Introduction

Denis R. Alexander and Ronald L. Numbers

Why should we be concerned about biology and ideology? One good reason is that the use of biology for non-biological ends has been the cause of immense human suffering. Biology has been used to justify eu-

genic programs, enforced sterilization, experimentation on living humans, death camps, and political ambitions based on notions of racial superiority, to name but a few examples. We should also be concerned because biological ideas continue to be used, if not in these specific ways, then in other ways that lie well beyond science. Investigating the past should help us to be more reflective about the science of our own day, hopefully more equipped to discern the ideological abuse of science when it occurs.

Not so many decades ago science represented the antithesis of ideology. Indeed, science rested securely on a pedestal, enshrined as the very “norm of truth.” According to the founding father of the history of science, George Sarton (1884–1956), the “main purpose” of science, pursued by disinterested scholars, was “the discovery of truth.” Convinced that science was the only human activity that “is obviously and undoubtedly cumulative and progressive,” he described the history of science as “the story of a protracted struggle, which will never end, against the inertia of superstition and ignorance, against the liars and hypocrites, and the deceivers and the self-deceived, against all the forces of darkness and nonsense.”1

DENIS R. ALEXANDER AND RONALD L. NUMBERS—INTRODUCTION

By the late nineteenth century, practicing scientists, as well as science educators and popularizers, were increasingly attributing the success of science to something called “the scientific method,” a slippery but rhetorically powerful slogan. In the words of the distinguished American astronomer Simon Newcomb, who devoted considerable thought to scientific methodology, “the most marked characteristic of the science of the present day . . . is its entire rejection of all speculation on propositions which do not admit of being brought to the test of experience.”2

To such devotees, science was not only true but edifying, totally unlike the “grubby worlds” of business and politics. As Harvard president Charles W. Eliot, an erstwhile chemist, declared at the opening of the American Museum of Natural History in 1878, science produced a “searching, open, humble mind . . . having no other end than to learn, prizing above all things accuracy, thoroughness, and candor.” Many of its practitioners, asserts the historian David A. Hollinger, saw science “as a religious calling,” “a moral enterprise.” Those who used science for ideological purposes often found themselves denounced as charlatans and pseudo-scientists.3

Until well into the twentieth century neither scientists themselves nor the scholars who studied science linked science with ideology, a term coined in the late eighteenth century and typically employed pejoratively to designate ideas in the use of particular interests. Among the first to connect ideology and science were Karl Marx and his followers, who identified “ideologies” as ideas that served the social interests of the bourgeoisie. Western historians of science first encountered the linkage between science and ideology at the Second International Congress of the History of Science and Technology, held in London in 1931, when a delegation from the Soviet Union contrasted “the relations between science, technology, and economics” under the capitalist and socialist systems. The Russian physicist Boris Hessen, under intense political pressure at home to prove his Marxist orthodoxy, delivered an iconoclastic paper on “The SocioEconomic Roots of Newton’s Principia,” which described Newtonian science in the service of the ideological (that is, industrial and commercial) needs of the rising bourgeoisie. Despite his bravura effort, he died in a Soviet prison five years later, falsely convicted of terrorism.4

Such “vulgar Marxism” exerted little influence on the writing of the history of science outside the Soviet Union. It was not until the 1960s that Marxism penetrated Anglo-American historiography, largely through the efforts of Robert M. (Bob) Young, an expatriate Texan working in Cambridge, England. In 1970, at a conference on “The Social Impact of Modern

INTRODUCTION

Biology,” he delivered a paper on “Evolutionary Biology and Ideology,” in which he “treated science as ideology.” He acknowledged that the term “ideology” traditionally had derogatory and political connotations that were connected with its popularization by Marx, who concentrated his use of it as a term of abuse for ideas that served as weapons for social interests. But Marxists were soon subjected to their own critique, and this led to Young’s general definition of ideology:

When a particular definition of reality comes to be attached to a concrete power interest, it may be called an ideology. . . . In its early manifestations the concept of ideology conveyed a sense of more or less conscious distortion bordering on deliberate lies. I do not mean to imply this. . . . [T]he effort to absorb the ideological point of view into positive science only illustrates the ubiquitousness of ideology in intellectual life. . . . We need to see that ideology is an inescapable level of discourse.

In contrast to earlier Marxists, who had damned ideology as inimical to good science, Young argued that all facts are theory-laden and that no science is value-free. The late historian Roy Porter described the efforts of Young and his fellow New Marxists as concentrating on “exposing the dazzling conjuring trick whereby science had acquired and legitimated authority precisely while claiming to be value-neutral.” Their goal was to liberate humanity from the thrall of science by demoting it from its privileged intellectual position and relocating it on the same level as other belief systems. Thus, at a time when some observers were declaring “the end of ideology,” a small group of historians of science was rushing to embrace it.5

Meanwhile, scholars of a less radical persuasion were also undermining the notion of science as a value-neutral enterprise. In 1958 the philosopher Norwood Russell Hanson, who would soon found the Indiana University program in the history and philosophy of science, published Patterns of Discovery, which described all observations as “theory-laden.” Influenced in part by Hanson, the historian of science Thomas Kuhn published his best-selling The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), by far the most influential book ever written about the history of science and one of the most important books on any topic published in the twentieth century. In his slight monograph, Kuhn challenged Sarton’s cherished notion that science was cumulative, arguing instead that scientific paradigms are incommensurable and therefore that science does not progressively approach a

DENIS R. ALEXANDER AND RONALD L. NUMBERS—INTRODUCTION

truthful description of nature. Although he insisted that “there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community” in determining the boundaries of good science, he shied away from equating science and ideology. In fact, he used the latter term only to dismiss a commitment to the cumulative nature of science as “the ideology of the scientific profession.” Some critics denounced Kuhn’s work for promoting “irrationality and rel­ ativism”—and many postmodernists and other denigrators of science drew inspiration from it in their attempts to undermine the privileged status of science—but Kuhn never joined the revolutionaries. He took pride in the description of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions as “a profoundly conservative book.”6

Outside of radical circles, in the 1970s and 1980s few historians of science paid much attention to ideology. In 1971 Ronald C. Tobey published a study of attempts to generate popular support for science entitled The American Ideology of National Science, but for him “ideology” implied little more than a commitment to “traditional social values.” Similarly, the British historians Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray in their history of the early years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, founded in 1831, credited the “Gentlemen of Science,” who founded the association, with articulating “a particular ideology of science,” by which they hoped “to consolidate the role of science as the dominant mode of cognition of industrial society”:

The deliberate creation of boundaries between natural and religious or political knowledge, the conceptualization of science as a sharply edged and valueneutral domain of knowledge, the subordination of the biological and social to the physical science, the harnessing of a rhetoric of science, technology, and progress—these were some of the ways in which an ideology of science was constructed.

The most influential blow to the traditional separation between science and ideology came in the 1970s and 1980s from a group of scholars in the Edinburgh University Science Studies Unit dedicated to creating a thoroughgoing sociology of scientific knowledge. Unlike such pioneers in the sociology of science as Robert K. Merton, who explored the impact of social factors on the growth of scientific institutions but left scientific knowledge untainted by ideologies, the Edinburgh scholars advocated a “strong programme” that treated science like any body of knowledge, vulnerable to psychological, social, and cultural factors. These “construc-

INTRODUCTION

tivists” insisted on treating “true” and “false” scientific claims identically and on exploring the role played by “biasing and distorting factors” in both cases, not just for unsuccessful or pseudo-science. Contrary to the claims of some of their critics, they never asserted that science was “purely social” or “that knowledge depended exclusively on social variables such as interests.” “The strong programme says that the social component is always present and always constitutive of knowledge,” explained David Bloor, one of the founders of the Science Studies Unit. “It does not say that it is the only component, or that it is the component that must necessarily be located as the trigger of any and every change.”7

As Bloor later discovered, the “strong programme” in the sociology of knowledge had been anticipated nearly a century and a half earlier by the church historian Ferdinand Christian Baur and his colleagues at the University of Tübingen. In the early nineteenth century, historians of Christian doctrine had distinguished between truth (which they explained supernaturally) and heresy (explained naturally— or diabolically). Baur insisted on using the same historical methods to explain the development of both Christian dogma and heresy, bringing the former within the realm of historical inquiry. The parallels for Bloor were obvious: “In the place of the historical unfolding of divine inspiration we have the unfolding of rational enquiry, the ‘internal’ history of science. In the place of heresy we have irrationality and the socio-psychologically caused deviations from the true scientific method, the ‘external’ history of science. Doctrinal error in theology has given way to ideological bias in science.”8

In the early 1980s a young historian of science at Edinburgh, Steven Shapin, collaborated with Simon Schaffer on a landmark book that dramatically illustrated the applicability of the “strong programme” to the history of science. In Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, which the authors described as “an exercise in the sociology of scientific knowledge,” Shapin and Schaffer sought to identify the role played by ideology in establishing trust in the experimental way of producing knowledge about the workings of nature. As good constructivists, they treated the views of Thomas Hobbes (the loser) symmetrically with the opinions of Robert Boyle (the winner). In the end they concluded that “scientific activity, the scientist’s role, and the scientific community have always been dependent: they exist, are valued, and supported insofar as the state or its various agencies see point in them.”9

By the 1990s the sometimes acrimonious debate over ideology and science was dying down. Although a few historians of science held out

DENIS R. ALEXANDER AND RONALD L. NUMBERS—INTRODUCTION

for value-free science, the great majority, it seems, had come to accept a moderate form of constructivism—not so much for ideological reasons but because the evidence supported it. While rejecting the radical claim that science was merely social, they readily granted the propriety, indeed the necessity, of exploring the constitutive role of ideologies in the making of science. Ideologies had morphed from antiscience to the heart of the scientific enterprise.

This scholarly consensus did not, however, bring the study of ideology and science to an end or make it less important, most strikingly in the context of biology.10 Perhaps more than other disciplines, biology has been particularly susceptible to ideological manipulation and application, a trend that shows no sign of abating. The essays in this volume illustrate the many and varied ways in which biology has been utilized for a wide range of political, religious, and social purposes from 1600 to the present day. The purposes may be beneficial, benign, or harmful in their outcomes, but all are “ideological” in the broadest sense of not being intrinsic to biology itself.

But the flow has gone both ways, not only “outwards” from biology into the worlds of politics, philosophy, or social structures, but also “inwards,” with whole scientific programs being shaped by ideological concerns, as Chapter 6 in particular suggests. At other times there is more of an iterative process of “co-evolution,” as occurred in theories about “racial hygiene” (Chapters 7 and 8), whereby the ideology shaped the biology, which in turn was used to prop up the ideology.

It is not therefore the goal of this volume to attempt a resolution of the vexed question raised in our historiographic discussion as to the precise meaning of the term “ideology” in its relationship to biology, but rather to illustrate the sheer diversity of that relationship over the centuries, with different authors highlighting its various facets, often explicitly, sometimes implicitly. Their essays do suggest that ideology provides an interpretative framework that serves a social purpose, motivated by ethical, religious, or political convictions. The history of biology does certainly evince ideologies as either motivating or as being justified by certain kinds of scientific research and declaration, and most of the contributors investigate episodes in the history of biology in which biological science has become thoroughly entangled with social causes.

The newly emergent cultural authority of biology’s precursor, natural history, is described in Chapter 1 by Peter Harrison, who shows how the first systematic investigations of the natural world in the early modern

INTRODUCTION

period attracted prestige by their support for natural theology and for the moral order. Even Descartes’ idea of animals as machines without souls, invoking thereby a sharp demarcation between human and animal, was employed as part of the argument for design. Yet nature did not always speak with a clear moral voice, and in the eighteenth century the vigorous debate surrounding the spontaneous generation of life was shaped by concerns about atheism and its perceived threat to morality, as Shirley Roe discusses in Chapter 2. Biological ideas connecting life and matter played a central role in the materialistic arguments of the French philosophes, which in turn were employed in the subversion of the social order. Yet, as Peter Hanns Reill reviews in Chapter 3, the eighteenth century also saw something of a reaction against the mechanistic analogies that had proven so influential in the natural philosophy of the preceding century, reformulating an “Enlightenment vitalism” that sought to revive ideas of nature as a dynamic system. This renewed emphasis on the internal driving forces and systematic organization of living things was used to generate a new science of humanity, which in turn was deployed to argue for particular economic and political structures. From the structure of organisms to the structure of societies has often been a short step in the history of biology.

One of the striking insights highlighted by this collection of essays is the way in which the ideological application of biological concepts is shaped by place as well as time. In some cases the same biological ideas have been used during the same period for quite opposite ideological purposes in different countries. The biology that in France was utilized by the philo­ sophes to subvert the social order was in Britain used as a key resource for natural theology, whereas in Germany it was being used politically as an analogy for the structure of nation states.

Sometimes a synergistic relationship between the biology and its nonbiological extrapolation is particularly apparent. As Jonathan Topham discusses in Chapter 4, natural theology in the first half of the nineteenth century drew heavily upon the latest biology to make its case; in turn the progressive and law-like view of the history of the creation that natural theology promoted paved the way for Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. In Chapter 5, Sujit Sivasundaram shows how concepts of race before Darwin were based on contemporary biological understandings of anatomy and physiology, and in turn the racial construction of societies defined new programs of biological investigation, lending itself conveniently to the requirements of colonial subjugation.

DENIS R. ALEXANDER AND RONALD L. NUMBERS—INTRODUCTION

It should not be surprising that in this bicentenary of Darwin’s birth (1809) and sesquicentenary of Origin of Species (1859), this volume should include several essays on the ideological uses and abuses of Darwinism. Would evolutionary theory have developed in the particular way that it did without Darwin’s own casting of his theory as a stark choice between natural selection and the non-scientific, religious doctrine of special creation? Nicolaas Rupke thinks not, arguing in Chapter 6 that “if Darwin had not boarded HMS Beagle and the Origin of Species had never been written, today’s evolutionary biology could well have looked different, possibly fundamentally so.” The point here is that Darwin ignored a third and well-established possible theory, one held by many of the great biological minds of the previous half-century, namely autogenesis—the spontaneous origin of species.

Evolutionary biology became increasingly intertwined with eugenics, at first in a relatively benign way as a result of the interactions between Francis Galton, founder of the eugenics movement, and his first cousin Charles Darwin. In Chapter 7, Edward Larson describes these early roots of the eugenics movement in the late nineteenth century, and the way in which genetic arguments were then used to justify the more aggressive eugenics programs of the first half of the twentieth century, leading in the USA to segregation and enforced sterilization of those supposed to be the bearers of “defective” genes. American eugenics became a model for other countries, not least for Hitler’s Third Reich in Germany, where the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Progeny, passed in 1933, was modeled in part on California’s compulsorysterilization law. In Chapter 8, Paul Weindling focuses on the twelve brief years of National Socialism in Germany, commenting that “biology lay at the core of the Nazi racial culture. Both in terms of ideology and application, biology fueled the racial war to exterminate, kill, and resettle total populations.” Yet, as Weindling points out, the relationship between Darwinism and Nazi ideology is complex, and, in particular, Nazi values of race purity and psychological types sit uneasily with Darwinism. Whereas biology in general played a powerful role in Nazi rhetoric, it was not as dependent upon evolutionary biology as is sometimes thought.

In the Soviet Union, however, Darwinism was central to the competing claims of rival Marxist factions, but as Nikolai Krementsov explains in Chapter 9, the ramifications of biology were far wider and more complex than the well-known affair involving Lysenko’s attempt to wed a discredited

INTRODUCTION

Lamarckian notion of inheritance to socialist doctrine. Ironically, Western observers believed Lysenko’s own version of events, that his biological views were Marxist and Darwinist, while portraying genetics as antiMarxist and anti-Darwinist. But meanwhile Lysenko’s opponents within the Soviet Union believed precisely the opposite: that it was Lysenko’s views that were incompatible with both Marxism and Darwinism. In reality there was fierce competition over which of the many interest groups would set the terms, forms, and norms of the meaning of Marxist-Darwinism, and this characterized much of the development of Soviet biology.

A powerful idea providing an important backdrop for the deployment of Darwinism in so many different contexts was the close linkage between evolution and the notion of progress, as Michael Ruse discusses in Chapter 10. Whereas in formal scientific literature the linkage between the two declined as evolution became more established as an empirical science, in biologists’ more popular writings the idea continued to flourish and continues to remain implicit in much popular evolutionary writing.

Less progressive was the role of biology in shaping notions of sex and gender, as Erika Lorraine Milam recounts in Chapter 11. Whereas early evolutionary theory promoted femaleness as being less evolved than, or a degeneration of, maleness, eugenic rhetoric ironically “secured for women an evolutionary status equal to that of men, as it was recognized that they bore the racial future of Anglo-American society.” Other images nurtured by evolutionary discourse included man the hunter and woman the sexually available mother. “Nature” became, and to a large extent continues to be, the key arbiter of difference between women and men. The ideological application of biological arguments is in no topic more striking than in the context of sex difference.

The final two essays in this volume both serve to bring the central theme right into the present. It is precisely the ideological transformation of Darwinism into a perceived threat to the moral, social, and religious order that helps us to understand the strident creationist opposition to Darwinism in the USA that gathered such pace and energy from the 1960s onward. No longer was Darwinism “merely” a theory to explain the origins of biological diversity, but it was now invested with a naturalistic antireligious agenda. No wonder this became a target for those seeking to preserve young minds from contamination in U.S. schools, and Ronald Numbers brings the story further into the twentieth century in Chapter 12 with an overview of the Intelligent Design movement and the battle for its access to the U.S. educational system.

Should the combined anti-Darwinian efforts of proponents of creationism or intelligent design ever lack suitable ideological ammunition to justify their cause, this is amply provided by Richard Dawkins, until recently the Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, who, as Alister McGrath describes in Chapter 13, has made a concerted effort to invest evolutionary biology with an atheistic agenda. Here “universal Darwinism” is no longer just a highly successful biological theory but, to use Daniel Dennett’s evocative phrase, a “universal acid” destined to eat away at those values and aspirations that many people find make life worth living. Ideologically transformed from the status of biology to a universal worldview, it is hardly surprising that anti-Darwinian movements continue to thrive and proliferate, feeding off such rich evolutionary rhetoric.

So today there is no sign of a let-up in the continuing traffic between biology and ideology. The flow both ways continues as strongly as ever. If this collection of essays has any message, it is that biological ideas promoted in good faith within the academy can find eventual non-biological application in ways remote from the original goals of the scientific investigator. Biologists would therefore do well to be cautious before proclaiming on the broader applications of their findings, recognizing that they themselves are embedded within particular places and cultures, and therefore only too prone to impress their own presuppositions upon their data. A wiser stance would be to emphasize the limited scope of biological theories, generated to explain particular scientific questions, and to resist the ideological hijacking of their scientific ideas to support all kinds of non-biological agendas.

Hopefully this volume will also encourage critical attitudes more generally amongst non-scientists towards the utilization of biological ideas in the service of political, racial, social, religious or antireligious ideologies. This is not merely because such extrapolations from biology often have little to do with the biology itself, thereby subverting the proper public understanding of science, but because such extrapolations can actually be dangerous, as several of the essays that follow most powerfully illustrate.