BOOKS ET AL.

10 FEBRUARY 2012 VOL 335 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org 658

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Fifteen years ago, scientists, historians,

and sociologists traded salvos in what

was termed the “science wars.” Pas-

sions ran high; “social construction of sci-

ence” became a battle cry. Critics like physi-

cist Alan Sokal pointed an accusing fi nger at

various humanists who had suggested that

science was an inherently social phenom-

enon riven by rival interests rather than a

rational pursuit of objective facts about the

natural world. Some blamed the French soci-

ologist Bruno Latour and his writings from

the 1980s. Others highlighted members of

the Edinburgh school of the sociology of sci-

entific knowledge and their writings from

the 1970s. Still others singled out Thomas

Kuhn’s remarkably infl uential little treatise,

The Structure of Scientifi c Revolutions ( 1),

fi rst published in 1962.

How remarkable, then, to learn in his-

torian Mary Jo Nye’s Michael Polanyi and

His Generation that the core notion of the

social construction of science antedates the

eras of Kuhn, the Edinburgh

school, or Latour by several

decades. Not only is the idea

of social construction con-

siderably older than usually

recognized, as Nye deftly

demonstrates, it was devel-

oped as part of a passionate

plea for the autonomy of sci-

ence from societal meddling.

The hue and cry in the 1990s

represented what Nye calls a

“paradoxical legacy” of the

earlier work.

Nye’s book centers on

Hungarian polymath Michael

Polanyi, who became a prin-

cipal architect of the notion

that science proceeds by something other than

strict rationality or algorithmic procedure.

Born in 1891, Polanyi joined a generation

of Central European scholars whose think-

ing about science and knowledge took form

amid the political riptide of the early decades

of the 20th century. Polanyi experienced the

bloody crises of World War I and its after-

math, as the crumbling Austro-

Hungarian empire gave way to

a short-lived Bolshevik regime,

itself toppled by a right-wing,

counterrevolutionary revolt.

By 1920, rampant antisemitism

forced young Polanyi to leave

his homeland and to pursue his

career as a physical chemist in

Berlin. In that cosmopolitan, intellectual set-

ting, he rubbed shoulders with Albert Ein-

stein, Max Planck, Fritz Haber, and others.

Their tight-knit community fell apart once the

Nazis rose to power in 1933. Within months,

Polanyi fl ed to Manchester, England.

Polanyi had always enjoyed debating

politics, economics, and social theory with

other energetic thinkers from his childhood

circle, including his older brother, the econ-

omist Karl Polanyi, and the sociologist Karl

Mannheim. Yet he began to turn more squarely

to philosophy soon after his relocation to

Manchester. Like his geographical migra-

tions, his pro fessional

shift had everything to

do with politics. Polanyi

made several visits to the

Soviet Union during the

early 1930s to visit sci-

entific colleagues. He

came away convinced

that centralized, planned

economies, symbolized

by Stalin’s Five-Year

Plans, led inexorably to

widespread privations

and misery. Polanyi was

therefore scandalized

when in 1939 the prom-

inent left-wing British

crystallographer J. D.

Bernal proposed that Britain adopt a kind of

national planning for science. Bernal called

for scientifi c efforts to be more overtly steered

toward addressing societal needs. Around the

same time, Polanyi grew suspicious—earlier

than most—of what came to be known as the

“Lysenko affair”: the heavy-handed intrusion

by Soviet authorities to squash research into

genetics (on charges that genetics diverged

from the official doctrine of dialectical

materialism) and instead to prop up agrono-

mist Trofi m Lysenko’s vaguely Lamarckian

notions of inheritance.

To Polanyi, each of these episodes

revealed the treachery of central planning,

for science or any other part of society. He

became convinced that advocates of cen-

tral planning—even scien-

tists like Bernal—made their

political error because they

had fundamentally misunder-

stood the nature of scientifi c

practice. Central planning

of scientific research could

only work, Polanyi argued, if

scientifi c discovery was the

product of specifi able, rule-

driven methods—that is, if it

were wholly rational. Refl ect-

ing on his own scientifi c career, Polanyi con-

cluded instead that scientific knowledge

arose from a mélange of social processes that

no purported method could capture.

In place of scientific method, Polanyi

trumpeted the importance of “tacit knowl-

edge.” No practicing scientist learned the

craft of research from books or articles,

Polanyi argued. Rather, they had to prac-

tice craftlike skills, which they internalized

via social relationships like apprenticeship

training. Scientists developed an aesthetic

sense for what counted as good science,

according to Polanyi, and used any means

available to convince colleagues from rival

research schools to believe a given result.

Scientists often formed their beliefs from

an immersion in particulars that resisted

explicit articulation; he likened the expe-

rience to religious conversion. To Polanyi,

the routines of scientific research could

never be captured by recipes, and therefore

any effort to steer the direction of research,

or subject science to central planning, was

bound to fail.

Polanyi developed his philosophical pro-

gram in a series of books and articles in the

1930s and 1940s, culminating in his best-

known books, Personal Knowledge ( 2) and

The Tacit Dimension ( 3). Kuhn read several

of these works while writing Structure; so did

early practitioners of 1970s-style sociology

of scientifi c knowledge, including Harry Col-

lins. To later interpreters, Polanyi’s insights

into the social foundations of scientifi c prac-

tice spoke to different political priorities: not

the midcentury fears of totalitarianism, but

the 1960s and 1970s disenchantment with the

military-industrial complex.

In assessing the “paradox and irony” of

later scholars’ appropriation of Polanyi’s

ideas, Nye concludes, “Each generation

of readers can select what it likes from the

past.” Her rich, impressive book recasts the

science wars barbs of the recent past by illu-

Paradoxical Roots of “Social Construction”

HISTORY OF SCIENCE

David Kaiser

The reviewer, the author of How the Hippies Saved Phys-ics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival, is at the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, Mas-sachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. E-mail: dikaiser@mit.edu

Michael Polanyi and

His Generation

Origins of the Social

Construction of Science

by Mary Jo Nye

University of Chicago Press,

Chicago, 2011. 427 pp. $45,

£29. ISBN 9780226610634.

Polanyi in the late 1950s.

Published by AAAS

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BOOKS ET AL.

www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 335 10 FEBRUARY 2012 659

Between 1960 and 1980, the American

Indian population surged from 524

thousand to 1.3 million ( 1). Rather

than natural increase, most of this impressive

demographic growth resulted from changes

in census practices that allowed respondents

instead of enumerators to designate their

identity. The U.S. Census requires Native

Americans to specify their tribal affilia-

tion but does not stipulate other markers of

membership, such as language or residence,

which some Indian nations require as a con-

dition of membership. The question of who

is an Indian transcends genetics and deter-

mines access to goods and services. Thus,

as David Treuer (an Ojibwe) recently noted,

tribal identity is (silly as it seems) often mea-

sured in “teaspoons of blood” ( 2).

More than instrumental ends, humans’

obsession with their genealogy is rooted in

a desire to forge social identities. With the

possible exception of establishing paternity,

these social identities, imagined or real, have

little to do with biology or genetics, as Eviatar

Zerubavel convincingly argues in Ancestors

and Relatives. Yet, because science evokes

conceptions of truth, grounding genealogy

in biology is used to validate even far-fetched

claims about relatedness. The proliferation

of DNA testing fi rms and online programs

to build family trees attests to the public’s

fascination with genealogical roots ( 3). To

lure genealogy enthusiasts into discovering

their past, for example, Ancestry.com boasts

7 billion genealogical records from across

the globe, ranging from vital statistics and

census and military records to immigration

Imaginary Identities

SOCIOLOGY

Marta Tienda

The reviewer is at the Offi ce of Population Research, Wallace Hall, 2nd Floor, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA. E-mail: tienda@princeton.edu

and vital statistics. The Web site also offers

cheek-swab DNA test kits to help in locating

“genetic cousins” ( 4).

From the outset Zerubavel (a sociolo-

gist at Rutgers University) engages readers

with provocative questions like “Are sixth

cousins still family?” and “Why do we con-

sider Barack Obama a black man with a

white mother rather than a white man with

a black father?” Drawing on a vast range of

sources—from scriptures to academic dis-

ciplines—Zerubavel aims to uncover the

“transcultural and transhistorical” principles

that underlie conventional understandings of

genealogical relatedness. He argues, simply

put, that culture trumps biology in establish-

ing ancestry and kinship ties, as well as group

boundaries that defi ne clans, tribes, commu-

nities, and even nations.

The claim that ancestry and ethnicity are

social rather than biological constructs is not

new. Nonetheless, the book artfully debunks

restraining myths about the salience of biol-

ogy in human differentiation. Zerubavel

exposes strong parallels between diagrams

used to establish codescent and those used to

illustrate splintering and differentiation, and

he demonstrates how the ties that link rela-

tives are similar to those that connect humans

to other animals. In his words, “The modern

academic compartmentalization of knowl-

edge has evidently kept [scholars] from real-

izing that they were actually all looking at

different manifestations of the genealogi-

cal principle of co-descent.” Unlike humans,

however, other animals are at most interested

in immediate, not distant, relatives. Zerubavel

reminds us that the “search for common

ancestors is effectively boundless … basically

we are all cousins.”

Understanding the social construction of

descent requires both questioning assump-

tions about the cognitive underpinnings of

genealogy and deciphering the social norms,

conventions, and classifi cation practices that

defi ne relatedness and group membership.

Even though biologists have improved upon

the measurement of genealogical distances

between organisms and entire populations,

the absence of natural boundaries separating

recent from distant ancestors, or even close

relatives from nonrelatives, leaves ample

space for cultural engineering of genealog-

ical lineation. And, as Zerubavel demon-

strates, there is no shortage of creativity in

crafting genealogies.

To delineate distant ancestral ties, gene-

alogists use norms and culturally defined

classifi cation schemes, but with hefty doses

of selective amnesia and strategic “adjust-

ment” of kinship ties. The inevitable results

are fi ctive genealogies and imaginary iden-

tities. Zerubavel pokes fun at the pseudosci-

ence of genealogy by using vernacular terms

to characterize how genealogies are cultur-

ally tailored to derive fi ctive kinship lines. In

a chapter aptly titled “Politics of descent,” he

amply illustrates the art of genealogical fab-

rication in practice. Using wit and punchy

exposition, he dis-

cusses how “cutting

and pasting” is used

to suppress tempo-

ral inconsistencies

in ancestral ties; how

“stretching” is used

to legitimize putative

ties to the Daughters

of the American Rev-

olution; how “clip-

ping” allowed Nazis to ignore the Jewish

ancestors of Aryan Germans; and how “split-

ting,” “pruning,” and “marginalizing” tactics

conveniently remove undesirable ancestors

from genealogies. In short, ancestor worship

is impervious to scientifi c advances in biol-

ogy and genetics.

If genealogies are largely fabricated cul-

tural narratives about social descent rather

than accurate histories of ancestors and

descendants (and if the boundaries demar-

cating race, ethnicity, and nationality are chi-

merical), why do they resonate with experts

and lay audiences alike? And looking to

the future—especially in the face of grow-

ing social complexity and uncertain kinship

ties due to immigration, remarriage, blended

families, surrogacy, adoption, and artifi-

cial insemination—why should anyone care

about genealogy? According to Zerubavel,

“Genealogy, in short, is fi rst and foremost a

way of thinking. … [and] one of the distinc-

tive characteristics of human cognition. As

the very objects of our genealogical imagi-

nation, ancestors and relatives therefore

deserve a prominent place among the foun-

dational pillars of the human condition.”

An erudite treatise about how culture drives

human cognition about near and remote rela-

tions, Ancestors and Relatives offers lay and

academic audiences alike a great read.

References and Notes

1. C. M. Snipp, American Indians: The First of This Land

(Russell Sage Foundation, New York, 1989).

2. D. Treuer, New York Times, 21 December 2011, p. A39.

3. My sister learned from a now-defunct DNA testing fi rm

that the Tiendas are 68% European, 25% Native Ameri-

can, and 7% Sub-Saharan African. The results were accom-

panied with a detailed manual and a map explaining the

migration patterns undergirding the statistical estimates.

4. http://dna.ancestry.com/welcome.aspx.

Ancestors and Relatives

Genealogy, Identity,

and Community

by Eviatar Zerubavel

Oxford University Press,

Oxford, 2011. 238 pp.

$24.95, £15.99.

ISBN 9780199773954.

10.1126/science.1217669

minating the searing politics, intellectual

passions, and spirited debates that drove

Polanyi and his generation to think about

science in social terms.

References

1. T. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientifi c Revolutions (Univ.

Chicago Press, Chicago, 1962).

2. M. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical

Philosophy (Univ. Chicago Press, Chicago, 1958).

3. M. Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Doubleday, Garden City,

NY, 1966).

10.1126/science.1214357

Published by AAAS