. 2020) and has spiked since the COVID-19 pandemic in the light of reinforcing effects of “climate, conflict, zoonotic diseases and pests, as well as economic shocks” (World Bank 2021b). Scientific research has not only failed to mitigate this trend but has also contributed to deepening this crisis through cash crop monocultures that are vulnerable to economic and environmental disruption, and through unsustainable production systems that contribute to droughts, loss of biodiversity, soil erosion, and other environmental factors that drive food insecurity (La Via Campesina 2020).

Furthermore, rates of food insecurity are only one relevant factor that is not always positively correlated with other relevant factors such as rates of poverty (Gentilini and Webb Reference Gentilini and Webb2008). Science-led increases in agricultural productivity often come in the form of “technological packages” of large-scale intensive agriculture that produce cheaper commodities through new seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, machines, seeding techniques, value chains, and so on. Even where these interventions have increased the availability of cheap food, they have often simultaneously driven land grabbing of peasant farms, rural unemployment, crumbling communities due to outmigration, and the explosion of urban underclasses (Sumberg, Thompson, and Woodhouse Reference Sumberg, Thompson and Woodhouse2012). Societal contradictions are therefore deeply embedded in processes of agricultural modernization – for example, by rapidly increasing urban underclasses while simultaneously making food more cheaply available to them. In this way, agricultural modernization often creates and connects spaces of poverty (rural spaces for creating food commodities as cheaply as possible, urban spaces of expendable peasant labor) and spaces of richness (concentrated ownership across food value chains, affluent consumer markets) on a global scale (van der Ploeg 2018: 93).

While it is possible to highlight contradictions of agricultural production at a general level, it is often more informative to address specific cases of scientific knowledge production and the specific interventions they enable. For example, genetic modification (GM) constitutes a salient issue at the interface of science and society with many more specific case studies. GM has a lot of potential for agricultural productivity that is only further increased through the rapid development of novel gene-editing technologies that promise ease and precision in manipulating targeted genes (Shah, Ludwig, and Macnaghten Reference Shah, Ludwig and Macnaghten2021). Beyond abstract talk about potential, there is also plenty of real life evidence. Proponents of GM crops often focus on Bt cotton as the shining example of a “pro-poor” technology with straightforward benefits for farmers (Ali and Abdulai Reference Ali and Abdulai2010). Containing a gene from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, Bt cotton produces a toxin that kills bollworms. Growing Bt cotton can therefore reduce risk of crop failures, costs of inputs such as pesticides, and health risks associated with widespread pesticide application. Especially in India, the largest cotton producer in the world, the introduction of Bt cotton in 2002 became associated with narratives of “technological triumph” with adoption rates over 90 percent, increasing yield, and reduced pesticide application (Kranthi and Stone Reference Kranthi and Stone2020).

The narrative of Bt cotton as a triumphal “pro-poor” technology is commonly contrasted with a counter-narrative, publicly most visible in Shiva’s characterization of Bt cotton as “Seeds of Suicide” (Shiva et al. Reference Shiva, Jafri, Emani and Pande2000) that create debt and dependency on global markets, allegedly causing an epidemic of farmer suicides in India. Almost thirty years after the approval of Bt cotton, it has become increasingly clear that these narratives of triumph and counter-narratives of failure capture parts of a complex and highly contradictory story (Kranthi and Stone Reference Kranthi and Stone2020). Initially developed for large-scale farms in North America, Bt cotton did not turn out to be a universal “pro-poor” technology but had wildly different effects in different agrarian and ecological contexts (Glover Reference Glover2010). Take the case of Burkina Faso, which approved Bt cotton in 2008. It was hailed as a “role model” for agricultural development in Africa with quickly rising adoption rates (2 percent in 2008, 70 percent in 2014) and sharply declining insecticide use (Pertry et al. Reference Pertry, Sanou, Speelman, Ingelbrecht, De Buck, Ingelbrecht, Heijde and Van Montagu2016). In the midst of this developing story of technological triumph, the Burkinabè cotton sector announced that it would cease producing Bt cotton, ending GM crop production in Burkina Faso entirely. As Luna and Dowd-Uribe (2020) point out, a wide range of problems had accumulated. Most importantly, the shorter fiber length of Bt cotton compared to conventional Burkinabè varieties made the former less profitable on global markets and created substantial losses for Burkinabè cotton companies. Luna and Dowd-Uribe (Reference Luna and Dowd-Uribe2020) highlight the problem that the marginalization of Burkinabè stakeholders (local farmers, researchers, and companies) led to distorted external studies of the alleged success of Bt cotton that misrepresented local realities and culminated in an abrupt collapse of GM crops in Burkina Faso. The contradictory effects of the introduction of Bt cotton in Burkina Faso reflect the complex (economic, ecological, social) dynamics of GM-based agriculture in Africa, which have led to only three out of fifty-four countries in Africa commercializing any GM crops whatsoever (ISAAA 2019).

Cases such as Bt cotton in Burkina Faso provide an entry point for engaging with the complexity of the interface of science and society – both in its potential for improving local livelihoods and its reality of often failing to realize this potential. And indeed, historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science have produced excellent scholarship on issues of global agricultural production (Curry Reference Curry2017; Hicks Reference Hicks2015; Lacey Reference Lacey2015; Millstein Reference Millstein2015; Motta Reference Motta2014). However, this scholarship does not fit well into framings of the New Orthodoxy that contrast reliable scientific consensus with anti-science populism. Despite the contested role of large agrifood companies such as Monsanto, the majority of proponents of GM crops are clearly not “Merchants of Doubt” (Oreskes and Conway Reference Oreskes and Conway2010) that trade epistemic integrity for corporate benefits; rather, they often include the most influential researchers in fields such as plant genetics at the most prestigious research institutions of the Global North. As a consequence, criticism of GM crops has often been rejected as “antiscience zealotry,” as Norman Borlaug famously put it, or even as a “crime against humanity,” as claimed in 2016 in an influential letter of 127 Nobel Prize laureates (Biddle Reference Biddle2018). History, philosophy, and social studies of science have the potential to highlight the need for a more substantial debate that acknowledges science as a key actor in addressing and producing global injustices in agricultural production. As much as research has the potential to improve agricultural production in ways that actually improve livelihoods, the reality of agricultural production often makes science central to the production of a wide range of injustices (e.g., environmental destruction, economic inequality and poverty, and health hazards).

Despite its undeniable virtues, the New Orthodoxy risks obscuring this complex and contradictory picture. Kitcher’s (2011) discussion of GM crops in Science in a Democratic Society provides a striking example by developing a vision of “well-ordered science” in which citizens are tutored by scientists and eventually learn that there “is nothing special, or especially risky, about genetic modification of organisms” (2011: 567). Kitcher’s discussion takes as its starting point a public ignorance of genetics (e.g., endorsements of the statement “GMOs [genetically modified organisms] contain genes, but ordinary organisms do not”) and a “picture of genes as mysterious little agents of evil, inserted into healthy foods by the wicked minions of agribusiness” (2011: 567). Given such a framing, the contestation of GM crops indeed seems largely analogous to the contestation of vaccines by anti-vaxxers: While there is scientific consensus about the safety of many GM crops and vaccines, rampant ignorance about the actual science and diffuse concerns about “big business” regarding everything from Monsanto’s seeds to Pfizer’s vaccines leads to the rejection of technologies that are literally saving the lives of millions of people.

While Kitcher frames his discussion in terms of the knowledge deficit of citizens about genetics, he does not consider the knowledge deficit of scientists about the social-environmental context in which GM crops are implemented. Tutoring appears as a unidirectional process in which scientists already hold all the relevant expertise and other stakeholders are negatively characterized through their lack of expertise. However, the case of GM crops illustrates that it is crucial to recognize the diversity of situated knowledges (Haraway Reference Haraway1988) and that it is often the scientists who need tutoring about the social-environmental ramifications of scientific knowledge production. This lack of engagement with contested realities of agricultural production is also apparent in the way Kitcher’s discussion characterizes GM opposition as “largely a European phenomenon” while “not much heard” among “many of the world’s people, particularly in Africa and parts of Asia, [whose] current agriculture is unable to provide them […] with ways of reliably growing the food they need” (2011: 318). The reality, however, is that GM adoption in the Global South has been hesitant at the policy level and publicly deeply contested. Burkina Faso is no exception. In 2018 (ISAAA 2019), GM crops covered 2.9 million hectares on the African continent – not even a quarter of Canada’s 12.7 million hectares. In Asia, the largest producer is India with 11.6 million hectares, but only GM cotton and no other crops. Apart from Indian cotton, the whole of Africa and Asia combined cultivates less GM crops than Canada and less than 20 percent of the USA’s 75 million hectares. Competing with the agricultural output of GM production in the Americas would risk the livelihoods of millions of farmers across Africa and Asia. Opposition is so strong that only three African countries (Eswatini, South Africa, and Sudan) commercialize any GM crops whatsoever.

While Africa and Asia illustrate hesitant GM adoption at the policy level, Latin America illustrates the public contestation of GM agriculture. For example, Brazil is the second biggest producer of GM crops in the world and GM varieties dominate the production of soy, maize, and cotton with an overall adoption rate over 90 percent (ISAAA 2019). The social contestation of GM crops in Brazil highlights the contradictions between visionary statements of biotechnological benefits “for the poor” and the economic reality of GM crops being part of technological packages that require land- and resource-intensive monocropping of cash crops for industrial use and export. GM agriculture is therefore often associated with a devaluation of traditional peasant production as underdeveloped and a push for agricultural industrialization that dispossess peasants and makes their labor expendable. It is therefore no surprise that peasants have been driving the resistance against GM crops in Brazil, most notably the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST). The roughly 1.5 million members of the MST embody many of the contradictions of agricultural production and of modernist development projects such as the construction of the Itaipú hydroelectric dam in Paraná that resulted in the eviction of more than 10,000 mostly Indigenous or peasant families. In the MST case, opposition to GM crops is therefore not driven by affluent consumers, as imagined by Kitcher, but is part of a wider agrarian struggle for peasant livelihoods in rapidly globalizing agrifood commodity markets.

None of this is to suggest that GM crops only have negative effects in Brazil or the Global South more generally. But it is simply misleading to characterize its contestation as “a European phenomenon” that derives from the privilege of not having to worry about food security. Just as I was writing this chapter, the Court of Justice of Paraná, Brazil, confirmed the responsibility of the multinational biotech company Syngenta for the murder of the peasant farmer and activist Valmir Mota de Oliveira, who was killed on an experimental GM field by a corporately hired militia (Brasil247 2021). Syngenta is not some shady “merchant of doubt” who aims to undermine the established consensus of agricultural sciences. On the contrary, the position of Syngenta at the very heart of agricultural science is difficult to miss from my office at Wageningen University and Research. The president of my university, the “world’s leading” agricultural university (WUR 2021), joined the nine-member board of directors of Syngenta in 2019 (Kleis et al. Reference Kleis, Louwerens and Sikkema2019). If only the contradictions of agricultural production could be modeled along the lines of familiar cases of climate change denialism or anti-vaxxers that demand a firm stance with the scientific mainstream against a vocal minority of “merchants of doubt.” Unfortunately, such a model is deeply misleading in many cases. The contradictions of agricultural production are embedded in our best science at the very heart of the science system.

Science as a Site of Injustice

The case of agriculture is not a strange outlier but illustrates a more general discrepancy between the potentials and realities of scientific knowledge production in global contexts. Indeed, scientific knowledge production has enormous potential for addressing social-environmental challenges while mitigating inequality. Agricultural sciences are a shining example of this potential as they can contribute to making food more affordable, more nutritious, and more sustainable for current and future generations. The reality of the agricultural sciences, however, not only highlights this potential but also the point that science can become a site of injustice that actually deepens inequality and social-environmental crises.

There may be a possible world in which the science system is entirely aligned with the public good wherever it is efficiently defended against epistemic corruption. In the actual world, however, the science system is deeply entangled with economic and governance regimes that also turn it into a source of justice and injustice. Agriculture may be an especially salient example, but similarly obvious stories could clearly be told in other domains, such as the health sciences. The ethically and politically outrageous handling of intellectual property regimes during the COVID-19 pandemic, which often prioritized corporate profits in the Global North over vaccine access in the Global South (Krishtel and Malpani Reference Krishtel and Malpani2021), provides just one straightforward example of contradictions in the health domain of similar magnitude to those in the agricultural domain.

Contradictions also appear in domains such as biodiversity conservation, which typically have more pristine reputations for being directed toward the common good. While corporate influence in agrifood and health domains raise relatively straightforward concerns about science as a source of injustice, fields such as conservation biology may appear as uncontroversially positive cases: scientific contributions to conserving biodiversity are of existential importance for all of humanity and the planet as a whole. There is no question that scientific contributions to biodiversity conservation are urgently needed and involve research in a wide range of disciplines such as conservation biology, ecology, engineering, environmental sciences, economics, ethnobiology, geology, management studies, policy studies, soil sciences, and sustainability sciences. Again, however, one-sided stories about scientific contributions to saving biodiversity risk distorting a complex picture. As political ecologists have documented for decades (Bryant and Bailey Reference Bryant and Bailey1997), not only the destruction but also the conservation of biodiversity is embedded in economic and governance structures that commonly deepen rather than address global inequality.

Indigenous peoples, peasants, and other marginalized communities are indeed often most directly threatened by the destruction of biodiversity through industrial agriculture, logging, mining, and other forms of resource extraction. However, this does not mean that they are always beneficiaries of biodiversity conservation. There are countless counterexamples. “Green grabbing” (Fairhead, Leach, and Scoones Reference Fairhead, Leach and Scoones2012), including the expulsion of Indigenous communities for the creation of conservation areas free of humans, provides an example. The criminalization of traditional and subsistence forms of resource extraction offers another case in point (Boelens, Guevara-Gil, and Panfichi Reference Boelens, Guevara-Gil and Panfichi2009). Yet another example are human–wildlife conflicts that almost exclusively affect marginalized communities “when wildlife forage on crops, attack livestock, or otherwise threaten human security” (Treves et al. Reference Treves, Wallace, Naughton-Treves and Morales2006: 383). As biodiversity has increasingly become a commodity for “green capitalism,” familiar contradictions appear in global biodiversity governance: As in the case of food commodities, biodiversity is also most cheaply produced in spaces of poverty to be consumed from spaces of richness – from carbon offsetting markets to ecotourism (Büscher and Fletcher Reference Buscher and Fletcher2020). Opportunity costs for the production of biodiversity are simply the lowest in spaces of poverty. Biodiversity regimes often contribute to stabilizing or actively creating those spaces by making other forms of economic activity illegal and concentrating economic benefits in the hands of large producers of biodiversity, such as owners of large carbon offsetting plantations or wildlife parks. “Science-led” or “evidence-based” approaches to biodiversity conservation are by no means a guarantee of resolving or even mitigating these tensions. On the contrary, the transformation of biodiversity into a form of capital (e.g., in ecotourism) and into a commodity (e.g., in carbon offsetting) are shaped by the mainstream producers of scientific knowledge.

Of course, it would be disingenuous to blame the science system for all injustices in domains such as agriculture, biodiversity, and health. However, it would be equally disingenuous to hail the science system for its potential to “feed the world,” “save biodiversity,” or “achieve global health” without addressing the reality of the science system with its wide range of both positive and negative effects in these domains. This does not mean ignoring the potential of the science system but rather not conflating potential with reality. A sober assessment of the current state of relations between science and society is crucial for developing normative visions of relations that actually harness the positive potential of the science system. The following section moves toward such a positive vision by emphasizing the role of three justice dimensions – distribution, recognition, and representation – for outlining an account of just science.

Science as a Site of Justice: Distribution, Recognition, Representation

My labeling of a “New Orthodoxy of Value-Laden Science” highlights the formative role of debates about values in creating an intellectual middle ground that transcends the dichotomies of the “science wars”: Values permeate scientific practice from the choice of research questions to methods to theories to dissemination. At the same time, appropriately situated values do not undermine the epistemic authority of science and create entry points for substantial conversations about socially engaged and democratically legitimized science. While there is indeed a lot to be learned from debates about “science and values” (Brown Reference Brown2020; Douglas Reference Douglas2009; Elliott Reference Elliott2017), they are no substitutes for debates about “science and justice.” First, much of the “science and values” debate has been focused on making a general case for the legitimacy of values rather than trying to identify just values in science (e.g., Ludwig Reference Ludwig2016). As such, the debate is helpful for navigating theoretical issues such as expertise, objectivity, or relativism but often provides much less guidance for engagement with the politics of scientific practices in contested social-environmental settings. Second, the focus on values can encourage a methodological individualism that focuses on the values of individual scientists in making certain choices (e.g., about conceptual framings, inductive risks, and theory choices) rather than the economic and governance structures in which these choices are embedded.

Rather than limiting the analysis to values in scientific practice, this section therefore outlines a broader, justice-oriented perspective. Political philosophy provides a wide range of frameworks for debates about justice (Kolm Reference Kolm2002) that also suggest different angles for debates about just science. For example, procedural accounts of justice will highlight stakeholder participation in science, while substantive accounts of justice will directly address the impact of science on livelihoods and well-being. Although it may be philosophically interesting to aim for one fundamentally unified account of justice, engagement with the messy reality of scientific practice suggests a multidimensional framework that can facilitate discussion of heterogeneous dimensions of scientific practice that relate to the production of heterogeneous (in)justices. Fraser’s (2009) account of global justice provides such a framework by highlighting two substantive dimensions (distribution and recognition), and one procedural dimension (representation), that are of immediate relevance to a positive vision of just science.

Distribution: One angle for thinking about just science is provided by debates about distributive justice. Scientific research shapes a wide range of practices with direct effects on the global distribution of benefits and burdens across and within societies. Some effects are of a direct, economic nature – for example, research facilitates novel technologies that lead to commercialized innovations with often varied effects on different societies and on different members within a society. At the same time, scientific research is also central to a wide range of further issues of distributive justice, such as exposure to environmental hazards, access to health services, and access to educational resources.

The food system illustrates the broad and differential effects of science on distributive justice. As argued in the previous section, research in fields such as agronomy, engineering, genetics, organic chemistry, plant breeding, and soil science has contributed to a radical transformation of food systems with differential impact on stakeholders. For many stakeholders, agricultural modernization has made food more accessible, as reflected in declining long-term rates of undernutrition. As previous sections have highlighted, however, the reality is much more complex. Not only have global rates of undernutrition been on the rise recently, but an exclusive focus on rates of undernutrition obscures the social and environmental price of agricultural modernization in many areas of the world. The reduction of production costs of food has often come with dispossession of land and loss of labor for peasant populations, creating novel spaces of poverty of enormous scales. Distributive concerns also extend beyond food itself toward issues such as exposure to environmental hazards such as synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. In all of these cases, scientific contributions are complex and multidimensional: For example, new seed varieties can reduce the need for synthetic fertilizers and pesticides and thereby reduce exposure to environmental hazards. At the same time, synthetic fertilizers and pesticides are themselves a product of scientific research and dependency on such chemical inputs is a mark of science-led industrialization of agriculture.

Distributive justice provides a lens for substantial engagement with such complex causal effects of agricultural research on the distribution of material benefits and burdens. Indeed, increasing the productivity of agriculture has the potential to contribute to distributive justice. Scientific research that contributes to agricultural sustainability is indispensable for addressing a wide range of distributive justice issues. At the same time, potential impact is not the same thing as actual impact, and the food system illustrates how deeply the current state of agricultural research is implicated in the production of distributive injustices. From the perspective of distributive justice, a focus on just science therefore highlights the importance of transforming the role of science in society for redistributing its diverse benefits and burdens, such as income, stable access to food, food safety, nutritional diversity, health hazards, or environmental degradation.

Recognition: While distribution is at the center of many justice concerns, it has been widely argued that justice is not exhausted by matters of distribution but also raises complex questions of recognition (Young Reference Young1990). As Fraser and Honneth (Reference Fraser and Honneth2003) put it: “Whether the issue is indigenous land claims or women’s carework, homosexual marriage or Muslim headscarves, moral philosophers increasingly use the term ‘recognition’ to unpack the normative bases of political claims.” Issues of recognition are closely entangled with issues of distribution, but the former often do not reduce to the latter. A woman who is sexually harassed in the workplace may be negatively affected in her career and income but clearly experiences injustices beyond such distributive effects. An Indigenous community that loses its land loses much more than simply the distributive benefits of control over natural resources. Thus, Fraser (Reference Fraser2009: 377) stresses “the demand for recognition of people’s standing as full partners in social interaction, able to participate as peers with others in social life. That aspiration is fundamental to justice and cannot be satisfied by the politics of redistribution alone.”

In the case of the global food system, concerns about recognition are most clearly reflected in the expansion of political activism from food security to food sovereignty (Noll and Murdock Reference Noll and Murdock2020). While the concept of food security is typically operationalized in distributive terms through stable access to nutritious and safe food, the influential Declaration of Nyéléni defines food sovereignty as “the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems” (Forum for Food Sovereignty 2007). Food sovereignty expands the scope of food security along two dimensions. First, the recognition of cultural (e.g., culinary, farming, fishing, hunting) practices and values that are crucial to the identities and self-determination of peoples. Even when agricultural intensification provides secure access to food, it may still constitute misrecognition of Indigenous peoples or peasants whose community structures, food practices, and ways of relating to environments are dismantled in the process. Second, the idea of food sovereignty highlights how recognition often turns out to be a condition for distributive justice. As Iris Marion Young (1990: 22) already argued, an exclusive focus on distributive indicators often “ignores and tends to obscure the institutional context within which those distributions take place, and which is often at least partly the cause of patterns of distribution.” The institutional context of agricultural modernization in the Global South is often based on misrecognition of local communities and food systems that contributes to unjust patterns of distribution – for example, through dominance of exogenous cash crops that replace Indigenous food crops but are vulnerable to crop failures or market fluctuations.

Expanding the scope of concern from distribution to recognition provides important and challenging lessons for an account of just science. While distributive concerns are of crucial importance, they need to be complemented through serious intercultural dialogue about the structure of the science system and a recognition of global epistemic diversity including the knowledge of Indigenous communities (Chilisa Reference Chilisa2019; Rivera Cusicanqui Reference Rivera Cusicanqui2010; Solano and Speed Reference Levya, Speed, Leyva, Burguete and Speed2008; Vijayan et al. Reference Vijayan, Ludwig, Rybak, Kaechele, Hoffmann, Schönfeldt and Löhr2022). Modern science and technology are deeply disruptive in peoples’ lives, and the food system provides some of the most dramatic illustrations of this, having fundamentally transformed rural spaces through dynamics of depeasantization and repeasantization, as described in previous sections. Not all forms of disruptive change are negative, but they are fraught with contradictions that can (and will) be evaluated in radically different ways from different, culturally situated standpoints. There is no “view from nowhere” in evaluating the global ramifications of science through a neutral set of distributive indicators. This lesson is especially challenging for scientists in the Global North who may be inclined to think of just science through well-intended distributive indicators rather than serious intercultural dialogue that recognizes heterogenous aspirations, needs, practices, and values.

Representation: Nancy Fraser (Reference Fraser2009) identifies distribution and recognition as “first-order questions of substance.” In the domain of agriculture, they include: How do transformations of agricultural productivity affect profits and wages, and whose? How do they affect patterns of land ownership and issues such as land grabbing? What are the effects on local community structures, from capital accumulation to division of labor to migration patterns? What are the effects on culinary cultures and diets? Who is exposed to what kinds of environmental and health hazards? What are the effects on local agrobiodiversity? How do they interact with processes of deforestation and soil erosion? What are the effects on community resilience in the face of disruptive events such as climate change and economic shocks? What are the effects on local relations with ecosystems such as leisure activities and spiritual connections?

Second-order questions of representation address the ways in which these first-order questions are negotiated. In the agricultural context, representation is crucial for two reasons. First, due to the entanglement of various issues of distribution and recognition that make evaluations of first-order questions deeply contested: How to weigh cheaper access to food against increased exposure to environmental hazards? How to weigh benefits for one group of stakeholders (say, the urban poor) against burdens for another group (say, the rural poor)? What is the weight of recognizing cultural dimensions of food sovereignty compared to more straightforward distributive aspects of food security? Second, issues of global justice often involve deep procedural inequality in negotiating these first-order questions. Agricultural development constitutes a prime example as it usually involves a dramatic discrepancy between dominant actors (e.g., corporations, donor countries, nongovernmental organizations [NGOs], scientists) and those who are most profoundly affected by interventions (e.g., Indigenous communities, peasants, urban underclasses). Second-order injustices of representation therefore often feed back into first-order injustices of distribution and recognition, since the former are often shaped by the interests of dominant actors. And even interventions that focus on benefits for marginalized communities can deepen injustices if they are grounded in a paternalistic second-order mode that evaluates first-order issues for rather than with these communities. For example, an NGO and a local community may have very different priorities in evaluating the complex ramifications of introducing a new cash crop for issues of distribution and recognition.

Expanding the scope of this discussion from first- to second-order questions of justice has important implications for a positive perspective of just science, as it highlights procedural aspects of the interface of science and society. Indeed, these procedural concerns have become increasingly prominent in science governance, reflecting broad shifts toward “transdisciplinary research methods,” “participatory action research,” and “public engagement” (Ludwig and Boogaard Reference Ludwig, Boogaard, Ludwig, Boogaard, Macnaghten and Leeuwis2021). Especially in development contexts, a wide range of debates about “inclusive development” reflects a reckoning with the paternalistic legacy of the science system that highlights epistemic diversity and the need to codevelop interventions with (rather than merely for) marginalized groups (Ludwig et al. Reference Ludwig, Boogaard, Ludwig, Boogaard, Macnaghten and Leeuwis2021). Second-order questions of representational justice thus have substantial implications for a positive vision of just science. It is not sufficient to incorporate first-order questions of distribution and recognition into research projects. The science system needs to become more inclusive and responsible in shaping practices together with affected stakeholders (Wittrock et al. Reference Wittrock, Forsberg, Pols, Macnaghten and Ludwig2021).

Fraser’s distinction between distribution, recognition, and representation provides a helpful heuristic for engaging with questions of just science. On the one hand, it provides an angle for critical engagement with contradictions of the science system that often remain invisible in debates about climate change denialism, anti-vaxxers, and other forms of epistemically corrupt anti-science sentiment. While these debates clearly matter, epistemic integrity does not guarantee just science. Beyond this critical attitude, however, an account of just science also provides an entry point for positive visions of the science system that aim to address the contradictions it produces. Scientific research can contribute to a more just distribution of resources, just as it can be shaped by an intercultural recognition of diverse standpoints and create spaces for their representation in scientific practice.

Lovable Science

Polemics aside, there are many important insights in the literature that I have lumped together as the “New Orthodoxy.” Yes, the world is facing social-environmental crises that require urgent action. Indeed, science is indispensable for addressing these crises. And yes, this requires challenging anti-intellectualism and anti-science populism as exemplified by climate change denialism and anti-vaxxers. Furthermore, much of the literature of the New Orthodoxy reflects an understandable frustration with the legacy of critique in STS (Latour Reference Latour2004b), which has often focused on a negative program of challenging scientific authority rather than a positive program of aligning science and society. Against this backdrop, Collins’ (2021) plea for loving science can be situated in a wider humanist tradition that recognizes that “the application of the fruits of scientific investigation by reason is crucial to shaping a better, collective future” (see the Introduction to this volume).

There are many reasons to highlight this humanist tradition in the light of global challenges, and it finds a beautiful expression in Collins’ call for loving science. Loving science, however, should motivate us to strive for lovable science. And epistemic integrity is not enough. Large parts of the science system are epistemically successful and still play deeply contradictory roles in both addressing and producing social-environmental crises. Science that is deserving of our love demands not only epistemic but also political integrity in confronting its impact on the world. Or, to put it as a slogan, lovable science is just science.

Engaging with science through first-order questions of distribution and recognition as well as second-order questions of representation opens spaces for a positive vision of both epistemic and political integrity in science. Realizing a humanist perspective on lovable science therefore demands an equally critical and constructive attitude. Engagement with the contested and sometimes fragile position of science in society is most convincing when showing that a more just science system is possible – that there can be science that is deserving of our love. Historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science have a lot to contribute to developing such positive and disruptive perspectives on the position of science in society. Indeed, such perspectives are a crucial part of the legacy of political philosophy of science from Otto Neurath to W. E. B. du Bois to Paul Feyerabend to Sandra Harding to Paulo Freire. Rather than simply accepting that “critique has run out of steam” (Latour Reference Latour2004b), however, this requires a constructive reading of critique that diagnoses current contradictions in order to open new directions for a more just interface of science and society.

A number of influential commentators embrace the view that the human sciences can deliver knowledge relevant to morality, the design of institutions, the framing of laws, and political life. For Daniel Dennett (Reference Dennett1996: 268), “ethics must somehow be based on an appreciation of human nature – on a sense of what human nature is or might be like and what a human being might want to have or be.” Steven Pinker, in The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, maintains that

The principle that “ought” can’t be derived from “is” is technically correct. Nevertheless, according to these writers, what “is” can provide guidance for what “ought” to be, assuming agreement in underlying values, such as relief of suffering and oppression. The empirical perspective invites us to look beyond interchangeable Kantian noumenal egos with abstract rights and obligations and to consider people’s endowments and desires, and their fit or lack of fit with the social conditions they live in. The more we can learn about human nature, it seems, the more humane and the less wasteful our institutions and practices can be made to be. Frustration results when needs are not satisfied, when people are required to behave in ways that are unnatural for them, and when talents and interests have too little room for development. The recommendation to adopt a scientific, rather than a purely philosophical, approach to designs for living is accordingly sound to the extent that the sciences can shed light on human needs, capabilities, and sources of satisfaction and dissatisfaction.

Nevertheless, any suggestion that we can discover, not only some, but all of people’s needs and abilities merely by examining their choices and their successes and failures is naive. In a society that limits choices and that restricts opportunities for the development and display of talents, these will not be revealed.Footnote ¹ Nor does empirical observation distinguish between morally acceptable needs and the so-called perversions or the hunger for power and domination. The human sciences – anthropology, biology, and comparative ethology – are supposed to take us under the surface to show us what is really going on: what human nature, undistorted by culture, really looks like. But anthropology began as a study of cultural, ethnic, and sexual difference, not simply as a study of what makes humans human. And the long history of “scientific racism” and “scientific sexism” can undermine confidence in the ability of anthropology and biology to promote democracy and respect for other people’s feelings.

Where “scientific racism” was a comparatively modern development, women and their parts have been observed, anatomized, weighed, and measured – and thereby found wanting – since ancient times. More recently, the theory of evolution by natural selection has inspired countless writers, beginning with Charles Darwin, to consider its applications to social and political life. Yet the prescriptions and policies claimed to be rooted in Darwinian science, first by “sociobiologists” and later by “evolutionary psychologists,” range from the disappointing to the disturbing. They have appealed to concepts of inheritance, innateness, and evolutionary significance in order to parade values – or at least to sigh over inevitabilities – that have an authoritarian and archaic cast to them. In the latest version of biology-is-destiny, we were told that it is the biological goal of all living things to leave a lineage, and that insofar as males and females are differently specialized to maximize their personal chances of passing on their genes, we can expect the socio-economic-political world to be permanently constructed on the basis of difference, unless misguided ideological fanatics succeed in forcing social equality, and with it misery on us. Claims about male–female sameness, including that “the mind has no sex,” belong, it is implied, to a philosophical fantasy world.

This chapter is written to dispel the nagging suspicion – or the frank accusation – that the real world, not the world of noumenal selves and their posited equality, contains forces and constraints, rooted in biology and human ecology, that make the equality of men and women neither fully achievable nor really desirable. While I agree that there is sexual specialization as a result of natural selection and that it functions importantly in the historical explanation of the division of labor, I believe three long-standing myths have been overturned by research in the human sciences: the myth of female cognitive inferiority; the myth of female domesticity; and the myth of female natural monogamy.Footnote ² To that end, I focus on research in psychology, anthropology, and primatology that has upended the sociobiological “theory of women,” with its echoes of ancient theorizing, that began to appear in the literature in the late 1940s and that has persisted in widely cited articles and popular books. The still-to-be-digested revisions of these sciences are not products of specifically feminist research; they belong to ordinary science. But they awaited the political and social changes that brought women, who asked new questions and noticed new phenomena, into the natural and social sciences.

The “theory of women” comprising the three myths was enough to explain women’s exclusion from important offices and activities and to justify behavioral restrictions on women and liberties for men. It was held to explain an important and uncontroversial set of observations. Until quite recently, in what vocational roles did the ordinary person most often find women? Certainly not in the top ranks of commerce, politics, scientific research, literary criticism, public architecture, or the arts – these roles were believed accordingly to lie outside their competence. As Charles Murray asked in 2005, “Where are the female Einsteins?” (Murray Reference Murray2005b).

According to Richard Lynn (Reference Lynn2017: 9–42), men beat women not only at tennis, golf, and footraces but also at thinking. Human males over the age of sixteen, he reported (2017: 145–156), are better than women at Raven’s Progressive Matrices, a test of nonverbal reasoning through pattern analysis that does not depend on cultural knowledge, and better at winning top prizes in science, chess, Scrabble, and bridge. As well as not being found among the decision makers, winners, and influencers, women were not observed seeking and collecting packs of sexual servants. Mostly, women were to be found at home, taking care of things, and as active in the world in helping others and providing for their needs. The normative image emerging from observation was that of a human lacking a first-class intellect, but possessing propriety, altruism, and charm. There were obvious deviations from the norm, but in fiction and in real life, they were liable to be ridiculed, feared, diminished, obstructed, or tragedified and punished.

I now turn to the three myths in order.

The Myth of Cognitive Inferiority

The notion that high levels of intelligence are a sex-linked trait shaped by natural selection goes back to Darwin, who was convinced of not only the intellectual inferiority of women but also their lesser creativity, coordination, and even sensory acuity. Darwin supposed that the inheritance of acquired characteristics (“habit”), as well as natural selection on the male sex, had produced this abundance of excellence.

Modern humans have large brains,Footnote ³ and our proliferation across the globe and the extinction of our hominin cousins is often ascribed to this anatomical feature. Such large, heavy brains are metabolically costly. Though the brain accounts for only 2 percent of the weight of the human body, it uses 20 percent of the organism’s energy budget just to maintain and regulate basic bodily functions. Why did such an expensive-to-feed organ evolve? What benefits did it bring its possessors?

Following Darwin’s hypothesis, on one view popular in the 1960s, the modern human brain evolved to enable male humans to solve complex survival problems in the environment of early adaptation; men are thus implicitly the developers and owners of these large brains. In the famous Lee and DeVore anthology, Man the Hunter, William Laughlin declared that “hunting is the master behavior pattern of the human species” (Laughlin in Lee and DeVore Reference Lee and DeVore1968: 307). Bipedalism was suggested to have evolved to free the hands for spears, boomerangs, and bows and arrows, and to have led to the evolution of language and intelligence to support the coordinated activity of early hunters. Laughlin detailed the skills required in the hunter: knowledge of animal types and habits; scanning, stalking, and immobilizing; and the retrieval and transportation of the carcass. The growth of the neocortex allegedly allowed for abstract thought, imagination, impulse control, and other well-developed and typically human capacities, and was driven by this hunting adaptation.

On another view, that of Geoffrey Miller (Reference Miller2000: 97), brain growth was driven by sexual selection on male humans. According to Miller, developed mentality was a male display feature, analogous to the peacock’s tail, with clever, artistic men preferred by early women as mates. Miller went on to argue that the struggle for wealth, position, and deference through cultural production is the specifically human form of antler-locking, head-butting, or biting and chasing that determine male “access” to fertile females in many other mammalian species. Men are more driven than women are, he thought, to create objects and structures that can make them famous and celebrated, or at least esteemed and respected. Female variants who allocated too much time to the pursuit of status and mating opportunities, on this theory, were out-reproduced by more specialized maternal competitors, and male variants who allocated too much time to direct paternal care were out-reproduced by more specialized promiscuous status-seekers. Implicit in both accounts is that the feeding role and baby care do not require much raw inventive, strategic, and computational brain power, so nature could skimp on this endowment for women and compensate with extra emotional responsiveness.

The notion that male hunting drove the increase in brain size because men but not women needed to be intelligent is no longer regarded with much favor. Animals with much smaller brains can locate, track, slay, and transport prey, and they can strategize and coordinate their kills with others. And where sexual selection is concerned, although humans use their large, evolved, and culturally developed brains for social, cultural, and intellectual purposes, and even to attract mates – for modern men and women both place “intelligence” high on their list of desiderata – a top-level mind is unlikely to be a male display feature females lack. In the peacock case, it is disadvantageous for a female to have a fancy tail. Like many female birds with relatively exposed nests, for her own safety, she must remain “drab” and inconspicuous. In birds that build nests relatively inaccessible to predators, both sexes are brightly colored.Footnote ⁴ It is hard to see of what protective advantage it could be for women to be less intelligent and less artistic than males.

In any case, the Miller account of the evolution of a sex-linked trait is unsustainable, simply because decades of testing have shown that men and women vary little or not at all with respect to intelligence, currently understood as including memory, learning, problem solving, flexibility in behavior, language fluency, creativity, speed of understanding, and ability to function in social settings (Colom Reference Colom, Juan-Espinosa, Abad and García2000: 57–68).Footnote ⁵ The higher cortical functions needed for planning, designing, and governing, considered in the abstract, are the same in men and women. They have essentially the same ability to recognize patterns and perform inferences. Humor, aesthetic appreciation, and language use are not very different. And apart from some small number of tasks concerned with spatial orientation, nimbleness, perception, and fluency, favoring one sex or the other, men and women differ little in problem-solving ability.

An important datum is nevertheless the “two tails” phenomenon. There are more men at the very top and the very bottom of the IQ scales: men are more variable than women in this regard and in other regards. This has an important biasing effect in social judgment, as I explain later. For now, it is sufficient to remark that in the view of the most recent researchers sex differences in variability do not account for sex differences in high-level achievement. Neither male-favoring cognitive differences nor the number of males in the upper regions of the IQ distribution are large enough to explain the predominance of men in science and engineering (Brush Reference Brush1991; Halpern et al. Reference Halpern, Benbow, Geary, Gur, Hyde and Gernsbacher2007).

What do we actually know about brain size, intelligence, and its evolution? We think of our brains as mainly used for planning, strategizing, inventing, and reasoning, but this is an error. Most of the volume of the brain is devoted to sensory perception, the regulation of movement, and physiological homeostasis and periodicity: the regulation of bodily processes, especially the release and suppression of hormones and neurotransmitters. Lynn (Reference Lynn1994: 257–271) ascribed male success in general to men’s larger brains,Footnote ⁶ but with the exception of a few traits, such as those related to anger and empathy, and, potentially, spatial abilities, male/female differences in behavior, interests, and mental health are not reliably correlated to brain anatomy (Eliot Reference Eliot, Cheung and Halpern2020: 63–82).Footnote ⁷ Larger organisms in any case require more neurons to regulate and control their bodies (Sowell et al. Reference Sowell2007: 1550–1560). According to Lisa Eliot: “Most male/female brain differences are attributable to body size; thus, all brain structures are 10 percent larger in males, but after accounting for individuals’ total brain volume, sex/gender explains only ~1 percent of the variance in structural volumes at both the cortical and subcortical level.” Women have on average thicker cerebral cortices, associated with greater intelligence, than men (Ritchie et al. Reference Ritchie2018: 2959–2975).

Evolutionary theory recognizes a number of coexisting conditions for increasing brain size. These include concentrated nutrition on account of its high caloric requirements; a system for cooling the brain, which cannot sweat inside the skull; and parturition of relatively underdeveloped infants. These features would have had to evolve in step with the trend toward larger brains. The following main contenders to the man-the-hunter theory and the peacock’s tail theory regard selection pressures as operating on both sexes and are based on the concepts of longevity, sociality, and expertise.

Kristen Hawkes’ “Grandmother Hypothesis” (Hawkes et al. Reference Hawkes, O’Connell, Bluton Jones, Alvarez and Charnov1998: 1336–1339) proposes that human evolution involved the coevolution of three features: long life, protracted infancy and childhood, and large brains. Large brains are found only in animals with relatively long gestation, long juvenile periods, delayed reproduction, and long life – animals such as whales, elephants, and humans – committed to the “K-strategy” of reproduction, by contrast with the “r-strategy” of trying to maximize the number of offspring in a short lifetime,Footnote ⁸ in the hope that some manage to survive. According to Figueredo et al. (Reference Figueredo, Váquez, Brumach, Schneider, Sefcek, Tal, Hill, Wenner and Jacobs2006: 246): “Traits associated with a high K-strategy in humans are long-term thinking and planning, commitment to long-term relationships, extensive parental investment, existence of social support structures, adherence to social rules (e.g., altruism and cooperation), and careful consideration of risks.”

Like large brains, long childhood is a prima facie evolutionary puzzle. A protracted period of nutritionally dependent, nonreproductive childhood is expensive in biological terms; an organism that can shave a few months off its period of dependency on others and begin to reproduce would seem to have an evident advantage. Hawkes’ hypothesis links the K-strategy to brain evolution, at the same time explaining the cultural importance awarded to grandmothers, especially maternal grandmothers. Hawkes proposed that long childhood and larger brains coevolved with a lengthening human lifespan, including a lengthy post-reproductive phase. While chimpanzee females retain their fertility until they die – the lifespan of a chimpanzee in the wild is about forty-five – the fertility of human females peaks in the early twenties and begins to decline by the early thirties, coming to a decisive end sometime in their early fifties, when hormonal cycling falters and then comes to a halt. Yet a hunter-gatherer female who lives into her mid-forties can expect to live another twenty or so years. Hunter-gatherer males as well tend to outlive their reproductive span when they are not victims of homicide.

Hawkes argued that selection for cessation of reproduction and for a period of post-reproductive vitality in women enabled them to shift their effort from the care and feeding of extra children up to the point of their own demise to the care and feeding of grandchildren. This shift allowed for a prolonged period of nutritional dependency in childhood and the slow maturation of a large brain, a process which in turn gave an even greater selective advantage to hardworking grandmothers (Davison and Gurven Reference Davison and Gurven2022: 1–12). Other theorists have argued that the elderly are essential to the human way of life because of their stored knowledge – for example, of unusual foods to be eaten in times of famine (Shipton Reference Shipton1990: 369).

Longevity in turn requires brain redundancy. “The brain,” observes Nick Humphrey (1999: 2),

The reason is that we have more than enough brain to make up for it. The chief purpose of the overly large brain may be to furnish back up power for essential physiological and psychological operations, keeping senescence and senility at bay.

Robin Dunbar’s (2003: 163–181) socialization hypothesis proposes that the brain coevolved with larger tribe sizes and greater interdependence of their members. This created a need for language and for “social intelligence,” for keeping track of one’s relations with a multitude of others, for understanding, predicting, and directing their behavior and adjusting one’s own to it, for political outwitting and outmaneuvering, and for recognizing and punishing wrongdoers. In a related vein, Dean Falk and Sarah Hrdy have proposed that infants and children, together with their minders, prompted the evolution of the human mind, jointly evolving a propensity for shared attention and playfulness. Hrdy (Reference Hrdy2009) suggests that human babies evolved into charming, demanding, interactive beings – perhaps even into linguistic beings – in order to engage attention from not only their hormonally saturated mothers but also from others who were less thoroughly primed but whose nervous systems were vulnerable to this type of stimulation. Such babies might have grown up into sociable, mind-reading adults who were in turn better able to soothe and care for active and curious young babies. Falk (Reference Falk2004: 498–501) points out that human babies, unlike ape infants, cannot cling to the fur of their mothers. They need to be set down – parked – so that their mothers can do other things. Mothers needed to warn, control, and reassure when at a distance, and language and empathy permit this.

A third current theory is expertise: Hillard Kaplan and his coauthors (Reference Kaplan, Hill, Lancaster and Hurtado2000: 149–186) have argued that not only expert tracking and hunting but also food preparation practices coevolved with a longer human lifespan, and a larger brain that permitted learning, practice, and mental storage. John Skoyles (1999: 1–14) has suggested that large brains coevolved not with general intelligence, which is measured on tests by the speed with which one can spot patterns or complete inferences, and which is measurably normal even in brains of only 750 cubic centimeters (ccs), as compared with the normal brain of around 1,300 ccs, but with the capacity to learn through practice and refinement.

Nonhuman animals, as Descartes noted, are expert but in limited domains, such as nest building and prey snatching, and need little practice to perform activities necessary to survival. Humans, by contrast, can master a variety of skills but only by observing, submitting to instruction, and engaging in solo effort involving much trial and error. They are motivated to learn new arts and to stick with learning even when frustrated. Hunting and foraging animals, as noted, do not need human-level intelligence to find food, but the human way of life requires considerable expertise. The usual diet of the environment of early adaptation was apparently rather chewy and sour. Many vegetable foods require boiling, steeping, or pounding if they are to be made tender, sweet, or nonpoisonous, and considerable technological inventiveness was required to make containers for transporting, processing, and storing. The remarkable tools and techniques of hunter-gatherer women for building shelters, making garments and ornaments, taxidermy, tattooing, and pottery making, as well as all aspects of food preservation, has been well documented. As one social historian comments (Mason Reference Mason1929: 158), the modern lucrative employments “originated with her.”

While Lynn’s claims for 3–5 points higher male IQ might seem puzzling, since IQ test are currently formulated so that the average IQ of men and women is the same,Footnote ⁹ the more interesting aspects of his argument concern the so-called right tail of the IQ distribution and mathematical ability.Footnote ¹⁰ When tests are scaled as described, men are, as noted, more frequently found than women at the high and low ends of the intelligence spectrum. The ability to perform spectacular feats of mental calculation and the hyperfocus on abstract objects associated with tech workers is more common in men. Although the size of the right tail varies from culture to culture and has decreased in recent years, it is still there. Jonathan Wai and colleagues, in their longitudinal study (2010: 412–423), found that in the top 0.01 percent of mathematics SAT students, the male advantage declined from 13.5:1 to 3.8:1 over the decade between 1980 and 1990. The reasons for this dramatic improvement in women’s test scores have not been fully explored, but the most attractive hypotheses must focus on the motivational changes in women and their parents and teachers, brought about by the feminist movement, that encourage the cultivation and display of competence and competitiveness.

Two-thirds of the population falls within the IQ range of 85–115, and most academics are found in the 120–140 regions, comprising about 11 percent of the population. At the very top of the scale, where IQs of 160 and above and dazzling mathematical abilities are found, often along with striking personal qualities,Footnote ¹¹ the ratio of men to women is about 6:1. We are talking here about very few people – about 0.03 percent – of the population, or 3 persons per 10,000; approximately 1 in every 20,000 of those is a woman. Yet the cultural worship of the male “genius” – usually associated with mathematical and musical accomplishments known to the general public – operates to the disadvantage of the entire female sex.

Reilly, Neumann, and Andrews (Reference Reilly, Neumann and Andrews2022) found that men estimate their own intelligence as higher than it is when measured, and women estimate theirs as lower than it is when measured. Married men tend to believe they are more intelligent than their wives (Kidder, Fagan, and Cohn Reference Kidder, Fagan, Cohn, Lerner and Lerner1981: 239–255). A number of men I have queried in academic life have admitted to the belief that they are intellectually superior to every woman, or nearly every woman, they have ever met. The actual shape of the IQ distribution shows how mistaken this belief is. At any given level, running into someone of the opposite sex with more IQ points than you varies, but given the statistics above, it’s bound to be a routine occurrence in any professional milieu. If we installed people in university posts and paid them according to their IQ points alone, the composition and emoluments of our academic faculties would look very different than they do.

Yet the more frequent surfacing of male “geniuses” at such tasks as mathematics, architecture, musical composition, and military conquest in the record of civilization redounds to the credit of the male sex as a whole in our minds. While we would not want to have Bobby Fischer or Isaac Newton on the Supreme Court, it is thanks to the Bobbys and the Isaacs, as well as the Alberts, the Ludwigs, the Alexanders, and the Napoleons, that all men benefit in reputation.

Why do well-educated men tend to believe they are cleverer than all the women they meet? I suspect it is that they feel that they (and not the women they meet) belong to the club of Einstein, Newton, Beethoven, and the top men in their fields, and they know intuitively that they do not belong to the club of all the men on the left-hand tail. All women are seen as, by comparison, pretty much average.

The Myth of Female Domesticity

“There is no society,” David Barash told us in his Reference Barash1979 book The Whisperings Within,

In this passage, Barash springs from historical time and its written record – beginning about 5,000 years ago – back to the early days of mammalian evolution. He fails to take into account what can be inferred from the study of contemporary hunter-gatherers, whose forms of social organization are theorized as corresponding to those of the anatomically and neurologically modern humans of the environment of early adaptation and the Paleolithic period. Although the few remaining hunter-gatherers are not living fossils, and although even they have been altered by contact with explorers and occupiers, governments, and trade, their mode of life offers compelling clues as to “human nature” as it whispered within before being shushed and shouted over by the development of civilization through the invention of agriculture and metalworking.

Barash’s claim that women have always devoted more time than men to direct childcare is true, but his statement that women are “left holding the babies” is misleading. The second sentence should have read: There are only a few hunter-gather societies in which women do not bear the primary responsibility for finding and furnishing the majority of food for the community. Only under civilization did some women become dependent on male effort and earnings to sustain themselves and their children, and even under civilization, poor women have continued to be the major providers for the household.

Hunting is a nutritionally and culturally significant activity, but the Lee and DeVore volume – as its own editors pointed out in the introduction – might as well have been titled less sensationally “Man the Hunter-Gatherer,” or even “Man the Gatherer,” for repeatedly the point was made that most of the calories consumed by savannah, desert, and forest-dwelling people are vegetable foods, roots, shoots, fruits, and berries, and that this food was gathered mainly by women. Meat is highly valued by hunter-gatherers for its taste and for its fat, protein, and mineral content. But only in the far northern regions colonized late by humans, where the growing season was short and grasses predominated, has meat been found to compose the bulk of the human diet. For southern populations, it would be more accurate to say that hunting is 25 percent of the food-getting behavior pattern of the human species, and foraging, scavenging, and gathering, 75 percent (Lee in Lee and DeVore Reference Lee and DeVore1968: 30–48).

Most hunter-gatherer societies observe a division of labor. This is not because women are not strong enough to kill animals, or because they have limited spatial abilities and cannot find their way around, or because they are too burdened with children. In the Arctic, it has been reported, women will occasionally hunt seal or caribou on their own, or bring down deer with sticks, ropes, dogs, or nets. The Agta women in the Philippines hunt deer and pig in the forest, alone or with the help of dogs, and communal hunting or solitary hunting of small game is an activity performed by both sexes (Estioko-Griffin and Griffin Reference Estioko-Griffin, Griffin and Dahlberg1981: 121–154). Latter-day female gatherers range, in groups or very often alone, as much as five to seven miles from camp with their sacks and their digging sticks, while, in many cases, carrying an infant or very young child or in the middle to late stages of pregnancy. Children over the age of two or three are not taken into the bush where they are a nuisance to working mothers: They are too heavy to carry, they cannot walk fast, and they get thirsty and tired; they remain behind with other caregivers, such as grandmothers. While both men and women forage, men do not tend to collect and transport plant materials using nets, containers, or other means, or to share plant foods they have gathered with others as women do.

A point that emerged in Man the Hunter is that while gathering is obligatory for human societies, hunting is more or less optional. Many men in hunter-gatherer and indeed in hunter societies are reluctant to hunt, do not enjoy it, or are not very good at it. In the far north, where there is almost nothing else to eat, women must nag men to get them to hunt. Among the Hadza of the Serengeti plateau in East Africa, one of the last hunter-gatherer societies surviving to be studied, only men in their late teens, twenties, and thirties were successful hunters, and about half had failed to kill even one animal the entire year (Woodburn in Lee and DeVore Reference Lee and DeVore1968: 54) Older men in their fifties and sixties did not hunt but worked alongside women and sometimes alongside children. “Only about 60 percent of the population of Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert appeared to be working at all” (Lee and DeVore Reference Lee and DeVore1968: 36). What did people do the rest of the time? They visited, chatted, gambled, manufactured or repaired things, or rested. This, we can reasonably suppose, was the “master behavior pattern” of our species.

Nothing, accordingly, could be further from the human template than the housewife-at-home-with-the-children. Adult women in hunter-gatherer societies spend time in the company of other adult women in physically demanding and essential economic activity outside the home; children are taken care of by older children and by elderly relatives who are no longer as mobile. Women have not evolved to be round-the-clock hearth-hugging nurturers. They need and gain psychological satisfaction from moving around in the world, exploring their terrain, facing uncertainties and dangers, and bringing back food and necessities to their dependents, both men and children.

The frequently heard argument that it is best for infants and young children to be cared for by the mother alone has no basis in anthropology or psychology and is certainly not a consequence of our evolutionary history. If women are hormonally and neurologically primed to devote themselves full time to infants and toddlers and to gain satisfaction from doing so, why do somewhere between 10 and 25 percent of women – the higher figure pertains to the lower socioeconomic brackets – develop a tragic array of symptoms, neglecting their babies and young children, physically abusing them, and developing a sense of apathy toward their own lives? Hormonal explanations for post-partum depression have been discredited; and evolutionary explanations have lately come to the fore. Studies from across the globe suggest that depression may be the effect of being unable to cope alone and a signal to others, a cry for more help (Hagen Reference Hagen1999: 325–359).

An important feature of the human way of life is what Hrdy terms “alloparenting.” Human infants, as noted, cannot cling; they must be carried on the hip or in slings or backpacks. As such they are shareable; they can be handed around to female relatives, to fathers, and to older children. Hrdy (Reference Hrdy1999) proposes that early humans were “co-operative breeders,” that human mothers relied on a spectrum of “allomothers,” not only grandmothers but also fathers, siblings, and other boys and girls for infant and childcare. Where a chimpanzee mother carries her offspring and jealously guards it until it is able to nourish itself, a human mother is willing to relinquish her baby into the arms of others immediately after birth, and other humans are willing to provide it with nutrition and care, freeing the mother for economic tasks and social interaction, and enabling her to become pregnant again, given the short window of peak fertility she has available to her. Cooperative breeding arises in a number of species; it is evidently consistent with selfish genes, though it cannot entirely be explained by kin selection, insofar as distantly or unrelated individuals, including foster children, are observed in babysitting roles.Footnote ¹²

Barash’s comment that “men do men things” while women mind the baby proved to be not only anthropologically but also historically uninformed. Throughout history, women have always worked outside the home. In ancient Mesopotamia, Wright (Reference Wright and Wright1996: 89), following Kang (Reference Kang1973), states, women worked in “harvesting and irrigating fields, carrying and winnowing barley, hauling barley into granaries,” and also in “milling, weaving, and loading goods into boats.” Medieval texts and illustrations cite and depict women in a variety of skilled occupations, as butchers, ironmongers, hatters, shoemakers, bookbinders, painters, goldsmiths, innkeepers, veterinarians, and farmers.Footnote ¹³ But the adaptation of women to work outside the home and outdoors and their drive to feed their families had a consequence. For human men, paternal investment is optional, where not enforced by law or rigid custom, and where men have not been forced into provider roles, they can demand status or high wages if they are to work, while most women, except in the historically rare cases of middle-class prosperity, needed to perform manual work of low status outside the home. Even in poor societies, men have more leisure and more discretion over their time, their expenditures, and their choice of activities than women (Dasgupta Reference Dasgupta1995: 308ff.). In wealthy societies, this extra freedom and leisure enabled them to monopolize the high-status tasks of culture and civilization.

The Myth of the Naturally Monogamous Female

The notion that men are naturally polygamous and women naturally monogamous is a favored topic for journalists and popularizers of evolutionary psychology. While its alleged ramifications are extensive, the credulity attached to it comes as something of a surprise. For in philosophy, theology, and fiction, strict fidelity to a partner was considered the ideal, but real women were known to be alluring, fickle, deceitful, liable to illegitimate pregnancy, and accordingly dangerous.

This myth is pernicious in many ways. It interprets the battle of the sexes as a conflict between a male need for freedom and gratification and a female demand for food, shelter, and money. It confuses female choosiness with a lack of sexual drive. Its proposal that men select sexual partners on the basis of face and figure, whereas women select sexual partners on the basis of status and income, creates a flattering halo around the predatory behavior of older men toward younger women. It tells women not only what they may and may not do in order to be natural and normal but also what they ought to feel rather than what they do feel.

How did this myth get into the books? It was supposed to follow from gamete size and number. We often read that female fertility is a scarce resource while male fertility is nearly boundless. A man, it is supposed, can impregnate hundreds of women in a single year. He can allegedly father healthy children even in advanced old age, while a woman can produce at most about twenty children over her entire reproductive lifespan, and she is liable to give birth to genetically abnormal infants toward the end of that period in her forties. Women invest more physiological and behavioral effort into gestation and lactation; men must, it is supposed, invest more physiological and behavioral effort on attempted impregnation. According to A. R. Bateman in a 1948 article cited over 4,000 times, independent of the particular mating system, “it is a general law that the male is eager for any female without discrimination, whereas the female chooses the male” (Bateman Reference Bateman1948: 352). “It pays males to be aggressive, hasty, fickle and undiscriminating,” declared E. O. Wilson (1978: 124) some years later. If a man were given “total freedom to act,” he maintained, he could produce “thousands” of descendants. Matt Ridley (1994: 172–173) remarks that: “In … human terms, men can father another child just about every time they copulate with a different woman, whereas women can bear the child of only one man at a time.”

A man’s best reproductive strategy, on this view, is allegedly to pursue “mating opportunities” with as many of the “scarce resource” young females as possible; rape is the unfortunate backup option where seduction fails or takes too long. According to David Buss and David Schmitt writing in 1993, in an article cited over 5,000 times, the constraints on male reproductive success involved problems of identifying “accessible” and fertile women and “minimizing commitment and investment” (Buss and Schmitt Reference Buss and Schmitt1993: 206). (They forgot to mention what is in real life the number one constraint on male reproductive success: not being much liked and trusted by women.) A woman’s best corresponding strategy a priori was to identify the “best genes” and to try to maximize their possessor’s commitment and investment. Having found the best provider her face and figure could attract, there would be no need to look further. His promiscuity should be of no concern to her unless it threatens her food supply or protection. Her infidelity would be, by contrast, unacceptable to him, as his provisioning and protecting efforts would then be directed to the offspring of his biological competitors. It has even been maintained that girlfriends and wives do not object to their partners’ “physical” infidelity but only to “emotional” infidelity that might lead to the abdication of the provider.

What do we actually know about sexual strategies, choice, and refusal? Given the variance in male quality, along with greater female direct investment, it pays females to be choosy and males to be competitive. But the average number of offspring generated per male in a community is the same as the average number generated per female, though some individuals will do better or worse than average (Einon Reference Einon1998: 413–426). It is inadvisable to try to derive social consequences from comparative gamete size, which holds across the taxa with their many and varied solutions to the problems of reproduction.

In any case, a female preference for lifelong sexual exclusivity is found in very few animals and is not a characteristic of our nearest primate relatives, the common chimpanzees and bonobos, whose lineages branched off from our extinct common ancestor 3–5 million years ago. Like human beings, chimpanzees have preferences and aversions: Females prefer males who remain near them, groom them, and offer them food; males prefer older females to younger, which is unsurprising given that females remain fertile all their lives and that maternal experience is correlated with survival of the offspring. Chimpanzees have three main patterns of sexual association: consortships, in which a female and a male sequester themselves from the rest of the group, remaining together as a sexually exclusive pair for as long as a month; possessive relationships, in which a dominant male tries to monopolize a female in estrus within a group setting by remaining close to her and fighting off other males; and opportunistic mating, in which several males take turns with a single female in estrus (McGrew in Dahlberg Reference Dahlberg1981: 35–74). Because a female chimpanzee, like a human female in a hunter-gatherer society, is likely to bear only four to five live young during her lifespan, it is evident that most sexual behavior will not result in conception. Sex serves other roles: release of tension, practice, research, making friends. The smaller bonobo has recently drawn attention for its hypersexuality, including female–female, male–infant, and male–male as well as male–female interactions (de Waal 1990: 378–393). Nonreproductive mating cements the social group and reduces hostilities and tensions. Female bonobo anatomy, as well as newer discoveries regarding human anatomy, puts paid to the notion that the clitoris was never more than a residual organ serving no function in motivating mating.Footnote ¹⁴

Chimpanzees are distinguished from human beings by a number of important features. One is the recurrence of estrus, which in chimpanzees is fully apparent to males and highly motivating to both males and females. Humans seem to retain something of this feature, but in a dampened form: women at mid-cycle when they are most fertile become more aware of attractive male scents and vice versa. Another feature is the absence of paternal involvement: Male chimpanzees do not know who their offspring are, and it does not concern them; human beings by contrast attach importance to social fatherhood even in conditions where biological fatherhood is not known, or where it is less significant than the paternal or avuncular role played by a man who has a relationship with the child’s mother.

The same three chimpanzee patterns of consortship, aggressive possessiveness, and casual frolicking, as well as bonobo-type homosexual and “pedophilic” activity, appear in human relationships. Humans experience romantic attachments which involve an emotional focus on a single individual, and these can occur at all stages of the life cycle, including its nonreproductive phases, from childhood to old age. Fights over women are common in most societies and a major cause of homicide, as jealousy is a frequent cause of femicide (Taylor and Jasinski Reference Taylor and Jasinski2011: 341–362). And there is one-off casual sex, willingly entered into by both parties in the absence of romance or possessiveness. Women who do not need an unrelated provider or the status and security conferred by marriage and who are outside the control of their elders are motivated by the same drives as men: curiosity, practice, and the thrill of seduction, and they compete for attention. Female–female rivalry, though ignored by male writers of evolutionary psychology, drives the plots of many operas and soap operas. The notion that men and women experience jealousy differently has also been effectively punctured (Harris Reference Harris2004: 62–71). Both sexes stalk and obsess. Men, being larger, stronger, more irritable, and with more access to weapons, are more prone to express lethal violence.

Casual talk of “mate choice” with regard to humans is misleading in not distinguishing between different sorts of “mates.” What makes human society strikingly different from primate society is the social institution of marriage, a form of behavior that is clearly related to human interdependency, long childhood, a need to minimize social frictions between and within groups, and a need to avoid inbreeding. “Mate choice” in this regard has little to do with the preferences exhibited by speed daters. From a comparative ethnological perspective, contemporary Western courtship and marriage practices where young people do their own choosing among people they already know are unusual.

For most of human prehistory, as well as human history, people did not select their own marriage partners; they were selected for them by their parents or close kin, and this system prevails in many parts of the world today. According to R. S. Walker and colleagues (2011), “it is probably safe to conclude that an important selective pressure on the evolution of human mate choice, certainly more than any other species, has been the direct, deliberate, and conscious intervention of parents and other close kin on the sexual lives of their descendants.” In a 2007 comparative study of 190 hunter-gatherer societies, Menelaos Apostolou (2007) found that arrangement, or required approval of marriage partners by parents or close kin, was the primary mode of marriage in 96 percent of his sample. Walker and his coauthors established in turn through genetic analysis that around 85 percent of offspring in these groups were indeed offspring of the married couple. “Reproductive skew” in men – the ability of some to beat the averages while other men fall short – in the earliest human societies appears to have been minimal, with little variance among men (Anderson Reference Anderson2006: 513–520). By contrast, Hrdy (1999: 83) has noted a greater than expected variance in the number of children born to them among women.

Male preferences for particular waist-to-hip ratios or large busts in candidates for marriage, as revealed in answers to questionnaires, are unlikely to have driven the evolution of the female form (Singh Reference Singh1993: 293–307).Footnote ¹⁵ These are not necessarily the attributes parents looking for wives for their sons put at the top of their lists. Although reported preferences may involve what people think they ought to prefer and may be different from the preferences of 100,000 or 30,000 years ago, the traits preferred in pre-industrial societies were similar for both sons in law and daughters in law: Surveyed parents cited emotional stability, dependable character, good health, desire for home and children, and pleasing disposition (Apostolou Reference Apostolou2010: 695–704). At least as far as revealed preferences are concerned, parents wanted someone nice for their children. While the 15 percent or so of nonmarital children would afford more opportunity for reproductive skew, and for criteria such as the waist-to-hip ratio to come into play, we can cautiously conclude that in the human case:

1. (1) For most men, generating children with a partner picked out by the parents was the best way to maximize fitness, since most children were born from such unions.

2. (2) Competition by men with other men to impregnate the most likely future mothers extramaritally, and the recruitment of extramarital sexual partners by women, nevertheless had significant reproductive advantages for both sexes.Footnote ¹⁶

3. (3) Most differences between human males and human females, regarding sexual motivations and their results, are smaller than commonly supposed (Andersen, Cyranowski, and Aarestad Reference Andersen, Cyranowski and Aarestad2000: 385–389).Footnote ¹⁷

4. (4) Natural selection likely favored nice individuals of both sexes, on the grounds that persons with unpleasant personalities were less likely to be awarded marital partners.

The natural reproductive window for men and women is not as different as is often assumed. Human males continue to produce sperm throughout their lives, but researchers (Rossman Reference Rossman and Solnick1978: 71) have noted that “[t]here is no functional parameter of aging that falls off more steeply than sexual performance.” In the absence of modern pills and potions, male sexual energy declines earlier than in females, and few hunter-gatherer males father children after the age of 50 (Buller Reference Buller2005: 220). More important, where maternal age is decisively correlated only with the risk of Down syndrome, paternal age is a risk factor for psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia, autism, bipolar disorder, and mental disability.Footnote ¹⁸ The fiction of healthy lifelong male sexuality and fertility that is supposed to incline women toward older, successful male partners, needs to be discarded. Young women’s alliances with very old high-status men may be to their financial or status advantage, or reflect the latter’s gratitude, kindness, and understanding, but as future fathers for their offspring, they were never ideal candidates from the biological point of view.

Psychobiosocial Explanation: The Role of Comparative Advantage

One argument formerly heard that has since disappeared is that academic standards for research and teaching would decline with the entry of women into the higher ranks of the academy. In fact, the opposite has happened, with much sharper competition and the generation of so much new knowledge. This should not be surprising since we now know that women are as cognitively well endowed as men. We know from Cole and Zuckerman’s Reference Cole and Zuckerman1987 study that women with children as well as without evolved to be productive workers outside the home, and that, despite their greater choosiness, their appetites and behavior over the course of the life cycle, when not constrained by socioeconomic pressures, are more like those of men than earlier scientific writing and recent journalism proposed.

This leaves us with an explanatory puzzle: namely, how to explain the frequency with which women, until recently, have been found in domestic roles and not in the lucrative and visible professions and in positions of political and economic authority. The hypothesis of a deeply rooted but inexplicable misogyny is not helpful. While we are now aware of centuries of learned discourse on the incompetence and moral undependability of women, this discourse has to be understood as the effect of the observed frequencies as well as their reinforcing cause. And here we must point to certain average differences between men and women that have nothing to do with cognition or the taste for exploration, social participation and economic contribution, and freedom, but that have long worked to the disadvantage of women.

First women are smaller and weaker than men. Women are 90 percent of men’s height and 80 percent of their weight. They are less muscular, with 30 percent lesser upper-body strength. Having a smaller vocal apparatus, they speak in higher and softer, accordingly more childlike, voices. Further, as noted by Pinker: “Women experience basic emotions more intensely, except perhaps anger. Women have more intimate social relationships, are more concerned about them, and feel more empathy toward their friends … Men have a higher tolerance for pain … Women are more attentive to their infants’ everyday cries” (2002: 345). Such qualities can be enhanced or diminished by social learning; men can certainly be taught to weep, to cultivate intimate friendships, to shrink from contact sports and dangerous occupations, and to find gratification in soothing and playful contact with infants and young children. Nevertheless, the path of least resistance does not lead that way; it is not the path to respect and social rewards for men. For women, such qualities – especially daintiness, sensitivity, and caring behavior – were valued and inculcated, especially by other women.

Two important drivers of the division of human labor that relegated most women to maintenance tasks were first, the employment of the principle of comparative advantage, and second, the discovery of the advantages of domestication: the cultivation of other living things for their utility. The principle of comparative advantage says that efficiencies are generated when a group doesn’t try to manufacture every socially desired product itself but concentrates on what it can do quickly and well and trades its surplus for things others can make quicker and better. Rather than trying to make soap and baskets, it’s best just to specialize in soap and trade with the neighbors for their baskets.

The ultimately pernicious division of labor began with a simple and comparatively innocuous division of labor between gathering for subsistence and hunting for meat, from the greater allocation of aggregate female effort to maintenance and handicrafts and male effort to recreation and warfare. Even looking aside from the responsibilities of care for infants, a small advantage in size, strength, and insensitivity to pain on one side, and in dexterity and visual memory on the other, generates efficiencies. In the exit from the state of nature to herding, farming, and city dwelling, the domestication of animals was followed by the institution of human slavery; ancient civilizations were uniformly slave civilizations. The disadvantages of urban overpopulation and the problems of sexual competition, jealousy, and violence suggested a neat and feasible solution: Lock up the unenslaved women and assign them the backup maintenance tasks. Women’s greater vulnerability to coercion and intimidation followed from their smaller size and economic dependency.Footnote ¹⁹ In accord with the “belief in a just world,” people in subordinate positions are assumed to be there because of lacks and failings on their part (Lerner Reference Lerner1980).

Under civilization, as the need for the management of large populations became critical, and as occupations multiplied, institutions such as schools, courts, armies, kitchens, laundries, and workshops appeared, which, once dominated by members of one sex, became inaccessible to members of the other. As the tendency toward formal education and credentialing moved from the crafts into the professions in the early modern period, these habits of exclusion were retained. Men came to occupy specialized roles that were innovative and sometimes dangerous; they became mariners, explorers, and construction workers, later scientists and financiers. The feedback process entrenched role divisions further.Footnote ²⁰

There was accordingly a logic behind the system of different spheres that made it difficult to question. What enabled a rethink was eighteenth-century anthropology. European philosophers speculating on the state of nature with the help of travelers’ reports of “found peoples” began to understand how the classless and relatively egalitarian small societies of prehistory had given way to the hierarchically organized slave societies of antiquity and to the tyrannies of their own times. There had always been sporadic uprisings and rebellions of slaves and peasants, and complaints from women, but these had not been guided by a historical theory of the formation of castes and classes, and by forceful challenges to colonial and aristocratic domination. Now, for the first time, it could be seriously questioned whether monarchy, slavery, and patriarchy were just and efficient.

Conclusions

Robert Trivers and Irven DeVore maintain that, because there are biological, genetic, and natural components to our behavior, “we should start setting up a physical and social world which matches [our] … tendencies.”Footnote ²¹ Charles Murray (Reference Murray2005a: 13) cautions in turn that “specific [social] policies based on premises that conflict with scientific truths about human beings tend not to work.”

What is usually meant by such recommendations, as many of my quotations show, is that we need to turn the clock back. E. O. Wilson in On Human Nature (1978: 128) maintained that the world that matches our tendencies involves a division of labor along the traditional lines. Murray and Wilson maintain that “social engineering” and top-down directives such as quotas and affirmative action policies are harmful in forcing people into environments where they do not feel or perform well.

Accordingly, the human sciences have been accused, with good reason, of presenting a “theory of women” that offers to explain and rationalize their subordination. But when political philosophers fret too much over scientism and essentialism or turn their backs on science as too ideologically corrupted to trust, they do a disservice to the many investigators who have observed and experimented carefully. These researchers too took women as objects of study, and in many – though not all – cases they were women whose experiences and interests enabled them to notice different phenomena and to pose different questions. Further, by resisting science, philosophers fail to address the powerful charge that human beings are not “blank slates.” We should not fear this accusation, I have argued, because the ongoing investigation of human nature turns out to underwrite the shakeup in the professions and family life of the recent era, with its undeniable gains for women individually and for the wider society.

To be sure, we often read about the problems of women in formerly male-dominated occupations – about things that “tend not to work” – ranging from low pay and lack of recognition, to workplace harassment and unwelcome solicitation and bargaining for advantage, to the second shift of maintenance and caring responsibilities. The problems did not arise in the old system of separate spheres, and perforce they would not arise in the dystopian world some would like to “set up.” But ultimately the old system proved not to work by our own improved standards of efficiency, fairness, and personal fulfillment. Its failure forces us to address these new problems separately and in their own terms.

Pinker refers to the “insights of artists” that the human sciences can validate. Marriage, in turn, is one of the top preoccupations of dramatists, novelists, and filmmakers, and while fiction is a mixture of idealization, demonization, and real-world knowledge, the insight gained from art and science, alas, may be that there is no solution, including locking up the women, for human partnering that solves all problems. Monogamy is hard, because the world is full of temptations to which both sexes are liable, and because people change their minds about their current partners in light of experience. Polyandry and polygamy are hard because, while some people appear to be free of jealousy, most know what it is like to suffer its torments, and these arrangements make household economics complicated. Single motherhood is hard; children need more than a single caregiver and benefit from the care and teaching of fathers. Fathers in turn want an appropriate share of parenting. A more humane and scientifically aware society would not take lifelong sexual exclusivity with no lapses from either men or women for granted. It would lay out less romantically but more objectively an account of the advantages of long-term faithful cooperation, and at the same time it would offer us models of fairness and amicability that can operate when partnerships are disrupted.

Setting the Research Agenda: Current Systems of Governance of Science and Their Limits

Who are the main actors today involved in the setting of research agendas? The answer may of course vary to some extent from one country to another, but sociological studies of science organization identify common, dominant features (e.g., Gläser and Velarde Reference Gläser and Velarde2018). There exist in most “research-intensive” countries national agencies directly involved in the shaping of the research agenda or coordinating strategic committees. Just to name a few, Japan and the United Kingdom each have a “Council for Science and Technology Policy,” the United States has its “National Science and Technology Council,” and Switzerland its Conseil suisse de la recherche (Swiss Council for Research). In France, the Conseil stratégique de la recherche (Strategic Research Council) is explicitly in charge of “identifying and proposing a limited number of big research and technological priorities to prepare and construct the future of France.” Who, you may ask as a citizen eager to find out who decides the public research priorities of your country, serves on this council? Not surprisingly, the majority comprises very distinguished French scientists (mostly from the natural sciences), a few representatives of big French companies, and three elected representatives.Footnote ³ The composition of the French Strategic Research Council illustrates the dominant players in the field in most countries: scientists, representatives of private sector interests (the market, in short), and politicians. Looking into further details would reveal a complex interplay between these actors. But what matters for our purposes is assessing to what extent those actors are the right ones to fulfill the humanist expectation of a better alignment between what society needs and what scientific research delivers.

Two preliminary qualifications are in order here. The first spells out a key background philosophical commitment of the rest of the chapter; the second is essentially conceptual and terminological.

First, my take on the notion of humanist expectations toward science is nonobjectivist, that is, the very notions of “human flourishing” or “common good,” etc., that a humanist science would help to promote should be approached in a nonobjectivist way. In other words, I am committed to the idea that the outputs of a humanist science, in the context of our democratic societies, should contribute to meet the needs and interests of their citizens, as identified and expressed by them.Footnote ⁴ This nonobjectivist approach can be contrasted with an objectivist, substantialist approach, according to which the citizens’ needs and interests to which science should respond can be defined independently (or partly independently) of what citizens themselves would identify and express as being their needs and interests. Later discussion (in the third section) of our increasingly participative societies buttresses this commitment.

The second qualification concerns the nature of the problems addressed by science: A distinction will be made between “endogenous” problems and “exogenous” problems (Bedessem and Ruphy Reference Bedessem and Ruphy2019: 2). An “endogenous” problem is encountered and defined internally by scientists within the course of a scientific inquiry, and its relevance and interest are judged solely according to epistemic or practical considerations internal to scientific communities. By contrast, an “exogenous” problem is identified outside (or partly outside) a scientific field and evaluating its relevance and interest incorporates interests and needs of other components of society (and not only of scientific communities). “Grand societal challenges” such as developing “secure, clean and efficient energy” or “inclusive, innovative and reflective societies” are typical exogenous (encompassing) problems,Footnote ⁵ whereas the search for the Higgs boson in particle physics is a rather newsworthy example of an endogenous problem. With these two qualifications in hand, let us now return to the question of who sets, or should set, scientific research agendas.

Participative Societies

In election campaigns, for example, citizens are sometimes directly consulted by a party to build up its political priorities. Some mayors reserve parts of municipal budgets to be spent according to priorities defined by public consultation. More sophisticated and deliberative forms of citizen consultation are set up to feed into the elaboration of national plans by governments or assemblies. A noticeable recent example is the Citizens Convention for Climate set up in France by President Emmanuel Macron.Footnote ⁶ Such participative forms of democracy are often presented by democracy theorists as a means to redressing the weakening of traditional representative forms of democracy, at both national and local levels.

More broadly, direct participation of citizens may be considered an appropriate response to the following six changes in contemporary democratic societies (Blondiaux Reference Blondiaux2008: 24–28). (1) Increasingly complex societies. Our societies are more and more divided into specialized “subsystems” calling for the existence of distinct spaces of negotiation and governance; direct participation of citizens in these governance processes may serve to meet democratic expectations. (2) Increasingly divided societies. Here, the focus is more philosophical than sociological. Our pluralist democratic societies are characterized by divergent views on what is good or bad, without the ability to directly overcome these differences by referring to common values or principles. Hence the necessity to implement spaces for deliberation where citizens can justify their disagreements and work on reaching consensus. (3) Increasingly reflexive societies. Overall levels of knowledge and proficiency of lay citizens have increased. At the individual level, deference to experts is not unconditional and lay or experiential knowledge can be put forward as a counterpoint or as an addition to certified knowledge provided by scientific institutions. Standpoints of lay citizens can then be expected to be taken into account in decision processes. (4) Increasingly disobedient societies. In response to individual or local acts of insubordination, often linked to health or environmental issues, citizens’ consultations appear as a means to prevent or diffuse such resistance, sometimes labeled in a somewhat derogatory way as the NIMBY (not in my backyard) syndrome. (5) Increasingly defiant societies. A decline in confidence in institutions and between citizens has been extensively described and discussed by sociologists. Direct participation of citizens may be promoted, especially at local scales, as a means to recreate social ties. (6) Increasingly ungovernable societies. The preceding five changes feed into a final one: In many liberal democracies, states and political decision makers appear more and more powerless to impose decisions from the top downward.

Blondiaux’s six propositions, built on various seminal works by sociologists and philosophers such as John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, Ulrich Beck, and Niklas Luhmann, allow us to make sense of the significant development of participatory devices in many areas of public and political life: In order to cope with this crisis of governability, governing bodies see the development of various mechanisms for citizen participation as a means to increase their political power of action. And science is, or should be, no exception to this general trend toward more direct involvement of citizens, given its centrality in our societies and the multiple levels of imbrication between science, public life, and politics. This partly explains my earlier commitment to nonobjectivism: In more participative societies, when it comes to defining their needs and interests in terms of research outputs, citizens should be directly involved.

Let me now briefly describe the various forms that public engagement may take in science.

The Many Faces of Citizens’ Engagement in Science

Assessment of the Humanist Prospects of Public Engagement in Science

To assess the prospects of a more inclusive science as regards the reduction of the gap between science’s outputs and society’s needs, after some quick comments on nonparticipative forms of engagement, I then discuss forms of participation that do not impact scientific life globally, and turn to the assessment of participation in the setting of global research priorities in the next section.

Assessment of Participatory Devices in the Setting of Global Research Priorities

Directly involving citizens in the setting of global research priorities is, admittedly, at least on paper (and if we opt for nonobjectivism), the best way to reduce the gap between the actual needs and interests of all citizens and the needs and interests that are currently shaping research agendas. Let us now investigate the various possible impacts that such direct participation would have on scientific life and the consequent, new responsibilities for researchers and scientific institutions, leaving aside the multifaceted and thorny issue of how a direct shaping of the global research agenda by citizens could be implemented concretely.Footnote ¹⁴ This discussion is structured around the identification of three tensions or sticking points, starting with issues of the legitimacy of the very demand for social responsibility that underlies humanist expectations toward science.

Conclusion

Humanist commitments regarding science in terms of relevance and benefits for society operate at two different levels, local and global, each raising specific challenges. In this chapter, I first discussed various ways in which lay citizens may engage in the process of producing knowledge and expertise, alongside professional scientists, and spelled out how public engagement at local scales may allow us to reduce the gap between science’s outputs and society’s needs. Three main, interrelated challenges were identified: (1) the need for more incentives from scientific institutions and communities to engage in citizen science programs; (2) the need for an evolution of the professional training of scientists and of cultural views on what kinds of science are worth pursuing; and (3) the need for an increase in individual awareness of the existence of political and ethical choices to be made as regards the type of research one is willing to engage in as an individual researcher.

When tantamount to supporting stakeholders, the humanist commitment may appear on the face of it rather modest. However, it turns out to be very demanding in our inegalitarian democracies. For a humanist commitment regarding science requires us to ensure that all citizens and groups of citizens are afforded the chance to become epistemically well-equipped stakeholders and to assert their interests in the political arena. It is, admittedly, not solely the responsibility of scientists and science decision makers to ensure that the voices of all citizens are heard in a democracy. However, heightening vigilance within science so that the epistemic needs of underrepresented groups don’t remain below the radar of scientific research because of unbalanced distributions of power in society at large is certainly called for.

At the more global scale of setting big research priorities, we have seen that calling for more relevance and benefits for all members of society impacts scientific life in several fundamental ways. It raises first the question of the legitimacy and desirability of a shift toward more targeted and pressing expectations concerning scientific research. Here the contribution of philosophy is to assess the very nature of the question and to argue (in my case) that it should be considered, in contemporary democracies, a political question. It also challenges the valuation of culturally well-entrenched features of science such as the valuation of unpredictability (as unforeseen applications). A complementary task is then to explore further the epistemological consequences of this shift for the dynamics of research fields, to identify epistemologically acceptable forms of limitation of scientific autonomy, and possibly to debunk other unfounded sources of resistance.

Another major philosophical task is to continue to explore the practical forms that a democratization of the setting of research agendas may take. It is difficult today to argue against the idea that citizens should have a say in the matter, but how exactly should that be accomplished? How should we articulate, for instance, the requirements of direct participation and indirect participation (via elected representatives)? To what extent is the implementation of participatory strategies at national scales compatible with the internationalization of science? These are undoubtedly crucial challenges to be met on the way to a more humanist science.