Science for the People is a left-wing organization that emerged from the antiwar culture

Peace movement

A peace movement is a social movement that seeks to achieve ideals such as the ending of a particular war , minimize inter-human violence in a particular place or type of situation, often linked to the goal of achieving world peace...

 of the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 in the 1970s. A similar organization of the same name was founded in 2002.

The original group was composed of professor

Professor

A professor is a scholarly teacher; the precise meaning of the term varies by country. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a "person who professes" being usually an expert in arts or sciences; a teacher of high rank...

s, students, workers, and other concerned citizens who sought to end potential oppression brought on by pseudoscience

Pseudoscience

Pseudoscience is a claim, belief, or practice which is presented as scientific, but which does not adhere to a valid scientific method, lacks supporting evidence or plausibility, cannot be reliably tested, or otherwise lacks scientific status...

, or by the misuse of science. Science for the People generated much controversy

Controversy

Controversy is a state of prolonged public dispute or debate, usually concerning a matter of opinion. The word was coined from the Latin controversia, as a composite of controversus – "turned in an opposite direction," from contra – "against" – and vertere – to turn, or versus , hence, "to turn...

 in the 1970s for the radical tactics of some of its members. Herb Fox, one of its founding members, wrote:

I was a founder in 1969-70 of Science for the People. It originated in the coming together of the then one-year old Scientists and Engineers for Social and Political Action (SESPA) and a group of Harvard and MIT students who had been invited to participate in a session of the AAAS annual meeting. SESPA itself was formed in the aftermath of a struggle in the American Physical Society led by Charlie Schwartz and Martin Perl and others to get the APS to take a stand against the Vietnam war. SftP's disruptive tactics at the AAAS meeting and at many scientific meetings thereafter increased its exposure and the participation of the younger and more militant among scientists and science students. The first issue of Science for the People (1970) was produced and edited by me with a comrade who is now my wife. Subsequent issues were produced by ever changing editorial collectives. Over its first few years differing views arose on what SftP should be. One group wanted Science for the People to assume a supportive role in the class struggle with special attention to the issues of science. Another group wanted to work towards 'A Science for the People.' Most wanted to be the voice of critical consciousness from within the scientific community exposing science against the people and the dangers of the misuse of science. The struggle was painful and disruptive and not carried on with great clarity. Eventually those who were more interested in third world and workers struggles etc. than in science itself left the organization. Over the ensuing years the organization became primarily identified with its magazine which became an outlet for critical discussion of the misuse of science. In the process it became identified with well known critical academic scientists such as Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin.http://www.scienceforthepeople.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=21

Criticism

E. O. Wilson

E. O. Wilson

Edward Osborne Wilson is an American biologist, researcher , theorist , naturalist and author. His biological specialty is myrmecology, the study of ants....

, a biologist

Biology

Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...

 and entomology

Entomology

Entomology is the scientific study of insects, a branch of arthropodology...

 professor in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 wrote that "the political objections forcefully made by the Sociobiology Study Group

Sociobiology Study Group

The Sociobiology Study Group was academic organization formed to specifically counter sociobiological explanations of human behavior, particularly those expounded by the Harvard entomologist E. O. Wilson in his 1975 book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis...

 of Science for the People in particular took me by surprise." Wilson stated:

I had been blindsided by the attack. Having expected some frontal fire from social scientists on primarily evidential grounds, I had received instead a political enfilade from the flank. A few observers were surprised that I was surprised. John Maynard Smith, a senior British evolutionary biologist and former Marxist, said that he disliked the last chapter of Sociobiology himself and "it was also absolutely obvious to me--I cannot believe Wilson didn't know--that this was going to provoke great hostility from American Marxists, and Marxists everywhere." But it was true that I didn't know. I was unprepared perhaps because, as Maynard Smith further observed, I am an American rather than a European. In 1975 I was a political naive: I knew almost nothing about Marxism as either a political belief or a mode of analysis; I had paid little attention to the dynamism of the activist Left, and I had never heard of Science for the People. I was not an intellectual in the European or New York/Cambridge sense. ... After the Sociobiology Study Group exposed me as a counterrevolutionary adventurist, and as they intensified their attacks in articles and teach-ins, other radical activists in the Boston area, including the violence-prone International Committee against Racism, conducted a campaign of leaflets and teach-ins of their own to oppose human sociobiology. As this activity spread through the winter and spring of 1975-76, I grew fearful that it might reach a level embarrassing to my family and the university. I briefly considered offers of professorships from three universities--in case, their representatives said, I wished to leave the physical center of the controversy. But the pressure was tolerable, since I was a senior professor with tenure, with a reputation based on other discoveries, and in any case could not bear to leave Harvard's ant collection, the world's largest and best. For a few days a protester in Harvard Square used a bullhorn to call for my dismissal. Two students from the University of Michigan invaded my class on evolutionary biology one day to shout slogans and deliver antisociobiology monologues. I withdrew from department meetings for a year to avoid embarrassment arising from my notoriety, especially with key members of Science for the People present at these meetings. In 1979 I was doused with water by a group of protestors at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, possibly the only incident in recent history that a scientist was physically attacked, however mildly, for the expression of an idea. In 1982 I went to the Science Center at Harvard University under police escort to deliver a public lecture, because of the gathering of a crowd of protestors around the entrance, angered because of the title of my talk: "The coevolution of biology and culture.http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/taboos/wilson01.html

2002 Revival

In 2002, a group formed using the same name and promoting the same general views. It described its mission as follows:

Science for the People is a website and journal written by working scientists for scientists. At a workshop on science in Florence on November 8th, 2002, a few of us decided to start a magazine for Working Scientists active in the Anti Capitalist Movement, as part of the European Social Forum. The magazine will publish our experiences in popularising science in the European mainstream media, whilst at the same time attempting to give our contributions a political dimension. The purpose is to claim 'Science for the People'. Original articles written by ourselves and published will be republished in the magazine so each of us may learn from the experience of the others. http://www.scienceforthepeople.com

Although the newer group is organizationally unrelated to the 1970s group, the new group received a message of approval from Herb Fox, one of the founders of the original group. http://www.scienceforthepeople.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=21

See also

• Science Wars
  Science wars
  The science wars were a series of intellectual exchanges, between scientific realists and postmodernist critics, about the nature of scientific theory which took place principally in the US in the 1990s...
  
  
• Sociobiology
  Sociobiology
  Sociobiology is a field of scientific study which is based on the assumption that social behavior has resulted from evolution and attempts to explain and examine social behavior within that context. Often considered a branch of biology and sociology, it also draws from ethology, anthropology,...
  
  
• Evolutionary psychology controversy
  Evolutionary psychology controversy
  From its beginning, evolutionary psychology has generated substantial controversy and criticism. Criticisms include 1) disputes about the testability of evolutionary hypotheses, 2) alternatives to some of the cognitive assumptions frequently employed in evolutionary psychology, 3) vagueness...
  
  
• Social Darwinism
  Social Darwinism
  Social Darwinism is a term commonly used for theories of society that emerged in England and the United States in the 1870s, seeking to apply the principles of Darwinian evolution to sociology and politics...
  
  
• Eugenics
  Eugenics
  Eugenics is the "applied science or the bio-social movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population", usually referring to human populations. The origins of the concept of eugenics began with certain interpretations of Mendelian inheritance,...
  
  
• Evolution
  Evolution
  Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...
  
  
• Intelligent Design
  Intelligent design
  Intelligent design is the proposition that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." It is a form of creationism and a contemporary adaptation of the traditional teleological argument for...
  
  
• Global warming
  Global warming
  Global warming refers to the rising average temperature of Earth's atmosphere and oceans and its projected continuation. In the last 100 years, Earth's average surface temperature increased by about with about two thirds of the increase occurring over just the last three decades...
  
  
• New World Agriculture and Ecology Group
  New World Agriculture and Ecology Group
  The New World Agriculture and Ecology Group is an organization focused on sustainable agriculture, conservation biology, and social justice.-History:Originally known as the New World Agriculture Group, NWAEG first became active in the 1980s...
  
  
• Marxism
  Marxism
  Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
  
  

External links

• Science for the People - Official website of the group founded in 2002
• Science for the People Discussion List - Discussion archives
• "Towards A Science For The People" - Theoretical outline, dated 1972.
• "Science and Ideology" - Critical essay by Edward O. Wilson
• Science for the People Magazine Table of Contents - Unofficial website