A comparative study of the system of co-evolution of Theoretical Genetics, practical Selets and agriculture in Russia, Ukraine, the Soviet Union and, above all, the example of two research schools - Kharkov and Saratov. Alittle-known and previously unknown archival materials are used.

The global Covid-19 pandemic has changed many aspects of our social and political lives, such as the balance between work and family, the shrinking role of the public sphere and the growth of gover...

The revolutionary period in France marked a turning point in the history of the profession of mining engineering and its relation to the State. This essay outlines the changing requirements of the revolutionary government, and describes the ways in which the State and its engineering professionals responded to the challenge of combining science and practice.

This chapter shows that science and quasi-science are already largely subject to various forms of "governance," including forms of self-governance. In science, as with other debating societies, governance characteristically begins with the problem of membership and the problem of regulating participation in discussion. The standard solutions to the problem of governance in the external sense recognize the inability of public discussion of the sort "demanded" by Beck to deal effectively with science. The history of particular forms (...) of expertise, such as the expertise of agricultural science, shows quite clearly that establishing credibility is difficult. When Leibig first introduced commercial chemical fertilizers with the backing of "science," the fertilizers had various unexpected and unintended side effects that harmed farmers—this was among the first of the science-made environmental disasters. The interesting thing about this process is the incredible difficulty and fragility of expertise. (shrink)

Zygon®, Volume 57, Issue 1, Page 267-286, March 2022.

Open science (OS) is considered the new paradigm for science and knowledge dissemination. OS fosters cooperative work and new ways of distributing knowledge by promoting effective data sharing (as early and broadly as possible) and a dynamic exchange of research outcomes, not only publications. On the other hand, intellectual property (IP) legislation seeks to balance the moral and economic rights of creators and inventors with the wider interests and needs of society. Managing knowledge outcomes in a new open (...) research and innovation ecosystem is challenging and should become part of the EU’s IP strategy, underpinning EU policies with the new open science–open innovation paradigm. (shrink)

In the 1950s and 1960s, prominent institutional economists in the United States offered what became the orthodox theory on the obstacles to commercializing scientific knowledge. According to this theory, scientific knowledge has inherent qualities that make it a public good. Since the 1970s, however, neoliberalism has emphasized the need to convert public goods to private goods to enhance economic growth, and this theory has had global impacts on policies governing the generation and diffusion of scientific research and innovation. We critique (...) the foundational conceptualizations of scientific knowledge as either public or private by examining Germany’s treatment of scientific outputs as club goods. We then compare the relative impacts on social welfare of distinct United States and German approaches to food and agricultural research and innovation. We conclude with reflections on how these findings might contribute to a democratic debate on how best to manage scientific knowledge to enhance social welfare. (shrink)

There is a stark difference between American and British policy on embryo science and research cloning. The following survey of the discourse offered both in support of and in opposition to research cloning and embryo science in the United States and Great Britain will show that the same arguments were made in both countries. The fact that similar ethical argumentation occurred in environments where different policy was set is an indicator that current frames for ethical discourse on embryonic (...) stem cell research and human cloning do not effectively capture the debate in the form that politicians and possible consumers of services to be derived from embryo science face.The ethics surrounding embryo research and human cloning have been presented from virtually every possible viewpoint in all forms of medium. It is impossible to reprise every argument made on embryo science and research cloning; therefore, this survey will focus on some of the arguments made during the time leading up to the enactment of Great Britain's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act of 1990 and the Human Fertilisation and Embryology regulations added to it in 2001. (shrink)

The question of the role of the state has, in one way or another, dominated historical studies of science and technology in modern China, a field that has experienced rapid growth since the early 1980s both inside and outside of China. While Western scholars have focused their analysis on the state control of science and scientists, Chinese historians and writers, often working under political restrictions, have largely adopted a descriptive approach with an emphasis on biographical, institutional, (...) and disciplinary histories and on the theme of Chinese nationalism. The emergence of an international community of younger historians of science, the easing of access to primary source materials, and new attention to transnational and comparative perspectives promise to make the field an exciting area of scholarship. (shrink)

This book analyzes how science-based nature protection campaigns are transforming society and the environment through extensive fieldwork in China's southwestern cities. Furthermore, it examines the role of ecology in constituting state power and social inequality.

Abstract. The science and religion discourse in the Western academy, though expansive, has not paid significant enough attention to South Asian views, particularly those from Hindu thought. This essay seeks to address this issue in three parts. First, I present the South Asian standpoint as it currently relates to the science and religion discourse. Second, I survey and evaluate some available literature on South Asian approaches to the science and religion discourse. Finally, I promote three possible steps (...) forward: (1) the literature must shift from high Hindu philosophical religion to the more prevalent bhakti traditions, (2) the Indian context must be understood in its own right without metaphysical assumptions attached to the concepts of science and religion, and (3) most importantly, concepts unique to the Indian worldview, such as dharma, maya, and cit, must receive better treatment in translation in order to facilitate a more accurate exchange of ideas across cultural boundaries. (shrink)

In the past twenty years, the field of science and technology studies (S&TS) has made considerable progress toward illuminating the relationship between scientific knowledge and political power. These insights have not yet been synthesized or presented in a form that systematically highlights the connections between S&TS and other social sciences. This timely collection of essays by some of the leading scholars in the field attempts to fill that gap. The book develops the theme of "co-production", showing how scientific knowledge (...) both embeds and is embedded in social identities, institutions, representations and discourses. Accordingly, the authors argue, ways of knowing the world are inseparably linked to the ways in which people seek to organize and control it. Through studies of emerging knowledges, research practices and political institutions, the authors demonstrate that the idiom of co-production importantly extends the vocabulary of the traditional social sciences, offering fresh analytic perspectiveson the nexus of science, power and culture. (shrink)

In Greg Bear’s critically acclaimed science fiction novel Darwin’s Radio, the activation of an endogenous retrovirus (SHEVA), ironically located in a “noncoding region” of the human genome, causes extreme symptoms in women worldwide, including miscarriages. In the United States, a task force is assembled to control the pandemic crisis and to find out how SHEVA operates at the genomic level. However, as the story unfolds, it becomes manifest that SHEVA is too complex to decode in this way and, moreover, (...) that it is not a disease at all. Biologist Kay Lang speculates that SHEVA is triggered by signals from the environment, and that newborn SHEVA children will be a new variation or species of Man. In this essay I analyze Bear’s literary experiment with science along Deleuze and Guattari’s important, but largely overlooked, concepts of State science and nomad science. Bear’s novel gives narrative form to nomad-scientific ideas about life, notably Lynn Margulis’s theory of endosymbiogenesis, which holds that a species’ DNA is an assemblage of many genomes acquired in symbiotic relations. The import of Bear’s informed speculations, I argue, is not crass prediction but a nomadic vision of life as always already different (impure, infected) and in becoming—a counterpoint to the image of the double helix as the bedrock of human identity. Darwin’s Radio is a key example of how fiction can be an excellent partner for science, technology, and society, analyzing and intervening in debates about life and laying bare epistemological and biopolitical tensions of technoscience. (shrink)

This Handbook assembles state-of-the-art insights into the co-evolutionary and precarious relations between science and public policy. Beyond this, it also offers a fresh outlook on emerging challenges for science (including technology and innovation) in changing societies, and related policy requirements, as well as the challenges for public policy in view of science-driven economic, societal, and cultural changes. In short, this book deals with science as a policy-triggered project as well as public policy as a (...) class='Hi'>science-driven venture. (shrink)

Recent science and technology studies have analyzed questions of nonexpert participation in science, technology, and science policy from an empirically grounded perspective. The introduction to this special issue offers a double contribution to this debate. First, it presents a summary of the state of the art and an outline of the historical emergence of the participatory question. The argument distinguishes four periods since the late nineteenth century, each with a specific relationship between expert and nonexpert knowledge (...) ranging from a hybrid, to a politicized, to an autonomous, to a participatory relationship. Second, the introduction summarizes the contributions to this issue. Their common concern is to take the debate one step further by critically reflecting the problems and limitations of participatory practices. The contributions point out the need for contextualizing the participatory question within the wider social, economic, and political circumstances in which participatory science and technology is set. (shrink)

Excerpt from Science and Ethics: Being a Series of Six Lectures Delivered Under the Auspices of the Natural Law Research League And abroad (germany, France, America, but although within the circumscribed limits of these lectures I have not. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original (...) format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

Availability of external funding influences the viability and structure of scientific fields. In the 1980s, structural changes in the manner in which external funds became available started to have an impact on materials science and engineering in the United States. These changes colluded with the search for a disciplinary identity of this research field inside the university. The solutions that arose were intended to find a mediating structure between external demands and resources and disciplinary orientation. Interviews with seventeen scientists (...) in seven universities revealed the impact in local university settings. The rise of research centers as new organizational units in universities can be linked to two periods. In the 1960s, expensive instruments stimulated unit formation; in the 1980s, the increase in application-related funding forced new administrative ways. It is shown that organizational changes also have an impact on disciplinary identity as witnessed by a strong increase in interdisciplinary materials Ph.D.s awarded. (shrink)

Beginning in 1868, the United States Army Medical Museum issued a request to Army medical personnel situated in ‘Indian country’ for specimens of skulls from Native Americans. The purpose of this collection was to promote the study of craniometry, a branch of racial science commonly used to delineate the different varieties of mankind and to rank them according to their perceived intellectual attributes. Yet, as this paper argues, the efforts of Army surgeons in amassing hundreds of crania for the (...) Army Medical Museum were not matched by a similar level of commitment on the part of racial researchers. In examining why this seemingly impressive collection fell rapidly into disuse, this paper explores the creation and abandonment of one of the largest craniological collections formed in the United States in relation to the trajectory of craniometrical studies during this period. It also questions the link between the interests of racial researchers in the late nineteenth century and those of government policy makers, arguing that the two might not have been particularly closely aligned in the case of craniological research in Washington. (shrink)

Although much has been written about the vigorous debates over science and religion in the Victorian era, little attention has been paid to their continuing importance in early twentieth-century Britain. Reconciling Science and Religion provides a comprehensive survey of the interplay between British science and religion from the late nineteenth century to World War II. Peter J. Bowler argues that unlike the United States, where a strong fundamentalist opposition to evolutionism developed in the 1920s (most famously expressed (...) in the Scopes "monkey trial" of 1925), in Britain there was a concerted effort to reconcile science and religion. Intellectually conservative scientists championed the reconciliation and were supported by liberal theologians in the Free Churches and the Church of England, especially the Anglican "Modernists." Popular writers such as Julian Huxley and George Bernard Shaw sought to create a non-Christian religion similar in some respects to the Modernist position. Younger scientists and secularists—including Rationalists such as H. G. Wells and the Marxists—tended to oppose these efforts, as did conservative Christians, who saw the liberal position as a betrayal of the true spirit of their religion. With the increased social tensions of the 1930s, as the churches moved toward a neo-orthodoxy unfriendly to natural theology and biologists adopted the "Modern Synthesis" of genetics and evolutionary theory, the proposed reconciliation fell apart. Because the tensions between science and religion—and efforts at reconciling the two—are still very much with us today, Bowler's book will be important for everyone interested in these issues. Contents: Illustrations Preface Introduction: A Legacy of Conflict? Confrontation, Cooperation, or Coexistence? Victorian Background Science and Religion in the New Century Part One: The Sciences and Religion 1. The Religion of Scientists Changing Patterns of Belief Scientists and Christianity Scientists and Theism Method and Meaning Science and Values 2. Scientists against Superstition Science and Rationalism Religion without Revelation Marxists and Other Radicals Science, Religion, and the History of Science 3. Physics and Cosmology Ether and Spirit The New Physics The Earth and the Universe 4. Evolution and the New Natural Theology Science and Creation Evolution and Progress The Role of Lamarckism Darwinism Revived 5. Matter, Life, and Mind The Origin of Life Vitalism and Organicism Mind and Body Psychology and Religion Part Two: The Churches and Science 6. The Churches in the New Century The Challenge of the New The Churches’ Response 7. The New Theology in the Free Churches Precursors of the New Theology Campbell and the New Theology Modernism in the Free Churches 8. Anglican Modernism Modernism and the New Natural Theology Charles F. D’Arcy E. W. Barnes W. R. Inge Charles Raven 9. The Reaction against Modernism Evangelicals against Evolution Liberal Catholicism The Menace of the New Psychology Science and Modern Life Theology in the Thirties Roman Catholicism Part Three: The Wider Debate 10. Science and Secularism Against Idealism Popular Rationalism The Social Reformers 11. Religion’s Defenders From Idealism to Spiritualism Creative and Emergent Evolution Evolution and the Human Spirit Progress through Struggle The Christian Response Epilogue Biographical Appendix Bibliography Index. (shrink)

I am grateful to Peter Achinstein, Don Howard, and the other participants at the conference, 'The Role of Experiments in Scientific Changer', Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 30 March to 1 April, 1990, for helpful discussion, and especially to Ron Laymon for his discussion comments presented at the conference on an earlier version of this paper.

This collection of essays by Sheila Jasanoff explores how democratic governments construct public reason, that is, the forms of evidence and argument used in making state decisions accountable to citizens.

Interest in science and math plays an important role in encouraging STEM motivation and career aspirations. This interest decreases for girls between late childhood and adolescence. Relatedly, positive mentoring experiences with female teachers can protect girls against losing interest. The present study examines whether visitors to informal science learning sites differ in their expressed science and math interest, as well as their science and math stereotypes following an interaction with either a male or female educator. Participants (...) were visitors to one of four ISLS in the United States and United Kingdom. Following an interaction with a male or female educator, they reported their math and science interest and responded to math and science gender stereotype measures. Female participants reported greater interest in math following an interaction with a female educator, compared to when they interacted with a male educator. In turn, female participants who interacted with a female educator were less likely to report male-biased math gender stereotypes. Self-reported science interest did not differ as a function of educator gender. Together these findings suggest that, when aiming to encourage STEM interest and challenge gender stereotypes in informal settings, we must consider the importance of the gender of educators and learners. (shrink)

Drawing on an analysis of German national cybersecurity policy, this paper argues that cybersecurity has become a key site in which states mobilize science and technology to produce state power. Contributing to science and technology studies work on technoscience and statecraft, I develop the concepts of “territorialization projects” and “digital territory” to capture how the production of state power in the digital age increasingly relies on technoscientific expertise about information infrastructure, shifting tasks of government into the (...) domain of computer scientists and network engineers. The notion of territorialization projects describes states’ ongoing struggle to mobilize science and engineering in order to transform globally distributed information infrastructure into bounded national territory and invest it with patriotic meaning: making digital territory. Digital territory, in other words, is nationalized information infrastructure: it includes building and monopolizing infrastructure as well as normative ideas about nation—who is a digital citizen, and who isn’t; or what constitutes “good” and “bad” digital citizens. Nationalizing information infrastructure and placing statecraft into the hands of scientists and engineers might indicate an emerging form of “techno-nationalism”—a combination of nationalist and technocratic tendencies—raising urgent questions for STS scholarship to investigate the consequences of territorialization projects for justice, democracy, and civic life. (shrink)

Science is the most powerful tool of the twentieth century, but is its influence properly harnessed? This book examines the often-difficult relationship between scientists and those who govern them. A distinguished group of specialists looks at the history of this relationship, where it stands today, and what needs to be done to ensure that science is used in the future for the greatest good of the greatest number.

This book explores the concept of consciousness when defined in the terms mind, spirit, soul and awareness. It consists of the edited proceedings of a colloquium held in Cordoba, at which experts in physics, neuro- and psycho-physiology, analytical psychology, philosophy and religious knowledge discussed aspects of their work related to this main theme. The following areas are covered: quantum mechanics and the role of consciousness, neurophysiology and states of consciousness, the manifestation of the psyche in consciousness, the odyssey of consciousness, (...) and science and consciousness. The discussions which follow give a multi-disciplinary perspective on the questions involved. (shrink)

A shrewd and compelling examination of how political figures throughout history have used scientific findings to achieve their objectives--just as scientists have often put political forces to work to achieve their own goals.

This essay offers an overview of the history of the relations between science and Eastern Christianity based on Greek-language sources. The civilizations concerned are the Byzantine Empire, the Christian Orthodox communities of the Ottoman Empire, and modern Greece, as a case study of a national state. Beginning with the Greek Church Fathers, the essay investigates the ideas of theologians and scholars on nature. Neoplatonism, the theological debates of Iconoclasm and Hesychasm, the proposed union of the Eastern and Western (...) Churches, and the complex relations with the Hellenic past all had notable impacts on the conception of science held by the Byzantine Orthodox. From the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, the Christian Orthodox world did not actively participate in the making of the new science that was developing in modern Europe. It had to deal with the assimilation of scientific ideas produced by Western Christianity, and its main concern was the “legitimacy” of knowledge that did not originate directly from its own spiritual tradition. Finally, with regard to the Greek state, beyond the specific points of contact between the sciences and Orthodox Christianity—pertaining, for example, to materialism, evolution, and the calendar—the essay presents the constant background engagement with religion visible in most public pronouncements of scientists and intellectuals. (shrink)

This article brings together the history of the social sciences and the history of social thought in Socialist Romania. It is concerned with the development of ideas about the social beyond collectivism, especially about the relationship between individual and society under socialism, from the early 1960s to the end of the 1970s. The analysis speaks to three major themes in the current historiography of Cold War social science. First, the article investigates the role of disciplinary specialization in the advancement (...) of new ideas about the social in the postwar period. Specifically, it asks how the debate over the relationship between sociology and Marxism-Leninism has challenged ideas about collectivism from Stalinist social science. Second, the article shows how social practice, individual and collective agency, and people's subjectivities became theoretically relevant in the 1960s, and how they were integrated, via empirical sociological research, into the reworked conceptual apparatus of post-Stalinist Marxism-Leninism. This complicates accounts about the role of quantification and theorization in postwar social science by foregrounding the intense reflection on the role of empirical research in sociology under state socialism. Third, the article shows how the relationship between individual and society became a topic of interest across social sciences in the 1960s and 1970s. The Marxist humanist approach to the social, although it never achieved the institutional status of a distinct discipline, adds an important perspective from East Central Europe to the existing historiography of the ‘thinning’ of the social in social sciences and social thought beginning in the 1950s. (shrink)

ArgumentThe interwar period in France is characterized by intense activity to disseminate science in society through various media: magazines, conferences, book series, encyclopedias, radio, exhibitions, and museums. In this context, the scientific community developed significant attempts to disseminate science in close alliance with the State. This paper presents three ambitious projects conducted in the 1930s which targeted different audiences and engaged the social sciences along with the natural sciences. The first project was a multimedia enterprise aimed at (...) bridging what would later be named “the two cultures” – natural sciences and humanities – rather than at popularizing scientific results in the society at large. The second project, an encyclopedia namedEncyclopédie françaiseedited by the French historian Lucien Febvre, was meant to shape a cultural view of science for the general public. The third project and the most successful enterprise was thePalais de la découvertedesigned by the physicist Jean Perrin and explicitly aimed at attracting the young public. This paper explores the paradoxes that resulted from these large enterprises. Despite their social ideals, the scientists-popularizers favored an elitist concept of popular science essentially aimed at integrating science into high culture. While they strove to overcome the increased specialization of sciences, their efforts nevertheless accelerated the professionalization of scientific research and the isolation of science in an ivory tower. In their attempts to get closer to the public, they eventually contributed to spreading the cliché of the increasing gap between the scientists and the public. (shrink)

Discussions about consciousness are complicated by the fact that participants do not share a common underlying “ordinary” consciousness. Everyday experience is founded on what Teasdale calls implicational cognition, much of which is not verbally formulated. An unacknowledged aspect of debate is individuals’ attempts to negotiate the expression of their unformulated experience. This is further complicated by the way in which a discourse, based on particular ontological assumptions, exercises an ideological control which limits what underlying aspects of experience can be formulated (...) at all. Tart’s concept of state specific sciences provides a framework within which the role of unformulated experience can be acknowledged and taken into account. Unless this is done, debates will be vitiated by participants engaging in ideological struggles and talking at cross-purposes. (shrink)

The dissertation examines the strategy of critical legitimation operative in contemporary social and political theory. Its primary thesis is that the historical emergence of critical discourse must be understood within the context of two events of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: the philosophical encounter with the rise of modern natural science, and the formation of a bourgeois intellectual elite and its essentially moral opposition to the absolutist state. These events produce a strategy of critical legitimation that (...) combines the vocabularies of mathematical objectivity and juridical normativity. ;This thesis is defended through a reading of several texts of Kant and Hegel, wherein two modes of the strategy are discerned. In Kant there is found the strategy of expropriation, or the iterative acquisition of the object of discourse, whilst in Hegel one finds a strategy of appropriation or systematic acquisition. Both modes serve to constitute the various forms of critical discourse in their specific theorization of the objects and themes of social and political inquiry. (shrink)

In his anthology of socio-political essays, Evolution and Human Life, Oka Asajirō, early twentieth century Japan’s foremost advocate of evolutionism, developed a biological vision of the nation-state as super-organism that reflected the concerns and aims of German-inspired Meiji statism and anticipated aspects of radical ultra-nationalism. Drawing on non-Darwinian doctrines, Oka attempted to realize such a fused or organic state by enhancing social instincts that would bind the minzoku and state into a single living entity. Though mobilization during (...) the Russo-Japanese War seemed to evince this super-organism, the increasingly contentious and complex society that emerged in the war’s aftermath caused Oka to turn first to Lamarckism and eventually to orthogenesis in the hopes of preserving the instincts needed for a viable nation-state. It is especially in the state interventionist measures that Oka finally came to endorse in order to forestall orthogenetically-driven degeneration that the technocratic proclivities of his statist orientation become most apparent. The article concludes by suggesting that Oka’s emphasis on degeneration, autarkic expansion, and, most especially, totalitarian submersion of individuals into the statist collectivity indicates a complex relationship between his evolutionism and fascist ideology, what recent scholarship has dubbed radical Shinto ultra-nationalism. (shrink)

Scholars in science and technology studies (STS) have recently been called upon to advise governments on the design of procedures for public engagement. Any such instrumental function should be carried out consistently with STS’s interpretive and normative obligations as a social science discipline. This article illustrates how such threefold integration can be achieved by reviewing current US participatory politics against a 70-year backdrop of tacit constitutional developments in governing science and technology. Two broad cycles of constitutional adjustment (...) are discerned: the first enlarging the scope of state action as well as public participation, with liberalized rules of access and sympathetic judicial review; the second cutting back on the role of the state, fostering the rise of an academic-industrial complex for technology transfer, and privatizing value debates through increasing delegation to professional ethicists. New rules for public engagement in the United Sates should take account of these historical developments and seek to counteract some of the anti-democratic tendencies observable in recent decades. (shrink)

This article provides a critical and global overview of current research into public opinion about science and technology (S&T). Although several sets of high-quality data exist, there remains a lack of international coordination and irregular release of new data in forms that can be widely used. The article highlights a range of key challenges that those involved in collecting and reporting public opinion data about S&T can address to provide society with a more comprehensive and more integrated picture of (...) attitudes and understanding about S&T around the world. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and (...) made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)