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The very first paragraph intrigued me. Especially this bit, [Would] gay Republican Latino ...... come to different conclusions based on the same data because of their different backgrounds? On the face of it, the laws of physics, chemistry, astronomy, are race.gender/disability....etc etc blind. Not quite so fpor biology., male.female are different - so are Black, White when it comes to e.g. skin and the performance of oximeters, or on the IT image recognion developed by White scientists, that fails to recognise, crucially, some elements of Black faces. This defiency is well documented elsewhere, I can reference examples. BUT, now read "The Weirdest People in the World" (Joseph Heinrich, Penguoin, 2020). An interesting book, whose premise is that Western peoples (i.e. from mainly western Europe, including those in N America of this heritage) are W.E.I.R.D (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic), and thos has given siuch people a different pyschological outlook on the universe compared tpo those who are not. For example the Muller Lyer illusion fools WEIRD people who are used to rectangular spaces and cponstructions, but not peoples from e.g. the South Pacific isolands who are not so used. I quite like the acxronym WEIRD as its 5 letters come in roughly chronological order. 1) Western = a peculiar writing system that promoted the Gutenberg print revolution (in fact Korea under King Sejong attempted such a script/print revolution, Hangul, but the proletarianisation of knowledge this would have produced was suppressed by the Korean elite). Then 2) Educated (e.g. English grammar school revolution), 3) Industrial (sadly, guns and steel, and germs, so the West then took over the rest of the world, more or less, then 4) Rich, from colonisatioon, then 5) Democratic, a form of government by no means universal across the globe. In turn, democracy has given the WEIRD regions different outlooks on, say, the monarchy (to cite a topical issue), for example imagine being anti-royalist in Thailand right now. There is nothing inherently superior about WEIRD science, in fact it can be defieient to much of 'indigenous people science' in say the Amazon rainforest or the Pacific islands, because WEIRD people may lack the indigenous knowledge of curative plants found there, to give just one example. #Indoigenous' languages may have words anc concepts for such plants that the West lacks. By all means let's have diversity in science. No one people, or their science, is inferior, or superior, to anyone else's. Lets have all different forms, and learn from each other, for a richer more knowledge filled varied diverse world. Dr Hillary J Shaw Centre for Urban Research on Austerity Faculty of Business and Law De Montfort University, Leicester LE1 9BH http://dmu.ac.uk/about-dmu/academic-staff/business-and-law/hilary-shaw/hillary-shaw.aspx www.fooddeserts.org -----Original Message----- From: Ilan Kelman <[log in to unmask]> To: [log in to unmask] Sent: Sat, 6 May 2023 9:33 Subject: Should science be impartial? Any comments on Pamela Paul's recent New York Times column, and the paper it cites, "A Paper That Says Science Should Be Impartial Was Rejected by Major Journals. You Can’t Make This Up" https://archive.is/4RIE6 ? The original is at https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/04/opinion/science-evidence-merits.html for those with a login. To unsubscribe from the CRIT-GEOG-FORUM list, click the following link: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/WA-JISC.exe?SUBED1=CRIT-GEOG-FORUM&A=1 ######################################################################## To unsubscribe from the CRIT-GEOG-FORUM list, click the following link: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/WA-JISC.exe?SUBED1=CRIT-GEOG-FORUM&A=1 This message was issued to members of www.jiscmail.ac.uk/CRIT-GEOG-FORUM, a mailing list hosted by www.jiscmail.ac.uk, terms & conditions are available at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/policyandsecurity/