Controversies on Evolutionism: On the construction of scientific boundaries in public and internal scientific controversies about evolutionary psychology and sociobiology

Controversy and publicity in evolutionary psychology

Maarten Derksen, Signe Vikkelsø, and Anne Beaulieu (2012) have argued that perspectives developed within the field of science and technology studies hold a particular value for critical and historical psychologies because they offer conceptual and methodical tools to understand the social production of psychic and social realities. Science and technology studies have devoted considerable attention to the popularization of science and the public understanding of science (Felt, 1999; Felt & Nowotny, 1993; Lightman, 2007; see also the journal Public Understanding of Science). Among the various forms of popularizing science, scientific controversies carried out in public offer valuable research material because they allow insights into the interlocking of specialized scientific discourse and public discourse and into public negotiations about what constitutes proper science and scientific facts.

Controversy is vital for the development and the very definition of science. Bruno Latour (1987) stated that scientific controversies are more heated within the inner confines of scientific discourse. Tommaso Venturini (2010), however, maintains that controversies are worthier of study the more public and the more heated they are. He describes controversies as “certainly and by far the most complex phenomena in collective life” (p. 260). This perspective on controversies already transgresses the confines of academia and hints at the larger societal dimension of scientific controversies.

Among other reasons, scientists turn to public controversies in order to secure their social position as “knowledge makers” (Gieryn, 1983). Science and scientific “facts” also need to be publicly recognized as such, and scientists aim at this recognition by practicing boundary work, that is, by drawing lines between science and non-science. However, public controversies are also a tightrope walk for scientists as they “draw attention to the sciences, but they also violate many of the implicit rules of scientific conduct, most notably the peer review process, but also ideas about scientific discourse being polite, subsuming personal opinions and being above commercial influences” (Cassidy, 2006, p. 176). Public scientific debates like public discourse on science in general are an inherent part of science, but they also pose a complex cartography for scientists to navigate (Venturini, 2010).

Cassidy (2007) describes public scientific controversies as events that transgress the confines of “science as usual” and points to Latour’s description of science as Janus-faced: “‘Science in the making’ on the right side and ‘all made science’ or ‘ready made science’ on the left side!” (Latour, 1987, p. 4). In public, scientists usually show the “left” side of science only and avoid disclosing the conditions and history of the development of scientific “facts,” for example, controversies and diverging opinions. The popularization of science is characterized by increasing certainty in presentation compared to scientific reports; scientific controversy, in particular, is left out of the popular picture for the sake of simplification and construed consensus (Fleck, 1935/1979).

There are incidents, however, when scientists forego the “proper” way of addressing the public only after significant consensus among colleagues is reached. In somewhat different local contexts, some of the most well-known among these are the sociobiology controversy (Segerstråle, 2000) that took place in the U.S. of the late 1970s and 1980s, the so-called science wars in the U.K. and the U.S. of the 1990s, and evolutionary psychology controversies in the U.K. in the late 1990s. Reasons for scientists to partake in such public debates can be varied (Cassidy, 2006): they may use public space to communicate across disciplines, especially with transdisciplinary topics; they may strengthen their social position as “knowledge makers” or their position within academia in competition for funding; or they may utilize public space to speculate more freely about various topics than they would within the constraints of routine scientific procedures (Felt, 1999). However, partaking in public controversies poses considerable risks for scientists, too, for they put their own credibility as scientists and the public image of science on a fine line.

Evolutionary psychology has been involved in many public controversies since its inception in the early 1990s. In the U.K., for example, a popular science boom during the 1990s went along with intense press coverage of evolutionary psychology, with evolutionary psychological accounts of sexual and gender politics figuring most prominently (Cassidy, 2005). U.K. press and print coverage on evolutionary psychology rose and fell with the publication of popular science books and was rather enthusiastic from the middle to the end of the 1990s. At the turn of the century, however, several critical popular science books appeared on the book market and the tone became more evaluative. Much popular discourse on evolutionary psychology was framed in terms of controversy from then on (Cassidy, 2006); the most controversial issues relating to sexual and gender politics (Cassidy, 2007). What is more, Cassidy (2005) has also shown that the media coverage on evolutionary psychology in the U.K. in the 1990s was so high that it outnumbered the academic coverage by far. It was only after 2000 that academic coverage started to boost, whereas media coverage declined. Cassidy even suggests that evolutionary psychologists compensated for their lack of academic respectability by engaging in public debates and by aiming at a broader audience with their publications. According to Cassidy, these efforts paid off.

Introducing: Internal controversy

One evolutionary psychological theory sparked an especially heated controversy in the field of evolutionary biology during the 1990s. This controversy was carried out in a small niche field of evolutionary biology concerned with the analysis of so-called “fluctuating asymmetry.” Fluctuating asymmetry describes the fact that most organisms are not bilaterally symmetrical. The theory at stake has become known as the “good gene” hypothesis of physical attractiveness. According to this hypothesis, physical appearance provides information about the genetic quality of an individual and thus, about their “mate value” for reproduction.

The controversy in question started in the early 1990s. In 1992, ornithologist Anders Pape Møller published a letter in Nature, suggesting that female barn swallows preferred symmetrical males and that asymmetrical tail features among male swallows are a product of sexual selection. Møller had cut the tail feathers of several male swallows and had thus varied the degree of tail symmetry. His data showed that symmetrical males were paid more visits by females than asymmetrical ones. In a commentary, Gerald Borgia and Gerald Wilkinson (1992) raised doubts about Møller’s data. In 1993, Møller suggested that fluctuating asymmetry was heritable at a conference organized by developmental biologist Theresa Markow, who would later become one of Møller’s harshest critics (Borrell, 2007). Biologist Randy Thornhill, also present at the conference, propounded a similar thesis. Most conference participants rejected this idea.

After the conference, Møller and Thornhill conducted a meta-analysis to support their thesis that fluctuating asymmetry had a heritable basis (1997a). The authors first submitted their study to the prestigious journal Evolution where the paper was apparently declined on the basis of “two ‘vitriolic’ reviews” (Borrell, 2007). The paper was finally published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, alongside seven comments on the original paper (Houle, 1997; Leamy, 1997; Markow & Clarke, 1997; Palmer & Strobeck, 1997; Pomiankowski, 1997; Swaddle, 1997; Whitlock & Fowler, 1997).

The debate continued on several levels after the controversy in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology. In 1998, Møller and Thornhill published another meta-analysis, and again, Palmer (1999) reacted with a commentary, launching a full-blown methodological critique this time. He pointed out that a wide-spread publication bias towards significant results distorted the evidence of meta-analyses. When his critique did not bear fruit again, he published a satirical piece called “The Emperor’s Codpiece: A Postmodern Perspective on Biological Asymmetries,” ridiculing the entire tradition of “good gene” research by comparing Møller and Thornhill to the two bogus weavers from Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale The Emperor’s New Clothes (Palmer & Hammond, 2000).

The accusations of deception and malpractice that had accompanied Møller’s and Thornhill’s research on the “good gene” hypothesis throughout the 1990s finally culminated towards the turn of the millennium when Møller was accused of fabricating data in his studies on oak leaves and was brought before the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty in 2001. In 2003, the Committee found the allegations to be true and concluded the following: “Neither the raw data kept at the University of Copenhagen nor the data forwarded by the defendant could have generated the results that emerged from the article” (as cited in Borrell, 2007, para. 21). In his reconstruction of the controversy, science journalist Brendan Borrell concluded that when Møller’s bird banding permit was revoked in 2005, his research on barn swallows had effectively come to an end.

Introducing: Public controversy

While the controversy recounted above was carried out within the inner confines of specialized scientific journals, there are incidents when controversy is immediately taken to the level of public discussion. When Edward O. Wilson published his book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis in 1975, it gave way to a heated public discussion in the U.S. that continued into public controversies on evolutionary psychology during the 1990s. The sociobiology controversy has become known for the sometimes violent measures with which participants defended their positions (see Segerstråle, 2000). Sociobiology was an attempt to define the biological foundations of social behavior. Wilson claimed that at least some human behavior had been developed by natural selection and thus had a genetic basis that could be inherited. The last chapter of Sociobiology (1975a), entitled, “Man: From Sociobiology to Sociology” was explicitly devoted to human behavior and was certainly decisive in sparking the public debate that followed.

In response to an enthusiastic review of Sociobiology in the New York Review of Books ¹ (Waddington, 1975), a group of students, physicians, high-school teachers, and professors from the Boston area addressed a letter called “Against ‘Sociobiology’” to the New York Review of Books (Allen et al., 1975). The critics would later be known as the Sociobiology Study Group of Science for the People. In their open letter, they criticized the relations of the biological sciences and politics. Wilson (1975b) answered the accusations with an open letter to the New York Review of Books entitled “For Sociobiology,” protesting against incorrect statements and accusations.

Once triggered, the debate was continued with sometimes violent measures. Wilson, for example, was physically attacked by members of the International Committee Against Racism (CAR; Segerstråle, 2000). On the Harvard campus, CAR members distributed flyers that accused Wilson of claiming genes for all kinds of behavior including racism. A number of scientists including population geneticist Richard Lewontin and paleontologist Stephan Jay Gould, however, soon changed their tactics to include a more detailed scientific analysis of sociobiology. The scientific controversy between Wilson and his critics culminated when Wilson published a more detailed analysis of the relation between genes and culture in the early 1980s. In Genes, Mind, and Culture (Lumsden & Wilson, 1981a), the authors had used Lewontin’s (1972) research to substantiate their claim that genetic variations within a given population could be responsible for cultural differences, while Lewontin had dedicated his studies to devaluating theories of scientific racism. Lewontin (1981) published a devastating review of Genes, Mind, and Culture, calling Lumsden and Wilson’s views absurd and reductionist. Lumsden and Wilson (1981b) shot back by accusing Lewontin of pursuing merely political motives.

Gould, especially, continued the same line of critique when a new protagonist entered the stage in the early 1990s: evolutionary psychology. In 1992, evolutionary psychologists John Tooby and Leeda Cosmides launched a full-blown attack on the social sciences, claiming that they were dominated by a “tabula rasa” concept of the human mind according to which humans were born as “blank slates” and acquired all psychological functions through socialization. In turn, Gould (1997) accused evolutionary psychology of overstating the role of natural selection in evolution in an open letter to the New York Review of Books, claiming that evolutionary speculations about the human pre-history could not be empirically tested and were therefore unscientific. Tooby and Cosmides (1997) responded to the allegations in the New York Review of Books, as did philosopher Daniel Dennett (1997) and science journalist Robert Wright (1997). In their letter to the editors of the New York Review of Books, Tooby and Cosmides (1997) attacked Gould’s position as an authority in the field of evolutionary biology. They claimed that Gould was only regarded as an eminent biologist by non-biologists because of his essayistic talents. His works should be regarded as fiction rather than science. The controversy between Gould and Tooby and Cosmides is not the only public controversy on evolutionary psychology in the U.S. by far, but it certainly stands out in terms of its heatedness and of the disdain with which evolutionists and their critics referred to each other.

Boundary work with and without the attention of the larger public

The controversies I have introduced above were not only debates about specific scientific theories or methods. Instead, all participants used these debates as a means of boundary work (Gieryn, 1983) by drawing lines between science and non-science and by claiming scientific superiority. Scientists in my case studies practiced boundary work both internally and in the public arena by propounding their theories of what science is and what its borders are. However, the various interlocutors used different standards that depend on their respective positions in the debate and on the arena of discourse. For reasons of simplicity, I will call one position the “evolutionists” and the other position the “critics.”

Taking a closer look at the controversies, it becomes evident that the debates are not so much about content but about a certain scientific code of conduct that seems directly related to the participants’ positions in the disciplinary field that framed the controversy. For example, when Møller and Thornhill (1997b) responded to their commentators in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, they suggested a code of conduct that regulates the ways in which established authorities in a field (their critics) are supposed to treat newcomers (them):

Clearly the issue of heritability of developmental instability is more than just a scientific question to some commentators. In science, no one should feel threatened by others working “in the field.” We are newcomers to the study of developmental instability (only nine, A.P.M., and seven, R.T., years, respectively), working on this subject as a primary research interest and have tremendous respect for the ground work laid by some commentators. … Most of all we hope that the derogations of us by certain commentators don’t lead young investigators interested in developmental stability to fear that they may be attacked personally by certain established workers in the field upon publication of their work, or to fear that acceptance of their manuscripts will be significantly dependent on the whims of unobjective referees. There is a real danger to a scientific field when established workers in the field view their colleagues as competitors and use innuendos and direct claims of malpractice to get an edge. (Møller & Thornhill, 1997b, pp. 69–70)

Disregarding the theoretical and methodological issues raised by their commentators, the authors concluded that they still believed in their original hypothesis:

In conclusion, we strongly believe that developmental instability … has an additive genetic basis. Also, we strongly believe that meta-analysis is the proper way to look at the hypothesis of heritable developmental stability. Our conclusion is independent of a number of different ways in which the entire data set is restricted. Therefore, our conclusion that developmental stability has a significant additive genetic component remains solid. (Møller & Thornhill 1997b, p. 74)

As becomes evident from the above quotes, Møller and Thornhill set aside the content of the critique and focused on its form and tone instead, calling for a climate of discussion that does not discourage scientists from speaking their minds.

In the public sociobiology controversy, Wilson (1975b) pursued a similar argumentative strategy in his public response to the open letter by the Sociobiology Study Group. Like Møller and Thornhill, he voiced the fear that the spirit of inquiry and discussion in the intellectual community might be damaged when scholars are intimidated by critics:

However, in spite of the fact that I have been on friendly terms with some of the signers of the letter for years, and two share the same building with me at Harvard University, I did not know of the letter’s existence until three days before it appeared in print.

I make this last point because I feel that the actions of Allen et al. represent the kind of self-righteous vigilantism which not only produces falsehood but also unjustly hurts individuals and through that kind of intimidation diminishes the spirit of free inquiry and discussion crucial to the health of the intellectual community. (Wilson, 1975b, para. 9)

The critics, on the other hand, delineated a different code of conduct that also corresponded with their respective positions in the disciplinary field framing the controversies. This becomes most evident with regard to the internal controversy on evolutionary biology, a controversy more tightly bound to disciplinary confines than public controversies. The commentators to Møller and Thornhill’s (1997a) paper complained harshly about Møller and Thornhill’s response to critique. The commentary by Markow and Clarke, for example, expressed the fear that Møller and Thornhill would use their meta-analysis as evidence of their hypothesis without taking into consideration the critique that accompanied the publication of their paper, a fear that would later turn out to be well grounded (see Ruck, 2013b):

The actual lack of data on such an association [between fluctuating asymmetry and fitness] was underscored by discussions at the 1993 conference on developmental stability that both authors attended … so it is surprising that they would make such a blanket statement. Although Møller and Thornhill do not specifically address the sexual selection implications of the meta-analysis results in the current paper, there is a fear that this will happen in the future, without reference to published criticisms. We have already uncovered six papers in which the results of their unpublished meta-analysis of FA heritability have been cited and used to support their indicator hypothesis. (Markow & Clarke, 1997, p. 35)

In a similar vein, commentators Palmer and Strobeck (1997) pointed out that two reviewers of Evolution had already criticized severe methodical shortcomings of the original manuscript and that Møller and Thornhill had not taken these into account before submitting their paper to the Journal of Evolutionary Biology:

When they have ignored or obscured the many potentially confounding effects of widely acknowledged difficulties with the original data and analysis, their use of meta-analysis to buttress claims for a robust quantitative estimate seems misleading at best or deceptive at worst. Since several of the concerns outlined above were raised by reviewers, why were Møller and Thornhill not more judicious in their presentation and analysis? Such a seemingly dismissive attitude towards acknowledged difficulties with analysis and interpretation runs the risk of tarnishing all those who use FA as a tool, because it suggests that proponents of FA are too quick to accept uncritically the answer they expect and too willing to build a conceptual edifice on a foundation of sand. Furthermore, given the high visibility of Møller and Thornhill, newcomers to the field, or those outside of it, may be inclined to believe that such dismissiveness is considered acceptable. This seems a most unflattering message to send. (Palmer & Strobeck, 1997, p. 48)

It becomes evident that both the evolutionists’ and the critics’ ideals and complaints are similar across both contexts. Both in internal scientific controversies and in public debates, evolutionists tended to emphasize freedom of inquiry and to complain about violent attacks and the dangers of intimidation, especially for “newcomers.” This is not to say that evolutionists did not exclude certain positions or certain people from discourse in the case studies I have analyzed. Complaints about taboos, censorship, or “political correctness,” in particular, often serve to establish boundaries of public speech (see Ruck, 2013a). While evolutionists emphasized freedom of speech in the scientific community and complained about intimidation and attacks, the critics voiced different ideals of science and different fears, too. The critics indeed formulated stricter rules of scientific conduct that vary in content depending on the position from which they launched their critique.

In the context of the internal controversy in evolutionary biology, Markow (Markow & Clarke, 1997) and Palmer (Palmer & Strobeck, 1997) indicated that Møller and Thornhill had transgressed the boundaries of the scientific community by not reacting to critique in the proper manner. It is evident that their definition of a proper scientific code of conduct was formulated from their position as authorities in the field. Between the lines, they both wove a narrative of how Møller and Thornhill went wrong and how they should have behaved: Møller and Thornhill introduced their “good gene” hypothesis at a conference organized by Markow and were met with critique by the other participants. Ideally, they should have taken up this critique and this is where they first went wrong. They then submitted a manuscript to a journal edited by Palmer and were met with harsh critique again. Instead of revising their manuscript according to the reviewers’ suggestions, however, they submitted the original manuscript to another journal, unfortunately ending up with Palmer as a commentator. Taking up neither the reviewers’ comments nor the commentators’ critique marked their second and third transgression. At the time, both Markow and Palmer were authorities in the small research community analyzing fluctuating asymmetry. They both maintained that critique uttered within arenas—the rules and limits of which were determined by them—needed to be taken seriously. As gatekeepers in their field they were concerned that the image of their research community might be damaged by “bad” scientific habits. They advanced a notion of discussion that entailed taking critique seriously—especially critique voiced by authorities and within proper scientific channels like peer-review.

Segerstråle (2000) has pointed to the fact that while the critics in the sociobiology controversy were politically progressive, they were rather traditional in their understanding of science; and while Wilson was politically conservative, his conceptions of science were more flexible:

The situation could be described as an opposition between a purist, critical, logical approach with slightly negative overtones (Lewontin), and a practically oriented, opportunistic, speculative, and generally “positive” model-building approach, where judgment is postponed until later (Wilson). From the protagonist’s own perspectives, the first approach is “serious science” (Lewontin) or “too safe” (Wilson), while the latter one is either “creative and risky” (Wilson) or “not serious” (Lewontin). (Segerstråle, 2000, p. 50)

Not least, the differences between Wilson and Lewontin, in particular, boiled down to different views of scientific progress. For Wilson, science advanced through conceptual leaps that need not be proven immediately. Lewontin, by contrast, described his position in the following way:

I am not a Popperian and I do not believe that strict falsifiability is necessary for a valid scientific theory. There is, however, a more elementary demand. Even if a theory has no potential falsifier it must at least have the potential of failure of confirmation. It must be possible to construct an experiment or observation which would fail to confirm the theory in that instance. We must reject out of hand any theory so built that every observation is a necessary confirmation of the theory. (Lewontin, 1976, pp. 26–27)

Lewontin did not object to the temporal order of designing theories first and testing them later. However, he maintained that scientific theories must be falsifiable in principle. According to Lewontin, speculations about past evolutionary processes and generalized speculations did not fulfill this criterion because they could not be tested empirically.

Another issue of disagreement between evolutionists and their critics was the relation between science and society—a concern mostly taken up in the context of public controversies. Wilson, for example, practiced boundary work by uncoupling science from society at large and by speaking to and of an intellectual community defined by its spirit of free inquiry and discussion. Wilson proposed exempting ethical discussion about the responsibility and role of science for society at large from scholarly discussions, pointing out that he had explicitly warned against inferring ethical statements from sociobiological observations of the status quo in an article he had written in the New York Times Magazine a month before Allen et al. had published their open letter. The critics in the public controversies on sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, on the other hand, pursued a double strategy that combined a political critique with methodological and theoretical critique in the beginning and increasingly limited their attacks to scientific matters also in public. In the first public critique launched against Wilson (1975a), Allen et al. (1975) emphasized the interrelation of science and society:

Wilson joins the long parade of biological determinists whose work has served to buttress the institutions of their society by exonerating them from responsibility for social problems.

From what we have seen of the social and political impact of such theories in the past, we feel strongly that we should speak out against them. We must take “Sociobiology” seriously, then, not because we feel that it provides a scientific basis for its discussion of human behavior, but because it appears to signal a new wave of biological determinist theories. (Allen et al., 1975, paras 18–19)

In contrast to Wilson, Allen et al. claimed that every theory of human nature carries political implications for society. From this perspective, what may be said and researched within science is not least determined by its function for dominant social relations. Thus, while Wilson propounded free inquiry but limited critique, the critics did not confine the realms of critique but of scientific inquiry. Though launching a political critique in their open letter, Allen et al. (1975) also considered Wilson’s Sociobiology as scientifically weak because he failed to offer empirical evidence for his theoretical claims. However, methodological critique was tightly linked with political critique because they claimed that in most cases, scientific claims about the biological basis of human behavior lacked empirical evidence but were kept alive nonetheless because they served the social function of legitimating the privileges of certain social groups. Not least because the critics posed such a tight connection between methodologically poor scientific research and ideology, scientists such as Lewontin and Gould pursued a rather “traditional” scientific agenda that emphasized painstaking and detailed empirical analyses and the construction of small-range theories that can be tested empirically.

It becomes cogent that in the context of both scientific and public controversies, critics of evolutionists agreed that adherence to sound methodology and to the rules of methodological and theoretical critique within the scientific community constituted a kind of safeguard. Tight scientific standards were considered to protect scientific fields from losing their respectability within the scientific community and to prevent society from the effects of theories that had little scientific credibility but served to legitimate the social position of a privileged few.

Finally, besides boundary work that centered on defining proper scientific conduct, genre distinctions also play an important role. In his last attempt to upbraid Møller and Thornhill, Palmer resorted to ridicule. Together with Lois Hammond (Palmer & Hammond, 2000), he constructed the history of “good gene” research as a fairy tale and Møller and Thornhill as conmen. The change of genre implies that Palmer ceased to take Møller and Thornhill seriously as scientists and instead put them in a fairytale where evidence can be fabricated because no one is able to detect fraud. Tooby and Cosmides (1997), on the other hand, used the topos of fiction in order to establish the boundaries of science, claiming that Gould did not produce scientific knowledge but fiction in order to compensate for a lack of recognition in the field of evolutionary biology. In their view, Gould’s production of fiction was powerful enough to destroy the field of evolutionary biology from both the outside and the inside by miseducating the general public and scientists alike.

My analysis points to the fact that in heated scientific controversies there is mostly more at stake than methodology or theory and that this observation not only holds for public controversies but also for internal ones. However, it is also paramount to put the evolutionists’ and the critics’ understanding of the relation between science and society in context. Evidently, the views scientists propound about science and the boundary work with which they define the core of science are not (only) of their own making but take place within a larger context of discussions about science in society and within a contested arena that is populated by an ever-increasing number of actors. Evolutionists’ insistence on freedom of inquiry and discussion within the scientific community and their view of scientists as relating to a larger public by educating (or miseducating) them, may be placed in the context of a “deficit approach to science–public relations” (Felt, 2003, p. 19) based on the idea of a linear communication between science and the public by way of which scientists enlighten lay people about scientific facts. Ulrike Felt explains that this perspective dominated debates about science–public relations until the late 1970s but also points to the fact that “while it was declared ‘dead’ for so many times over the past 25 years of science-technology-society analysis, it in a certain way seems to have survived the major shifts through gradual adaptation” (Felt, 2003, p. 19).

The critics’ position, on the other hand, evolved out of emerging skepticism towards science that was raised in the context of social movements like the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, environmental movements, or the peace movements during the late 1970s. These movements not only questioned the social effects and the responsibility of science and technology but also raised doubts about science being the only legitimate form of knowledge. It is thus not by chance that the first public critique of Wilson’s Sociobiology was tightly linked with anti-racist initiatives. Increasing skepticism towards science and technology went along with new forms of technology assessment and also with more interactive means of science communication, for example, science shops (Felt, 2003).

Attempting a diagnosis of current relations between science and society, Nowotny, Scott, and Gibbons (2001) have proposed that the idea of scientific autonomy is rather outdated in what they have called Mode 2 production of knowledge: a form of knowledge production that has gained importance since the end of the Cold War and the advent of neoliberalism and that is more application oriented, diverse in regards to the sites of knowledge production and the actors involved, and increasingly breaks down disciplinary barriers for the sake of transdisciplinary efforts. It is perhaps a cunning of history that the critics’ demand of taking into account the social effects and social responsibility of science gains a more ambivalent meaning in a knowledge economy where science funding is increasingly tied to research that promises the most beneficial societal outcomes (see Felt & Fochler, 2012).

Conclusion

In this article, I have analyzed one scientific controversy that was carried out mainly in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology and two controversies that took place mainly in the New York Review of Books. I have asked about the ways in which both evolutionists and their critics practice boundary work in such exchanges of arguments. It has become evident that boundary work takes place both in specialized scientific debates and in public controversies while the borders of science and the position of scientific authorities are defined differently across contexts. It is not always the case, as Latour (1987) once suggested, that scientists hide the controversial side of science from the public altogether. Under some circumstances, “wrestling in public” (Cassidy, 2006, p. 175) may well have developed into a certain genre of science communication.

As Derksen and colleagues (2012) have argued, conceptual and methodical tools from science and technology studies help to understand the social production of psychic and social realities. In this case, the conceptual tool of controversy has helped me to analyze how science as a social reality is produced not only within the confines of scientific insider discussions but also in public discourse. Evolutionists and their critics use both specialized scientific and public arenas in their battles for scientific authority. However, both parties hold that authority in specialized debates is concentrated in the hands of disciplinary gatekeepers who have shaped a field of inquiry, while authority acquires a much more ambiguous and contested meaning in the public sphere because scientists need to negotiate for authoritative positions for and with the public. Furthermore, evolutionists and their critics agree that science is distinguished from other social practices by a certain code of conduct but they disagree on its exact form. Furthermore, what differentiates evolutionists and critics is the way in which they conceptualize the relation between science and society or science and the public.

Latour once remarked that, “when we approach the places where facts and machines are made, we get into the midst of controversies” (Latour, 1987, p. 30). Mostly, these controversies revolve around methodical, methodological, and theoretical issues and they showcase the variety of ways in which facts can be made. As soon as we look beyond the content of these debates, however, we find ourselves not only in the midst of controversies but also in a territory of fierce quarrel about the nature of science as such, about the relationship between science and society, and about expectations and hopes regarding how we are to relate to one another.