Myrna Perez, Criticizing Science: Stephen Jay Gould and the Struggle for American Democracy Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024. Pp. 264. ISBN 978-1-4214-5015-5. $54.95 (hardcover).
Year: 2025
Type: book-review
Abstract: The 2020s seem an appropriate time to appraise the state of science, public discourse and democracy in the United States of America.Historian of science and scholar of religion and gender Myrna Perez's Criticizing Science comes therefore at an opportune moment.With a vaccine sceptic chairing the United States government's Department of Health and Human Services, a climate denier as president, and creationists throughout the cabinet, one might argue that the present place of science as a force for public good in American democracy is rather limited.Perez does not shy away from the present, but her book situates the 2020s and contemporary fights over the authority of mainstream science in a much longer trajectory.Stephen Jay Gould, she writes, is her Virgil, and by analysing and contextualizing his scientific, intellectual and cultural contributions, Perez shows how the long-developing tension between scientific liberals, New Leftists, conservatives and critics of science during the late twentieth century led to the present moment.By the author's own admission, Criticizing Science is really three books in one: an intellectual history focused on the work of Stephen Jay Gould; a cultural history of science, democracy and public discourse in the late twentieth-century United States; and a commentary on how progressives can both champion science and come to grips with the systemic racism, classism and sexism that Perez identifies as embedded in the scientific enterprise.Gould and his intellectual contributions serve as the pivot in these three narratives.So too do three scientific-political-social movements: 'ultimately, a history of evolutionary science in this period provides a tangible thread with which to follow the emergence of left-wing, liberal, and right-wing approaches to science' (p.3).The six chapters of Criticizing Science weave together those interlocked narratives and movements, using Gould as the shuttle.Perez takes a generally chronological approach to Gould's work and life, considering his background in radical science and politics during his education, through his scientific research, and into his life as a public intellectual.Gould's efforts to confront racism (Chapter 1), sexism (Chapters 2 and 3), and creationism (Chapters 4 and 5) occupy most of the book, with the framing chapters contextualizing the big picture of science, democracy and scientific discourse.Throughout the text Perez analyses Gould's major written works -such as 'The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm' (1979, with Richard Lewontin), The Mismeasure of Man (1981), and The Rock of Ages (1999) -but her book is structured less by Gould's output than by the social questions that he addressed: structural racism and sexism, the dangers he saw in sociobiology and creationism and the relation of science to religion, democracy and politics.
Author: Benjamin E. Zeller
Institution: Lake Forest College
Language: English
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4413834146