It seems to me that radicals of all shades are really uncritical of established science, and constantly refer to scientific findings to bolster communistic arguments. I 'spose it goes right back to Marx and Engels who studied the natural world to learn the laws governing matter. Latter it was anarchists like Kropotkin and more recently Bookchin who studied nature, looking for all kinds of moral lessons. You see it nowadays with people discussing what monkeys do in their spare time like it has some sort of relevance to human sociality.
The problem with this is that the natural world is so multi-faceted and complex you can concoct any bedtime parable for a new society that you like. Take for instance the current view that humans evolved in Africa and later spread round the globe. 'Progressives' (sorry) point to the fact that we thus all have African heritage, and thus attack racism. But I'm pretty sure a racist can just convince themselves that Africans are primitive and white people are the next evolutionary step. More pertinent is the off-cited data that there is no meaningful genetic difference between the worlds populations. But think about this: humans and chimps are 99% similar. Nowadays genetic difference per se is not seen as indicative of organismal differences; rather it is about the spatio-temporal regulation of genes during development. This regulation is effected by the minute differences in DNA, which theoretically could exist between the 'races'. My bet is that in the next few years racist scientists will be studying gene regulation between 'races' as 'proof' that the races are in fact different. Are the communists who cling to the aura of established science gonna change their politics when this data hits the journals?
The problem I feel is that science is percieved to sit outside the market and represent what Graeber would call a domain of 'values', like the church, family, etc. Here science can concern itself with Truth and Knowledge, right? Wrong. Scientists compete for funding money and prestige. To be successful they have to convince people that they are doing the best science. Note they don't have to be doing the best science, they just have to convince people they are doing it. And think about this: a group of, say, population geneticists, has an interest in promoting the perception that population genetics isn't a load of hogwash. OK, but who besides trained population geneticists has the skill to critique it? The experts capable of doind so are, well, population geneticists. So round we go.
We all know from our work and play that race dosn't mean shit. Do we need to refer to a bunch of liberal scientists latest findings only to find out tomorrow that now they've changed their mind and race means something...and next generation of scientists deconstructs it....and next generation......and on and on. The natural world is awe inspiring and inspirational but it carries no moral lessons. I don't care that chimps hunt and bonobos shag if we're talking about right and wrong. I don't care that the earliest human fossils are in Africa, so what? - no ones looked anywhere else. When science isn't about egos and empires it will be much better, and scientists wont keep having to shove their square peg data into the round hole of people's insecurity about the world.
