October 2020, ScientificAmerican.com 81Naomi Oreskes is a professor of the history of science
at Harvard University. She is author of Why Trust Science?
(Princeton University Press, 2019) and co-author
of Discerning Experts (University of Chicago, 2019).OBSERVATORY
KEEPING AN EYE ON SCIENCEIllustration by Jay Bendt
Tempers are running hot in science (as they are in the U.S. at large)
as the field embarks on a long-overdue conversation about its treat-
ment of women and people of color. In June, for example, thousands
of researchers and academics across the globe—as well as the pre-
eminent journals Science and Nature —stopped work for a day to
protest racism in their ranks. The American Physical Society
endorsed the effort to “shut down STEM,” declaring its commitment
to “eradicating systemic racism and discrimination” in science.
Physics exemplifies the problem. African-Americans make up
about 14 percent of the college-age population in the U.S., com-
mensurate with their numbers in the overall population, but in
physics they receive 3 to 4 percent of undergraduate degrees and
less than 3 percent of Ph.D.s, and as of 2012 they composed only
2 percent of faculty. No doubt there are many reasons for this
underrepresentation, but one troubling factor is the refusal of
some scientists to acknowledge that a problem could even exist.
Science, they argue, is inherently rational and self-correcting.
Would that were true. The history of science is rife with well-
documented cases of misogyny, prejudice and bias. For centuries
biologists promoted false theories of female inferiority, and scien-
tific institutions typically barred women’s participation. Histori-
an of science and MacArthur fellow Margaret Rossiter has docu-
mented how, in the mid-19th century, female scientists created
their own scientific societies to compensate for their male col-
leagues’ refusal to acknowledge their work. Sharon Bertsch
McGrayne filled an entire volume with the stories of women who
should have been awarded the Nobel Prize for work that they did
in collaboration with male colleagues—or, worse, that they had
stolen by them. (Rosalind Franklin is a well-documented ex ample
of the latter: her photographs of the crystal structure of DNA were
shared without her permission by one of the men who then won
the Nobel Prize for elucidating the double-helix structure.) Racial
bias has been at least as pernicious as gender bias; it was scien-
tists, after all, who codified the concept of race as a biological cat-
egory that was not simply descriptive but also hierarchical.
Good scientists are open to competing ideas; they attend to chal-
lenging data, and they listen to opposing views. But scientists are
also humans, and cognitive science shows that humans are prone
to bias, misperception, motivated reasoning and other intellectu-
al pitfalls. Because reasoning is slow and difficult, we rely on heu-
ristics—intellectual shortcuts that often work but sometimes fail
spectacularly. (Believing that men are, in general, better than wom-
en in math is one tiring example.) It is not credible to claim that sci-
entists are somehow immune to the biases that afflict everyone else.
Fortunately, the objectivity of scientific knowledge does not
depend on the objectivity of individual scientists. Rather it depends
on strategies for identifying, acknowledging and correcting bias
and error. As I point out in my 2019 book, Why Trust Science, sci-
entific knowledge begins as claims advanced by individual scien-
tists, teams or laboratories that are then closely scrutinized by oth-
ers, who may bring forward additional proof to sustain them—or
to modify or reject them. What emerges as a scientific fact or estab-
lished theory is rarely if ever the same as the starting claim; it has
been adjusted in light of evidence and argumentation. Science is
a collective effort, and it works best when scientific communities
are diverse. The reason is simple: heterogeneous communities are
more likely than homogeneous ones to be able to identify blind
spots and correct them. Science does not correct itself; scientists
correct one another through critical interrogation. And that means
being willing to interrogate not just claims about the external
world but claims about our own practices and processes as well.
Science has an admirable record of producing reliable knowl-
edge about the natural and social world, but not when it comes to
acknowledging its own weaknesses. And we cannot correct those
weaknesses if we insist the system will magically correct itself. It
is not ideological to acknowledge and confront bias in science; it
is ideological to insist science cannot be biased despite empirical
validation to the contrary. Given that our failings of inclusion have
been known for a long time, it is high time we finally fix them.JOIN THE CONVERSATION ONLINE
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or send a letter to the editor: [email protected]Sexism and
Racism Persist
in Science
We kid ourselves if we insist that
the system will magically correct itself
By Naomi Oreskes
© 2020 Scientific American