Stop Equating “Science” With Truth
Evolutionary psychology is just the most obvious example of science’s flaws.
It's 2017,and people are still debating whether or not women are intellectually inferior to men, and whether we are entitled to a workplace that isn’t toxic to people simply based on their gender and sex. The Google employee memo about the apparent harms of diversity policies in Silicon Valley is both a shocking news story for the general public and for many women and gender minorities—especially of color—working in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine,
a banal sign of normalcy.
At least science is helping us make progress, right? Science is sold to us as an almost holy, objective pursuit: a pure endeavor, a way of pursuing truth and only truth. As a high school senior planning to study physics and astronomy in college, I was thoroughly convinced that solving quantum gravity would trickle down to improved human relations. Of course, I was adorably naïve about both the difficulty that quantum gravity presented us (we’ve made little progress in the 18 years since I started university) and about the relationship between science and humanity’s various imperfections.
My education as a scientist did little to disabuse me of this simple view of science as a great unifier, as an objective means of distilling information. When skeptical members of my family argued that physics was dangerous because of nuclear weapons, I pointed out that it wasn’t science that was the problem but rather how people used it. But nowhere is it more evident that this perspective is flawed than when we consider the uses and abuses of evolutionary biology and its sibling, evolutionary psychology.
It is impossible to consider this field of science without grappling with the flaws of the institution—and of the deification—of science itself. For example: It was argued to me this week that the Google memo failed to constitute hostile behavior because it cited peer-reviewed articles that suggest women have different brains. The well-known scientist who made this comment to me is both a woman and someone who knows quite well that
“peer-reviewed” and “correct” are not interchangeable terms. This brings us to the question that many have grappled with this week.
It's 2017, and to some extent scientific literature still supports a patriarchal view that ranks a man’s intellect above a woman’s.
