Continuing with exploring the meaning and implications of science, what type of economy a society has can impact science by affecting:

• what information is collected and what claims about it are explored
• what are the means and procedures utilized in the collection and analysis of information, and
• who is in position to participate in these processes or, for that matter, even to benefit from science’s accomplishments.

Science has at least two individual motivations and at least two social ones.

First there is pure curiosity. Science thrives on the human predilection to ask questions and seek their answers.

Why is the sky blue? What happens if you run at the speed of light next to a burst of light? What is time and why does it seem to go only one way? What is the smallest piece of matter and tiniest conveyor of force? How do pieces of matter and conveyors of force operate? What is the universe, its shape, its development? What is life, a species, an organism? How do species form, persist, get replaced? Why is there sex? Where did people come from? How do people get born, learn to dance, romance, try to be a success? What is a language and how do people know them and use them? What is consciousness? When people socialize, what is an economy, how does it work, and what is a polity, culture, family, and how do they work?

Inquiring minds would passionately want to know these things even if there were no material by-products to enjoy. It is like clever feet passionately wanting to dance even if no one is watching or nimble hands passionately wanting to draw even if no one will put the result on a wall.

A second personal motive of science is, however, individual and collective self interest. Knowledge of the components of reality and their interconnections sufficient to predict outcomes and even to intervene to impact what happens can not only assuage our curiosity, it can increase the longevity of our lives and also their scope, range, and quality.

What is the cause and cure for polio, cancer, or ebola? How do birds fly? How does gravity work, friction, flight?

Curiosity opens doors and peeks into the unknown with gigantic desire and energy, to be sure, but we also run through and indeed drive whole huge caravans through the doors of science because the insights that science accumulates benefit us.

A parallel personal motive for science is benefit not from the implications of the knowledge itself, but instead from remuneration offered for scientific labors or achievements. There can be material rewards for gathering information and for proposing or testing hypotheses about reality. Pursuit of these material rewards is another motive for doing science.

Likewise, the benefits to be had beyond the pure satisfaction of fulfilling one’s curiosity or benefitting society are not confined to material payment. There is also the social bestowal of stature and fame or whatever other accolades a particular society causes us to value, and doing science is often at least in part driven by pursuit of the social prizes, notoriety, stature, and admiration that accompany discovery.

An economy, as but one aspect of society, can plausibly increase, diminish, or just push people’s curiosity in one direction or another. It can impact how scientific knowledge can directly benefit people and of course the remuneration and other material rewards bestowed on people for doing science, as well as the non-material rewards they can garner.

For a long time science as we mean it did not even exist. There was mysticism and belief, which sometimes approximated truth and sometimes not, but there wasn’t an accumulation of evidence tested against experience and guided by logic.

Eventually societies and economies propelled science and oriented it in various ways. At present, of course, tremendous pressures from society and particularly from capitalist economy both propel and also limit the types of questions science pursues, the tools science utilizes, the people who have a chance to participate in science, and the people who benefit from or even know of science’s results.

In the capitalist U.S., for example, science has become ubiquitous, influentially revealing many inner secrets of materials, space, time, bodies, and even to a limited extent, minds. But science has also become, in various degrees and respects, an agent of capital.

Steven J. Gould writes “Science is a pluralistic enterprise with a rich panoply of methods appropriate for different kinds of problems… Direct vision isn’t the only, or even the usual, method of inference.” Distortion arises when the different methods and problems are biased by motives other than those of science itself.

One kind of problem arises, for example, from the fact (noted by British journalist George Monbiot) that “34% percent of the lead authors of articles in scientific journals are compromised by their sources of funding, only 16% of scientific journals have a policy on conflicts of interest, and only 0.5% of the papers published have authors who disclose such conflicts.”

In pharmaceuticals we find that “87% of the scientists writing clinical guidelines have financial ties to drug companies.”

In other words, as we all know, much science is directly and overtly biased by corporate money.

More subtly, commercial funding and ownership impact what questions are even raised, what projects are pursued and supported. If patent prospects – profit prospects – are good, money flows. If they are bad, even though general curiosity reasons or even human welfare reasons are ample, money is barricaded. Consider research funds for an Ebola vaccine. The disease strikes intermittently, small audiences, who have little income to spend. Not much profit in that. Now consider diet pills, sex aids, or serious medicine that has to be taken regularly for life by constituencies that have money to spend. Plenty of profit there.

Most vile in this type accounting, citizens may wind up “guinea pigs as in the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment between 1932 and 1972, or in experiments between 1950 and 1969 in which the government tested drugs, chemical, biological, and radioactive materials on unsuspecting U.S. citizens; or the deliberate contamination of 8000 square miles around Hanford, Washington, to assess the effects of dispersed plutonium.” (from Cornwell 2003 ).

On a larger scale, the U.S. Pentagon now controls about half the annual $75 billion federal research and development budget with obvious repercussions for the militarization of priorities.

I sat on an airplane not too long ago coincidentally next to an MIT biologist whose interest was comprehending human biological functions and dysfunctions. By his own reckoning, he was not at all political or ideological, but he nonetheless had no confusions about the context of his work. “What we do, what we can do, even what we can think of doing is overwhelmingly biased by the need for funding which, nowadays, means the need for corporate funding or, if government, then a government that is beholden overwhelmingly, again, to corporations or to militarism,” he reported. It was, in his view, just common knowledge. He added, “More, the corporations have a very short time horizon. If you can’t make a very strong case for short run profits, forget about it. Find something else to pursue, unless, of course, you can convince the government your efforts will increase their killing capacities.” This is the deadly combination of market competition and profit seeking plus militarist governments doing what they do. It yields perverse science.

It is clear, therefore, that for anyone who cares about, wishes to be involved in, and wants the benefits that might accrue from science, without enduring vile harm – which all leftists certainly should – the issue is in large part the society that science is embedded within. A question – for a follow up essay – arises. What would be good science, worthy science, in a good and worthy society?