SCIENCE and scientific facts possess a degree of authority in our society that is based on the alleged objectivity of the facts that we can come to know through the scientific process. If we correctly apply the “scientific method,” we are meant to discover things that are true, regardless of whether we believe them to be true. This idea of science is usually invoked in contrast to religion or spirituality. The biologist turned atheist campaigner Richard Dawkins claims that “Science is the disinterested search for objective truth about the material world.”  

Is it possible for scientists to achieve this complete disinterest in their work? Sometimes it might seem possible, a scientist studying the function of a very specific protein might not be invested in the details of their findings beyond thinking that discovering the function is an important thing to do. But even in this case it might be hard to be completely disinterested, perhaps subconsciously you hope that your findings are novel or significant in a way that will help your career.

Only very rarely does science take place in a context that is so neatly separated from human desires and concerns. As we saw during the Covid-19 pandemic, discovering facts about the SARS-CoV-2 virus led to considerable restrictions on the everyday life of millions of people. Research into sea temperature increases reveals that they will destabilise the climate with significant consequences for everyone on the planet. The search for these facts can hardly be described as disinterested, the researchers are likely motivated by a desire to improve the world we live in.

The idea that there is a monolithic thing called science which consists of facts that are objectively true is shown to be nonsense when we look at the history of scientific ideas. During the Atlantic slave trade the prevailing scientific thought was that the evidence showed the racial inferiority of African slaves, helping to justify the slave trade as a practice. Science has also made proclamations on the supposedly inherent traits of women as more emotional, caring, and nurturing that have been used to justify their position as unpaid domestic workers. Even on its own terms, mutually incompatible scientific claims frequently replace each other.

How can science on the one hand make a claim about the objectivity of its discoveries while also seemingly managing to concur with the new prevailing ideologies of each historical age? The physicist Albert Einstein thought that the objects that scientists study are objective, but that this objectivity becomes muddled because science is performed by humans: “Science as something already in existence, already completed, is the most objective, impersonal thing that we humans know. Science as something coming into being, as a goal, is just as subjectively, psychologically conditioned as are all other human endeavours.”

The material world exists and does so irrespective of whether we believe it does. At the same time the desires of humans creep, subconsciously or otherwise, into our study of this material world. Many scientific desires are for naming, categorising and dividing, in a way that is sometimes accused of being at root extractive, proprietorial and patriarchal. There is a lump of relatively small frozen rock orbiting far away from the sun that we call Pluto that exists regardless of whether we think it is a dwarf planet or a planet. If we find the remains of an animal and scientists fight over which species it belongs to, perhaps since it lies in the middle ground of two already poorly defined species, that animal will have lived and died regardless of what species we think it is.

The concept of a species is a human construction that is meant to help our categorisation of the world. There are whole organisations trying to resolve the conflicts involved in splitting the vast array of different animals into species. For bacteria, who are happy to swap genetic material with each other in the environment, many ways of categorising species break down altogether. If you ask a scientist how we should categorise species, you will likely get a different answer depending on what particular branch of biology they are in.

If we try to become comfortable with this view of science, that we only have access to small and fundamentally biased viewports into an infinitely vast and changing material world, then we can hope to unpick what human prejudices have snuck into our scientific thinking. A Marxist viewpoint suggests that class will influence scientific study. If science has been used to defend reactionary racist and sexist views, why would it not also bolster the interests of the capitalist class?

One study in the US found that faculty members across a range of disciplines were around 25 times more likely to have a parent with a PhD compared to the average American. Also, the percentage of faculty members who have parents with college degrees is about 50 per cent higher than the average American and has consistently stayed that way over time. In 2009 a study of members of the Royal Society and British Academy, two prestigious British science institutions, found that 42 per cent of their members went to private school compared to 7 per cent of the British public. The same study found that 56 per cent of their members went to Oxford or Cambridge.

If the top scientists are overwhelmingly from such an elite background, it is clear that the prevailing attitudes of the capitalist class form the backdrop of their worldview through which they perform their science. Such a view is similar to one expressed by Ralph Miliband when he analysed the supposed neutrality of civil servants who are also drawn overwhelmingly from wealthy backgrounds; it “makes them part of a specific milieu whose ideas, prejudices, and outlook they are likely to share, and which is bound to influence, in fact to define, their view of the ‘national interest’”.

It is hard to disentangle the process of science from human interests. If the interests of scientists are shaped by the wealthy backgrounds that they are selected from, then we must be aware that these interests will be smuggled into supposedly objective scientific facts. For science to be useful, we must attempt to extract something from scientific knowledge without elevating it to supreme authority, or ignoring the material factors that have produced it.