On board with both of you.

Science that isn’t ethical science is a huge problem we can’t just wave away, and science that isn’t good science is also a huge problem we can’t just wave away.

On the other hand, good science that is also ethical science can be immensely useful when it helps to describe the world and predict things that could happen accurately.

I agree with the sentiment in the context of it being a file sharing site for academic texts but it’s not worded so well barriers in the way of science could also include ethical concerns to certain kinds of experiment

Racial hatred and bigotry are individualistic barriers to science.

Racialized capitalism is the foundation of the modern university. Harvard resisted getting rid of its slaves and when they did they bought and sold people in the Caribbean outside of the reach of US law. Disgustingly high numbers of medical schools were built on the basis of dissecting and experimenting on black and indigenous people.

Most ivy league schools still have the remains of scores of black and indigenous people in their museums, their libraries, and even their classrooms. Entire skeletons of enslaved people were prepared for classroom demonstrations and used in contemporary memory!

The money for these universities came from the slave trade and from slave labor. The schools themselves were often built with slave labor. The patrons of the university funded race science to justify the structures of racism.

It has nothing to do with racial hatred and bigotry.

The structural racism funded the creation and expansion of universities. MIT would not exist if it weren’t for the need for textile producers to build machines to make more money so the money that got poured into MIT was the money that was extracted from slave labor picking cotton.

Undoing this harm and bringing about justice through reparations is going to really undermine university endowments. It’s going to require removing names of buildings, dishonoring scientific “heroes”, and preventing it from happening again is going to be seen as barriers to science.

Either way, even shitty science should be freely accessible so your point doesn’t make any sense.

It really shouldn’t. We saw through the COVID vaccine hysteria just how harmful shitty science can be. A lot of people died completely preventable deaths because we live under the illusion that reason prevails under the free marketplace of ideas or some nonsense like that.

Can you explain what you mean about historical race science? I’ve never heard of it.

Basically it boils down to making up any bullshit excuses possible to justify

Race science is the science that emerged to rationalize and justify the structure of racism. It is the science that emerged to justify political race structures. Race science is what allowed black and indigenous children to be ripped away from their parents while other parents watched and participated and said “This is good”.

That race science was funded by the elite or society. They extracted wealth through settler colonialism and racialized capitalism and then donated it to the universities as “philanthropy” and used their influence to direct more research into race science and other endeavors to maximize their profits.

Making research freely available is not removing all barriers to science. It is removing but one barrier to science. There are many other barriers that exist, have existed, or could exist.

In this way, saying that all barriers to science must be removed ignores the historical facts that the origins of academic science in the US are rooted almost entirely in race science. Even medical schools were locations of mass racialized atrocities where black and brown bodies were bought, imported, experimented on, killed, and desecrated in order to meet the demands of donors and chasing more endowment money. That science was used to further establish the schools’ reputation and revenue streams.

Fixing this will be seen as a barrier to science, as fixing it required dismantling major portions of the socio-politico-economic structures that maintain academies of science. Reparations alone would make many scientific institutions disappear overnight.

Thank you.

Lysenkoism

The man was operating at the same time as other scientists who were just starting to create hypotheses that DNA was the physical manifestation of their theorized concept of a “gene”. He denied the existence of the gene because he, correctly, established that his data contradicted the oversimplified view of genetic inheritance. His data showed that somatic changes were part of what an offspring inherited. Lo and behold, he was talking about the current field of study we call “epigenetics”. His “eugenics” theories were nothing like those of race scientists. Instead, his theory was that the state must produce a healthy society in order to produce healthy people. Lo and behold, we find that trauma transmits to offspring and that the traumas of slavery (for example) are passed down from generation to generation. This position cannot be accounted for in the genetic theories of the time, and as such he rejected those theories. In essence, Lysenkoism is actually an attempt at thinking of biology dialectically, and that does indeed make it Marxist-Leninst.

And, like anything else in science, the dominant power structure must do everything it can to dismiss and denigrate anyone that correctly pointed out critiques of their work. For almost 200 years we taught doctors in training that the human body had 78 organs. We finally updated that to 79 in 2012, despite the overwhelming evidence from 3 separate researchers and papers. The doctor who made the claim that stood the test of 100+ years was an English knight. The researchers who contradicted him were Italian and American. The Italian contradicted him 5 years before his own book was published. But, the dominant culture must be correct. The British empire is also the structure that maintained the incorrect science that the brain and lymph system were not connected, despite detailed anatomical sketches from non-English doctors showing otherwise. That position was held for centuries until it was finally overturned in 2015, but not before much controversy that it couldn’t be possible and those other doctors were probably just obsessed with something irrational.

The claim of Lysenkoism being eugenics “just like what the imperialists did” is just completely ahistorical and requires a desire to absolve one’s own national project through the use of projection. Lysenko’s theories, and the policies that were built on them, failed in many ways and caused a lot of harm, none of which holds a candle to child separation, centuries of mass rape, and centuries of forced sterilization (which, we must acknowledge, continued well into the 1960s in the USA).

Lysenko was wrong about a lot of things, and was right about very little. But the idea that his contrarian position to the dominant theories of genetics is to be mocked or even vilified is a completely ideological position firmly seated in the imperialist camp.

you are literally responding to a scihub post. the founder of scihub is a communist. the founders of lemmy are communist. you are a star trek fan. it was made by A COMMUNIST.

what is going on in your brain?

Do you understand that the primary barriers being referred to here are intellectual property?

I understand that anyone who knows what SciHub is about would infer that. It’s not what the slogan says. It says remove all barriers in the way of science. The slogan is problem.