Because science has been identified with truthfulness and empirical reality,’ any role of social factors in science is categorized as bias. Consequently, context dependence of scientific theories is ignored. The issue is NOT that anything goes in science or that there is no way to decide whether scientific facts are right or wrong. Rather, the issue is to carefully investigate how evidence is mobilized in scientific theories and the role of social factors in the process. For example, scientific racism was a widely respected science until as late as the first half of the 20th century. In short, we need to rethink the role of the social factors (not just race and gender, but more broadly as well) in science. On the basis of the readings from the second section (“Race, Gender, and Science”) analyze how race and gender have affected science and how these issues are being interrogated in the context of new scientific research, particularly genomics?
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