What Science Studies Does
by KYLE MUNKITTRICK on AUGUST 17, 2009
Mark Dery and Stephen Pinker had an email exchange on IQ’s correlation with genetics vs social conditioning. The back-and-forth, posted on boingboing, is marvelous, and at one point, Dery writes a paragraph that brilliantly summarizes the valuable insights made by science studies:
In the past hundred and a half years, we’ve witnessed the dominance of scientific theories that even in their purely theoretical form, let alone everyday practice, were sharply etched with the prejudices and presumptions of the day. I’ve mentioned eugenics; I’ll name a few others: the 1950s vogue, in psychotherapy, for dosing with antidepressants or institutionalizing housewives suffering from what Betty Friedan later called the Problem With No Name (a suicidal dissatisfaction with the role of the happy homemaker). Psychiatry and psychosurgery have been used, throughout their morally checkered history, to bring to heel women who were feminists avant la lettre, as well as political radicals and others who questioned the ideological assumptions of the world they were born into. “Science”decreed them aberrant, and “science”dealt with them, summarily. If pills didn’t work, the electroshock room beckoned, or perhaps the leucotomist’s pick.
Another example: What peer-reviewed journals, open debate, and falsifiability claims prevented the pathologization and in many states criminalization of homosexuality, which was only removed from the DSM-II in 1973? Who, in the peer-reviewed medical journals and openly critical medical community, stood up (until very recently) to oppose the routine surgical “reassignment”of intersex (hermaphroditic) babies, at birth, to a single gender? To be sure, hermaphroditism is anomalous in the strictly statistical sense, but the reflexive assumption that the intersexed patient must be “normalized”with the knife—like the presumption that homosexual “deviance”must be psychopharmaceutically treated—is inarguably a cultural bias, soaked through with ideology. So, too, is the not uncommon tendency, in such cases, to “rationalize”the hermaphroditic male infant with the small but fully functional penis (and male reproductive system) into a female, on the presumption that a small penis is too unendurable a humiliation for any man to bear, in American society. These are only a few examples of science corrupted by cultural bias—ideology, by any other name. If sexism, homophobia, and culturally bounded notions of the normative aren’t to blame for the lamentable chapters in American medicine I’ve just detailed, then what alternate explanation would you posit?
“Smart Bombs: Mark Dery, Steven Pinker on the Nature-Nurture Wars and the Politics of IQ” [boingboing]
