biology & culture & politics
"...'the entire body of modern science is an attempt to explain phenomena that cannot be experienced directly by human beings'. Metaphors and analogies, in turn, come laced with human stories and values, meaning that no discussion of scientific ideas -- this one included -- can be free of cultural bias." [Richard Lewontin, as cited/paraphrased in Entangled Life, by Merlin Sheldrake]
science as an extension of a question+method as an extension of scientists who are humans and are caught up in humanity. Science as a non-political entity is a falsehood, to claim otherwise is naïve. The same phenomena is explained very differently by different people: referring to symbiosis, Jan Sapp (again, in Sheldrake's book) says "[it] behaves like a prism through which our own social values are often dispersed." in some works this is PAINFULLY obvious.
E.g. in Camazine's 1991 paper on self-organizing behavior in bees, Camazine prefaces with laying out the dominant theory on bee organization: the queen is the Leader who Controls where the workers go and what they do, her design for the colony a blueprint that is logically constructed from a central vantage point. The issue with this hypothesis is that worker bees would fill honeycomb with the "wrong thing" according to what we as humans assumed would be the "correct thing" (pollen adjacent to the brood area for easy access). Upon observing this, the assumption was that this was, indeed, doing something "incorrect", and that it was a behavioural aberration on the part of the workers, not the queen. Twofold reflections of the belief that the organisation was competent leader + incompetent workers , AND that further information that may challenge this belief was simply incorrect and not a reason to rethink things.
Camazine dismantles this, providing a more-sensible (if >30years old...) worker-organized system as a framework for bee behavioral scientists to work with. Read here on Springer.
There is more like this. so much more. it rears its ugly head in complex systems in animal behavior, a LOT, often assuming central command where there is none. Whether the relationship between mycorrhizal fungi & their plants is cutthroat or generous is a prominent point of dispute: do the fungi and plants give generously and receive generously in return, or do the plants starve out fungi who aren't productive enough (...vice versa)? Did [x] really first evolve in the now-USA and migrate South, or is this an extension of uneven paleontological interest and dig sites (and education, and oppression,)? & so much more. the mechanisms of life are such that one scientist/political-cultural-angle/general-life-outlook will not suffice.
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