ABSTRACT
How does cognitive ordering affect our perception and understanding of Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution? Without any doubt there are countless varieties of both Darwin as a cultural icon and utilizations of evolutionary theory (which this book demonstrates). This essay does not support the idea that there is a single, objective answer to this question (though it considers addressing this idea to be a vitally metaphysical and thus highly ethical issue), but it supports the idea that there is a way of understanding why generalizations are possible (because metaphysical truths, though constructed and culturally and historically embedded they may be, do exist and we align ourselves to this truth and consequently to its ethics and politics). The complexity of specializations within science leads to unbridgeable gaps between scientists who then resort to simplifications so as to be able to at least communicate some of the dense knowledge acquired over a long period of time. This problem appears even more striking when we consider the distortions of scientific insights in the arts and science pages of the popular press. Here, an uncritical reader with only surface knowledge of biological science may be led to think that biology actually holds the answer to the question of what human nature is (look out for sentences that start with ‘scientists now have found the key to…’), rather than showing that nature is a malleable, ongoing process of becoming. For example, if we look into Heinz-Jürgen Voß’s work on the history of not only medical theories of sex, we see that constructivist notions have long been part of such inquiries and that they are not a symptom of the two cultures of hard vs. soft science. I understand this essay as a contribution to science studies, which reflects the structures underlying scientific inquiry.
