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Originally Posted by Nine Black Poppies
I follow your line of reasoning and I understand the hierarchy paradigm you're arguing but I think the issue here is that we disagree on this key assumption--my argument is that psychological and social factors are very much at play in biology, both fundamentally and as a scientific discipline; the relationship between the two is dialectical and can't really be teased apart.
I don't feel fully equipped to get into the depths of the first part of that argument on my own, but isn't it generally accepted that psychological stimuli can have imprinted effects on the body and it's development and progeny? Like I say, I'm not in depth enough in that particular realm of scientific thought to be fully comfortable getting into it with someone who clearly is, but I do know there's a school of thought that feels the superorganic model (which, if my understanding is correct, corresponds to that hierarchy you describe) is, at best, inadequate.
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Your thoughts, feelings, personality would not exist without your body. Your body is built from a blueprint, your DNA. If this DNA was changed, so could your thoughts, feelings and personality change depending on how big the change was. Psychology is a study of biological phenomenons; thoughts, feelings, behaviours. You could call it a specialized branch of biology if you wanted to.
This is the reason why biology is fundamental to psychology and not vice versa. A study on how development is influenced by thoughts or feelings does not really change this. Furthermore, psychological theory is not always required to test the effect of thoughts and emotions. F.ex I have a girlfriend who studies the effect of fear on the learning ability of chickens. She is not studying fear itself, only the effect of it (similar to your imprinting example) so psychological theory is not required. She just needs to recognize fear so that she can register it and perhaps rank it on a scale so that she can generate data for statistics.
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Originally Posted by Nine Black Poppies
But there's also an epistemological effect in play, and that I do feel comfortable talking about. In a radically simple form, it's basically the idea that scientists are human and active participants in culture and therefore--because scientific data require interpretation and context to have any meaning--no science can be perfectly objective or independent of pervasive cultural norms. In other words, that knowledge is not necessarily concrete--what science is being done and how is based on a system of what knowledge we value and there are things that we don't know, not because the information isn't available, but because we--as a culture, not necessarily as individuals--choose to not investigate, ignore or reframe it. You said yourself that there is a common misperception about the science among laymen that's been demonstrated even here. I'm suggesting that that misperception doesn't exist in a vacuum and that the same knowledge patterns that inform it can also inform the path scientific discovery can take even among people who "should" know better, as well as--in the case of sexuality--also having a multitude of intra-social and political effects justified by a misperception of science.
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If I understand correctly, you seem to think that when there's a new biological discovery about homosexuality, one should not just care about the "right" interpretation, but also how the result is misinterpreted because that will have an effect on society as well.
I do not believe in hiding the truth for fear that it is misinterpreted. I do not believe in hiding any kind of truth from society, even if it is an unpleasant truth, for example that God does not in fact exist or that asians are smarter than white and black people. If society can't deal with a truth, then society should improve until it can.
In order to create a society capable of dealing with truth, we need to educate people. It is one of the most important things we can do and to me, hiding the truth is just not acceptable. I think truth and education is how you best benefit society long term. A lot of this is opinion of course, but there you go.
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Originally Posted by Nine Black Poppies
So, in essence, you're right--that is what I was trying to address. But I don't think you can really say that one side is more dangerous than the other (nor could one fairly characterize the social aspect as "fluff")--doing so, especially when the scientific community itself (versus a layperson) does so, makes it that much easier to foster that misperception that biological theory can explain everything. And, as I said earlier, that misperception can be exploited.
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When I write dangerous, what I mean is more likely to end up at the wrong conclusions. When people say science has an agenda, they usually mean something like a mission to find out the truth about the universe. It is something we need to do if we want to better the collective status quo and future predictions for our children. Any study leading to false assumptions are bumps in our road to enlightenment.