>
> Or is it scientific? After all 'genes make proteins' and 'proteins are the
> basic machinery in cells' and 'drugs must target bodily functions on the
> cellular/super-cellular level' so if we go and dig around in the genetic
> databanks, we end up with information which allows us to operate upon the
> body and cure disease. I'm radically shortening the descriptions here, but
> I'm suggesting that in some sense this is a 'scientifically valid'
> description - in that we are describing, in language, a hypothesis which
> a) is falsifiable and b) is 'technically' useful.
>
> So this is a 'scientific' statement. But I could just as well state that
> this is an ideological statement, because by structuring the description
> in the way I have, I have done a number of political things:
>
> a) By considering a body, belonging to a person, to be an instance of a
> general body described in theory, I have stated that the proper domain of
> understanding the body resides outside the person whose body that is, and
> in the mind of the scientists.
>
> b) I have delimited the scope of my enquiry so that questions outside of
> the scope of my enquiry cannot be meaningfully answered
> My point is that the process of description used in 'modern science'
> has political effects - it carries with it, hidden in its assumptions, its
> ideology.
Excellent post.
The ideology lies in the reductionist methodology and the concept of causality used. Lewontin in his *Biology as Ideology* uses the example of tuberculosis, where medical students are taught that bacili is the cause of tuberculosis. However, bacili can thrive only in certain environments. British coal miners of Marx's era had an extremely high rate of tuberculosis because bacili thrive in dirty coal mines. Capitalism created working conditions where TB thrives, thus the medical deFn of TB does not stretch the causal chain far back enough to take into account the social conditions --a product of class struggle-- within which diseases develop, spread and die out.
The nature of medical research; who benefits from it, who undertakes
it, for what reasons etc. is also a product of class struggle.
>
> Is it thus false? Surely not - modern genetics, and the use of genetics in
> drug discovery, cannot in a (to me) meaningful sense be said to be false.
>
> So again, is this science, or is this ideology?
Tough question. That bacili cause TB is a half-truth and science cannot be made up of half-truths. So treating TB as caused by bacilli is still just treating the symptoms and not the cause. Incomplete science.
>
> The distinction that seems to be offered in support of science as opposed
> to ideology depends on 'the real' - the world in which, if I jump off a
> building, I will not fly, but fall.
Depends on what you think the ontological status of social relations is. Are they just as real as bacilli?
>
> Of course, we do not apprehend the world directely, as sovereign
> individuals - we apprehend the world through the only kind of practice
> that is human - social practice.
While standing in this society,
> with my current modes of thought, it is difficult to work out other models
> of genetics, I can conceive of a model of cellular development where 'the
> gene' doesn't exist as central, or maybe doesn't even exist at all.
The limitations of the gene-centered view come out in its explanations. Taking the gene as the locus of the explanation, higher level i.e. social, phenomena cannot be explained. When the human genome is mapped out, we will not be able to tell once and for all whether the Law of the Falling Rate of Profit is true or false.
It is through my interaction
> with the world that 'something matters'.
Yes, Kant's central insight.
Sam Pawlett
I stood upon a high place, And saw,below,many devils Running,leaping, And carousing in sin One looked up, grinning, And said "Comrade!Brother!" --Stephen Crane