Even if you don’t recall many facts from high school biology, you likely remember the cells required for making babies: egg and sperm. Maybe you can picture a swarm of sperm cells battling each other in a race to be the first to penetrate the egg.
For decades, scientific literature described human conception this way, with the cells mirroring the perceived roles of women and men in society. The egg was thought to be passive while the sperm was active.
The opening credits of the 1989 movie ‘Look Who’s Talking’ animated this popular narrative, with speaking sperm rushing toward the nonverbal egg to be the first to fertilize it.
Over time, scientists realized that sperm are too weak to penetrate the egg and that the union is more mutual, with the two cells working together. It’s no coincidence that these findings were made in the same era when new cultural ideas of more egalitarian gender roles were taking hold.
Scientist Ludwik Fleck is credited with first describing science as a cultural practice in the 1930s. Since then, understanding has continued to build that scientific knowledge is always consistent with the cultural norms of its time.
Despite these insights, across political differences, people strive for and continue to demand scientific objectivity: the idea that science should be unbiased, rational and separable from cultural values and beliefs.
When I entered my Ph.D. program in neuroscience in 2001, I felt the same way. But reading a book by biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling called “Sexing the Body” set me down a different path. It systematically debunked the idea of scientific objectivity, showing how cultural ideas about sex, gender and sexuality were inseparable from the scientific findings. By the time I earned my Ph.D., I began to look more holistically at my research, integrating the social, historical and political context.
From the questions scientists begin with, to the beliefs of the people who conduct the research, to choices in research design, to interpretation of the final results, cultural ideas constantly inform “the science.” What if an unbiased science is impossible?
Emergence of idea of scientific objectivity
Science grew to be synonymous with objectivity in the Western university system only over the past few hundred years.
In the 15th and 16th centuries, some Europeans gained traction in challenging the religiously ordained royal order. Consolidation of the university system led to shifts from trust in religious leaders interpreting the word of “god,” to trust in “man” making one’s own rational decisions, to trust in scientists interpreting “nature.” The university system became an important site for legitimizing claims through theories and studies.
Previously, people created knowledge about their world, but there were not strict boundaries between what are now called the humanities, such as…
