Why I am not a scientist

I have been reading Jonathan Marks's Why I am not a scientist: anthropology and modern knowledge(Berkeley : University of California Press, 2009). Just stopped at p. 102. Quickly typed out the following quotes to return the extremely overdue book to the library.

Divided into ten chapters: 1. Science as a culture and as a "side"; 2. The scientific revolution; 3. Normative science; 4. Science as practice; 5. The problem of creationism; 6. Bogus science; 7. Scientific misconduct; 8. The rise and fall of colonial science; 9 Racial and gendered science; and 10. Nature/culture

"an advocate of scientism - that is to say, the largely uncritical acceptance of everything said with the authority of science - might also be called a 'scientist.'" (preface, viii)

In the sub-title of "A definition of science", he proposes his definition of science he employs in the book: "Science is the production of convincing knowledge in modern society" (p. 2)

Bringing forth the well-known and controversial article "The Two Cultures" by C. P. Snow, which divides the academics into two camps, namely humanists and scientists he states that "the price we pay for knowing more and more about the universe is that knowledge becomes so specialized that a scientist often knows nothing but science." (p. 6) "The rest of us find it more than a full-time activity to keep up to date on our subspecialty (say Molecular anthropology), much less on our specialty (biological anthropology), much less on our general field (anthropology, or whatever it actually says on the diploma on the wall), still less on other sciences - all still have the time and mental energy to read novels." (p. 7)

He quotes the geneticist Conway Zirkle's constructed mock diploma (p. 17):

THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY

certifies that

John Wentworth Doe

does not know anything but Biochemistry

Please pay no attention to any pronouncement he

may make on any other subject, particularly when

he joins with others of his kind to save the world

from something or another.

However, he has worked hard for this degree

and is potentially a most valuable citizen. Please treat

him kindly.

Hilarious!

"why shouldn't specialists in things other than science require a specialized vocabulary and conceptual apparatus to communicate their ideas as well?" (p. 18)

"One of the weirder fronts on the 'science wars' is the claim that science strives for transparency while the humanities seem to be striving for opacity, with dense, self-important academic blather, often in the name of 'deconstruction' or 'postmodernism,' rather than the lucid, comprehensible prose that characterizes science. Indeed (this position continues), the very goal of science is to be as widely understood as possible, while these postmodern humanists are terrible writer, merely using gobbledygook to cover up the fact that they have nothing to say." (p. 19) Writing something very difficult to comprehend "is by no means the exclusive domain of contemporary deconstructionists or postmodernists." (p. 20)

"I suppose", Marks says, "some humanists indeed have nothing to say but need to say something in order to keep their paychecks coming." However, he does some justice to humanists by saying "But that situation is not much different in science." (p. 19)

"The writing," he concludes, "on average, is probably better in humanistic fields than in scientific fields. Why? For a simple reason: scholars in humanistic fields have been subject to a lot more intensive formal training in writing than scholars in scientific fields have. It's part of their curriculum." (p. 19) How true it is!

"the scientific paper required an infrastructure before it could be an effective means of disseminating knowledge. Not only did there need to be a critical mass of people interested in reading such a document, but there needed to be the financial structure that would permit the knowledge. This necessitate some kind of patronage - the richer, the better" (p. 43) "Like any endeavor, science requires political patronage to thrive...But that patronage inevitably comes at a cost - namely, the freedom to question the political power that keeps science in place." (p. 69) Government today is the biggest and richest patronage. Where the super-rich men go?

"The idea that science should be dispassionate and apolitical is one of the most interesting assumptions about it, since in fact science has never been either of those. After all, passion - that is to say, unchecked obsession beyond the bounds of reasonable behavior - is one of the hallmarks of the successful scientist in any age. Science is not, and has never been, a nine-to-five job...scientific knowledge is empowering to the nation, and the nation should control the knowledge. 'Knowledge,' Bacon wrote epigrammatically, 'is power.'" (p. 47)

"[Thomas] Kuhn's great contribution was his very anthropological application of cultural relativism to the study of science. The clash of paradigms is a clash of cultures." (p. 58)

"Hypothesis testing is what differentiates science from other forms of intellectual activity; making a consistency argument is not - it's what everyone, from lawyers to shamans, does: they try to convince listeners by adducing evidence." (p. 60)

"until the Great Depression eugenics was neither unscientific nor even scientifically marginal - it was mainstream. It was so mainstream that, if you criticized it, you were beaten over the head with Darwin and Mendel!" In retrospect, and significantly only in retrospect, we can see that the scientific community had inscribed its class, economic, and social interests upon its science; in a particular cultural context (without an idea of universal human rights or a major government role in social programs) and political context (totalitarianism), the scientific community not only rationalized the genocidal practice but was to some extent complicit." (p. 68-9)

"Science is a human endeavor, and thus it cannot be devoid of morality, responsibility, meaning, value, or self-interest. The opposite idea, that science transcends the values, interests, or politics of its practitioners, is largely a self-interested image developed in the twentieth century." (p. 70)

"the courts were increasingly relying on the testimony of experts. But who was an expert, and what counted as expertise? Lawsuits were being cluttered with 'junk science'" (p. 96)

"Scientists hold privileged positions in modern society. They are, at the very least, employed and smart." (p. 98)

"The social hierarchy simply reflected an underlying natural hierarchy: rich people are the fittest and deserve what they have. Regulating their business practices and helping the poor would consequently be nothing less than a crime against nature." (p. 100)