It was reported yesterday that Bruno Latour, the philosopher of science and anthropologist, had died at the age of 75.
Latour was considered one of France’s most influential and iconoclastic living philosophers, whose work on how humanity perceives the climate emergency won praise and attention around the world.
A pioneer of science and technology studies, Latour argued that facts generally came about through interactions between experts, and were therefore socially and technically constructed. While philosophers have historically recognised the separation of facts and values – the difference between knowledge and judgment, for example – Latour believed that this separation was wrong.
…His groundbreaking books, Laboratory Life (1979), Science in Action (1987) and We Have Never Been Modern (1991) offered groundbreaking insights into, as he put it “both the history of humans’ involvement in the making of scientific facts and the sciences’ involvement in the making of human history”.
To put that into context, one of his most controversial assertions was the claim that Louis Pasteur did not just discover microbes, but collaborated with them.
In the mid-1990s there were heated debates between “realists”, who believed that facts were completely objective, and “social constructionists”, like Latour, who argued that facts were the creations of scientists.
I was impressed with the book that Latour co-wrote with Steve Woolgar in 1979 titled Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts and discussed it in my own book The Great Paradox of Science about how the history of science that is presented in textbooks and popular accounts is very different from what actually happens. Here is the relevant passage from my book.
In her exhaustive analysis of how during the first half of the twentieth century what we call the “Copenhagen interpretation” of quantum mechanics became dominant, Mara Beller shows that the people who are now seen as instrumental in its formulation (Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, and Wolfgang Pauli) were constantly changing their views, at various times adopting ones that contradicted each other and their own earlier views, sometimes opportunistically doing so in order to appeal to different audiences and win converts. Decades later, their reminiscences of past events were revised to create a linear narrative that conformed to their final views. Despite the fact that there were, and still are, viable alternatives to the Copenhagen interpretation, those other voices have largely disappeared from the discussion (Beller 1999).
What is more accurate than a statement of the form “This scientist discovered this phenomenon (or proposed a new theory) on this date” is to say something along the lines of “Before date X, the theory or phenomenon was not part of the scientific consensus but after date Y, it was considered well established.” In the intervening period, ideas related to it bounced around among various researchers working on the problem, continually getting refined in the process until they settled into a rough consensus. The assignment of credit and dates for the final formulation of these efforts is an act of retrospective consensus judgment by the community of scientists in the field, mostly based on perceptions of who contributed the most to the final formulation and assigning their names to them, along with dates, as easily-identifiable markers. This verdict it is not always unanimous and sometimes bitterly contested by those who feel their contributions have not been adequately recognized.
A detailed anthropological study of daily scientific practice in the Salk Institute laboratory in La Jolla, California shows how difficult it is to assign credit and dates. Bruno Latour describes how scientists arrived at the elucidation of TRF (thyrotropin-releasing factor), a hormone that is secreted by the brain. He says that his observations led him to “the conviction that a body of practices widely regarded by outsiders as well organized, logical, and coherent, in fact consists of a disordered array of observations with which scientists struggle to produce order” (Latour and Woolgar 1979, 36). The final consensus formulation of TRF (i.e., when it became a scientific “fact”) emerged some time between January 1968 and January 1970 (Latour and Woolgar 1979, 181–82). Half of the Nobel Prize in Medicine for 1977 for this discovery was shared between the Salk group and another competing group in New Orleans (the other half went to Rosalind Yalow for the techniques she developed that was used in these studies), but each of these two competing groups strongly felt that they deserved sole credit and that the other did not deserve even a share of the award.
But despite these known shortcomings, we still continue (as I will also be guilty of sometimes in this book) to use that misleading shorthand description of scientific discovery in the form of “Scientist X discovered Y on date Z” as long as it serves a pedagogical purpose by providing a concise, convenient, and memorable narrative structure of landmark developments in science. But in doing so, we should always bear in mind that what we are passing on is a myth-story and not an accurate history, let alone a complete one.
I feel that the contributions of the historians, sociologists, and philosophers of science towards our understanding of the nature science should be much better known and my own book was partly intended to bring that scholarship to a wider audience.
Doesn’t much of this boil down to “the long and tortured process by which scientific credit and reputations are created”, rather than the facts (however defined) as such?
[nature science → nature of science]
Pierce @1: Yeah, pretty much. I doubt that there’s an academic field which is free of self-serving blather and obfuscation.
Pierce @#1,
The point is that when something new becomes an established scientific fact is almost never a single moment but an extended process involving many people. The fact that credit and reputations are also involved is (in my mind) secondary.
Any study of history quickly reveals that it is highly subjective. We know about Roman history, but very little exists that is written from the POV of the various places and peoples who were colonized by Rome.
The historians who first invented Iron Age hill forts and ancient invasions were military men, so their personal bias became the official history of England. Hill ‘forts’ are now interpreted as social spaces, where entire communities would meet seasonally for feasting and perhaps trade and religious rites. They have evidence of the feasts, but the bones can’t tell us why they were having the feast.
Archeology can fill in some aspects of historic cultures, but better science in the areas of DNA sequencing, and various dating techniques have just begun to revolutionize our understanding of human history.
Didn’t Leeuwenhoek discover microbes, rather than Pasteur?
Steve, yes.
@ 5 Tethys
Apart from the best-selling book of all time. 😉
Somewhat related, Stephen Hawking was often invoked by fans of “hard science” who sneered at “post-modernism”. Yet the real Hawking had this to say:
Quite interesting, but please let’s pay attention to definitions and vocabulary. Statements like:
“In the mid-1990s there were heated debates between “realists”, who believed that facts were completely objective, and “social constructionists”, like Latour, who argued that facts were the creations of scientists”
really make me jump out of my skin. Facts concerning the discovery process may be debated, but facts relative to the actual workings of nature may not.
For example, when someone prepares one of those horrid, fluorhydric-acid heavy cocktails used for metallurgy, they must be damn careful not to have their face eaten off by that stuff.
And that is a fact that is NEVER up for discussion: quite obvious this, but maybe not so obvious to those less familiar with science in general.
“Didn’t Leeuwenhoek discover microbes, rather than Pasteur?”
.
Creationists like Leeuwenhoek and Pasteur also refuted spontaneous generation, the notion that living things emerged from inanimate matter. This doctrine has been successfully revived and repackaged, but it has not, of course, been demonstrated. I suppose that for scientists to be able to create facts, some of the elements of the scientific method must necessarily be discarded.
Spontaneous generation as they knew it is not the abiogenesis we are slowly uncovering; a refutation of the former is not a refutation of the latter. Your hobby is dumb.
Silent Bob @8
Most heavily edited book of all time? That book is the reason we don’t have a written historic record for most of Europe. It’s very frustrating that the only thing written in Gothic that still exists is the Wulfilas translation of the Bible. (Shakes fist at Justinian)
txpippy: has “intelligent design” been demonstrated?
“has “intelligent design” been demonstrated?”
.
Extravagantly.
Has anyone seen a designer designing that, or any other living system? That’s what you meant by “demonstrated,” right?
Your source documents an interesting creature, but specifies “These gears are not designed; they are evolved” -- contradicting your claim.
Also, as I said before, gears are pretty damn simple compared to most other biological systems. Pointing to that as an example of “irreducible complexity, therefore it had to have been designed” just shows how utterly silly the whole “intelligent design” shtick really is.
And they claim to believe the ENTIRE UNIVERSE was created by their super-duper-intelligent god, but they can only find a tiny handful of isolated examples of things in this universe that are supposedly too complex and wunnerful to have merely evolved. It’s bad jokes all the way down.
There is nothing simple about integrated, mirrored sector gears. There is however, something comically simple about believing that random errors can produce anything functional.
txpiper @19: There’s something deeply tragi-comic about seeing complexity and reflexively proclaiming “goddidit”.
Of course, the real problem with you and your fellow-travellers is that you start with your magical beliefs, and then try to shoehorn reality into them. It’s a profoundly dishonest, and futile, exercise.
“you start with your magical beliefs”
.
Nah. It’s just your grossly misplaced faith in a supposed developmental mechanism that has never been observed, that you do not understand, and that you cannot explain or apply to anything biological, like those gears. It is about you believing in things that you like. It’s how you’ve been trained to think.
txpiper @21: I was brought up in the Lutheran Church. Nobody trained me to reject the stories I was told. I did that all on my own, by the age of 11. And the “grossly misplaced faith” you speak of simply doesn’t exist. We examine. We hypothesize. We are often wrong. We correct as best we can without appealing to supposedly received wisdom. You’re not even remotely interested in that process. Your conclusions are all predetermined.
That said, there were and are devout believers (like Maxwell), who recognized that science should admit of no “sacred ground” that was beyond their questioning. For people like you, the sacred ground is everything.
“…that you do not understand…” This is very funny coming from a creationist that believes Jesus is going to ride to Earth soon.
I was raised by deeply religious people who are not liars and hold the tenet that only adults are capable of choosing baptism into their faith.
Since faith is meaningless without acts, I decided to simply act with integrity, and dispense with the baptizing and faith bit altogether.
Says the person who has been trained not to think.
<snicker>
That is brilliant, txpiper! Comically simple.
As for religious types, facts never matter one whit.
see https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_of_the_end_of_the_world
It’s a shame we can’t hook those goalposts up to a generator, that’s a ridiculous amount of carbon-free energy just going to waste in these comment sections…
@ 21 txpiper
Lol. “Every accusation is an admission”.
There are ways to distinguish wishful thinking from well supported explanations -- empiricism, making testable predictions, consistency with other well-supported understanding, making the least unproven assumptions…
Guess which wins out of the evolution theory and the magic inexplicable disembodied intelligence “theory”?
@ 26 tuatara
I confess it’s true. I was trained to think that belief should be based on evidence and reason.
Silentbob.
I was amused by the disparaging and quite unironic accusatory ejaculation of our dear creationist friend here, much in the vein of John Morales only I was less explicit.
My teachers at school mostly followed a method for teaching me. That is partly ‘how’ I was taught to think. But I did thankfully have one schoolmaster who taught me ‘how to think’, and his methods were quite dissimilar to the others.
Our friend txpiper here gets the two quite mixed up, the poor thing.
There is nothing simple about integrated, mirrored sector gears.
God’s death, @txpiper, you’re a special kind of stupid, aren’t you? How simple do you have to be, to think (or think you can credibly pretend to think) that PLAIN OLD GEARS are too complicated a “system” to evolve in a living creature? #FuckOffToBed
It’s funny to think a cog is too complex to arrive at by undirected chance, while a granite rock -- with all those embedded crystals -- is not.
“to think…that PLAIN OLD GEARS are too complicated a “system” to evolve”
.
Things do not just evolve. And random DNA replication errors could not possibly produce the instructions and definitions for such things as:
-the specialized proteins involved
-the size of the gears
-the positioning of the gears
-the symmetrical arrangement of the gears
-the spacing of the gear teeth
-the start and stop points of the sectors
-the neurological controls that activate the system
-etc., etc, etc.
Mutations cannot build sublime, functional systems. Organization and purpose are not the result of chance events. Countless millions of fortuitous molecular level miracles did not occur just to make your sappy theory work. You have been made a fool of. You have been deceived.
txpiper:
And so, yet again, back to the beginning.
(A hamster running in a wheel has more degrees of freedom than you)
Heh. I don’t know how many times I’ve told you ‘mutation’ is a synonym for ‘genetic change’. It means change, it does not mean error.
(Can’t improve a system without changing it)
<snicker>
OK, so why then did those countless millions of fortuitous molecular level miracles occur?
(I mean, it’s pretty clear from your language, no?
Goddiddit, because only God makes miracles occur.
And God works in mysterious ways)
Frustrated feverish rant dismissed.
See, txpiper, your schtick presumes God cannot use evolution as a method.
Too magical for it.
So, really, you’re dissing your own deity, not just presuming you know better than It.
(Better get ready to have hot coals shoved into your orifices, in the afterdeath)
“Things do not just evolve.”
Just because you keep saying it, doesn’t make it true.
Empiricism doesn’t work like bronze-age prayers.
You keep denying facts unless someone can provide you a bite-sized graduate degree worth of information in a blog comment, and well, the world doesn’t work that way.
You repeatedly refuse to consider the most basic of statistical concepts. Most High-schoolers (and probably middle-schoolers, and even some elementary folk, but I don’t want to overly complicate this for you) rapidly understand the results(marginal concession, maybe not the mechanism?), of 3d6 (rolling 3 six sided dice) vs. 4d6 drop lowest (rolling 4 six sided dice, and only counting the total of the highest 3).
You’re biggest complaint against the idea of “through natural selection” is a steadfast refusal to admit the “natural selection” portion of that idea has any bearing on it. It’s about like If I were to try to claim that heat has any bearing on cooking, because I’ve had shit results using recipes with both aluminum and cast iron cookware, but no oven/stove.
Nobody should engage with you, because you are the platonic ideal of a personification of an unfalisifiable hypothesis. Nobody can learn anything by engaging with you. You have no logical consistency, and are merely a void of intellectual energy
txpiper is a base troll, and I hope they never come anywhere near where I exist, because I do not think I can afford the inevitable assault charges I will endure If I have to experience there nonsense in meatworld…
Substantiate this claim.
Another claim lacking substantiation. How have you demonstrated their truth? Lacking this, you just have naked assertions.
“‘mutation’ is a synonym for ‘genetic change’. It means change, it does not mean error.”
.
You can’t paper over this with word games.
“A mutation is a change in the DNA sequence of an organism. Mutations can result from errors in DNA replication during cell division, exposure to mutagens or a viral infection….
In real life, a mutation is never so beneficial that it turns a person into a superhero or does something bizarre like cause them to grow wings. There are many reasons that mutations usually don’t have major consequences. One reason is that our cells have very sophisticated machinery for repairing mutations very quickly.”
https://www.genome.gov/genetics-glossary/Mutation
=
“Random, unpredictable DNA copying mistakes account for nearly two-thirds of the mutations that cause cancer, report scientists from Johns Hopkins….each time a normal cell divides and copies its DNA to produce two new cells, it makes multiple mistakes. These copying mistakes are a potent source of cancer mutations that historically have been scientifically undervalued, and this new work provides the first estimate of the fraction of mutations caused by these mistakes”
https://sciencebeta.com/dna-copy-errors-cancer/
.
So much for the thundering engine of evolutionary development.
You can’t paper over this with word games.
Why? Because word-games are your specialty?
The word “error” means a mistake or unintended deviation from some sort of plan or decided course. Life-forms and living systems don’t evolve according to plans, so you can’t just automatically call every single genetic change an “error.” That’s YOUR word game, and it only proves you’re a dishonest idiot. Among the correct, non-game phrases that are appropriate are “beneficial mutation” and “detrimental mutation.” The latter might be called an “error,” but the former cannot.
It’s about like If I were to try to claim that heat has any bearing on cooking, because I’ve had shit results using recipes with both aluminum and cast iron cookware, but no oven/stove.
I’m sure txpipsqueak has a stove. He just never learned where the pilot-light was, so he insists that his neighbors ability to cook good meals can only be ascribed to divine miracles.
txpiper @39:
It doesn’t thunder. It stutters (like me!). Tiny changes over billions of years. Or perhaps you’re a YECist. If so, give us the rundown on why cosmology and geology are also “misguided”.
txpiper is a YEC. His grasp of geology consists of claiming that all sedimentary rocks worldwide were deposited by the flood of Noah.
Never mind that my local sedimentary rocks are thousands of miles from any body of salt water, and filled with fossils of extinct marine life like trilobites and stromatolite reefs.
#39 tx replying to John
Your own source bolsters John’s position and not yours. First, it agrees that ‘mutation’ simply means changes to genetic sequence: “A mutation is a change in the DNA sequence of an organism.” You would know this if you knew anything of the etymology of mutation -- it is related to ‘mutable’, which is synonymous with changeable. See latin’s mutabilis.
Second, it states copy errors are only one of several sources of mutation: “Mutations can result from [1]errors in DNA replication during cell division, [2]exposure to mutagens or [3]a viral infection…”
This reminds me of the time you cited a Britannica article claiming that it stated all sedimentary rock was laid down simultaneously, when a quick read showed that it said the opposite. You are just… bad at this. Bad at reading, bad at understanding, bad at reasoning.
“it agrees that ‘mutation’ simply means changes”
.
You can call them cupcakes or sunflowers if it makes you feel better. But they are unintended copy failures. The replication enzymes are there to preserve the fidelity of the original. Deviations are errors.
Perhaps you’d like to explain how those enzymes evolved? No, of course you wouldn’t. You couldn’t possibly explain such a thing in a blog post. You have to be a university level sucker to even understand such things.
@txpiper: Everything you just said has already been refuted, more than once on this blog alone, and also in plenty of other places AT LEAST since the Kitzmiller ruling. You’re just an idiot and a crank creaking away on a very old hobby-horse. Dismissed. #FuckOffToBed
Very same site you quoted and so presumably find authoritative, txpiper.
https://www.genome.gov/genetics-glossary/Evolution
Again, your own citation states there are more sources of mutation than just that. To quote your own source again: “Mutations can result from [1]errors in DNA replication during cell division, [2]exposure to mutagens or [3]a viral infection…”
Here’s a fun fact for you, which you don’t know specifically because you never studied biology: the error protection mechanisms are also a source of error! This is because the molecules are dumb, operating purely in response to atomic-scale forces with no intent behind any of their interactions. They smooth over bumps in the DNA strand by replacing one of a mismatched pair of bases randomly -- giving rise to a 50% chance that the wrong one will be snipped out and replaced, creating a new single point mutation.
You’d know these things if you had studied biology. You know so little biology you don’t even know how little you know.