The Subjectivity of Science

The progressive view of science assumes as a matter of course that what we think we know today is superior to what we thought we knew in the past. But that is not always the case. Here science writers John Horgan and George Johnson discuss a recent finding that a study conducted by a widely-respected modern scientist, Stephen Jay Gould, was actually more biased and inaccurate than a nineteenth-century study which Gould was criticizing.



It is interesting to note that Horgan, at the end of his commentary, endorses the idea that scientific findings, even if they are accurate, should be suppressed on moral and social grounds. So much for scientific objectivity!