Darwin made teh Hitlerz!

Fuck, that dude. I feel bad for him.

here it is

I've never read Darwin. Was he really such an adjective junkie, that he would feel the need to modify "death camp" with "horrifying"? As opposed to the cheery sort, I guess.

Oh please, the last thing we want is "socio-political" scientists. That's what Josef Mengele was. You can throw Oppenheimer in there too, if you think about it. I think if you really look at the history you'll find that practically all of the dastardly applications of science, came about at the hands of ideologically motivated scientists - and conversely, ideologically motivated scientists tend to have a pretty bad track record.

I think there's a degree of crossed-wires here.
Scientists with a willingness to take a step-back and assess the social and political context in which their research takes plave are probably more likely to be critical of both the motivation behind research funding and the uses to which it is put.

the problem is when ideologically-motivated do some pretty horrible things (as you point out), but deny ideological motivation, clinging to the notion that their research is 'objective' and takes place in some sort of social vacuum.

the likes of population geneticist Richard Lewontin and mathematical ecologist Richard Levins had a keen awareness of socio-political context in scientific research and resigned their positions in US National Academy of Science (pretty much the scientific elite in the US) because of the academy's role in weapons research and advising the US military. Likewise, only a month ago, the World Archaeological Congress refused to advise the US military, when under the veil of 'cultural sensitivity' the US government asked advice about where they should avoid bombing in terms of historical/cultural importance if they were to attack Iran at some point in the future.

New Scientist - "Such advice would provide cultural credibility and respectability to the military action," said a resolution agreed by the World Archaeological Congress in Dublin, Ireland, last week. Instead, delegates were advised to emphasise the harm that any military action would do to Iran's people and heritage.

Other's like S.J.Gould and Niles Eldredge, were aware of cultural and socio-political misuses of their work, usually in the form of quote-mining by the religious right in support of creationism, and went to great lengths to speak-out against misrepresentations of their work, particularly Gould, for in this case, advancing rightwing religious doctrine.

This is not to say in day-to-day terms, those scientists use social cultural motivations in evaluating their work, not at all. In the day-to-day 'roll up your sleeves' sense of doing science, they stick to evidence-based observation, inference, and generating explanations of natural phenomena. So, in assessing the 'truth-value' of a scientific claim, they stick to the evidence. However, they generally show an awareness of the limits of their knowledge, and are cautious as to the uses to which their explanations and research programmes are put.