PalMD has a post, Science is politics. I would respond that science is normative. Or, more precisely, the practice of science intersects naturally with our normative presuppositions. There’s a big universe out there, and the stuff we study is skewed toward topics which interest humans. For example, there’s a whole science, anthropology, devoted to humans. Why? Well, because we humans think we’re mighty important. This isn’t a scientific assessment. You could reply that we are important in terms of how we impact the biosphere, but privileging the biosphere of the third planet in the Sol system is also showing your value cards!
In sciences with a very applied human focus such as medicine the normative dimension looms large. That’s why there’s a whole field termed bioethics. In contrast, though Spinoza attempted to derive ethics from physical and mathematical principles, it seems that physical and mathematical ethics is a much more constrained field (usually it is to the effect of “Does experiment X entail a small chance that the universe will explode?”). It wasn’t always so, as the apocryphal tale of the drowning of the individual who proved the existence of irrational numbers illustrates.
Some science is purely abstract and intellectual, for example String Theory (at least for now, there is a tendency for “pure” science to become “applied” science after a latency of several decades). But as the NIH, DoD and DoE can tell you much of science has utility in terms of the human condition. And because of this it ultimately speaks to what our conception of the Good Life is. And of course our model of the Good Life is a normatively charged construct.
There are differences in political orientation by scientific discipline. But I don’t think this has much direct causal relationship between the nature of a science and the nature of an ideology. Rather, as the data which shows that geologists are likely to be Republican illustrates there are more banal social and economic variables which can explain the associations.
Note: You’re a fucking retard if you think any of the above implies that science is just another superstition or story 🙂
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