GBL August 06
Science as Normative Discourse: Who is Driving the Bus?
Brad Allenby
Recent columns have argued that science and technology, especially in the
environmental fields, have become necessarily and unalterably normative, and that
nothing less than a fundamental re-imagining of the Enlightenment is required if
humanity is to respond ethically and rationally to the challenges of the Anthropocene. It
might help ground this discussion, then, to return to one of the more fundamental issues
of concern to many environmentalists from the perspective of science as normative
discourse: the “biodiversity crisis”. A previous column noted that what appears to be an
extinction crisis if only evolutionary biodiversity is considered, may in fact simply be a
cusp as the source of biodiversity shifts from natural evolution to human design, and that
reductions in information content in biological systems resulting from extinctions of
evolved lifeforms may be balanced by creation of new information content as new
bioengineered lifeforms are designed and commercialized.
Whether this dynamic is indeed at work is obviously in part a very complicated
factual question. But it is more than that: it is a cultural and a political power question as
well. In this regard, perhaps the most interesting question is: what group gets to define
the cultural construct of biodiversity, and why does it matter? As it turns out, it matters a
lot: the community that controls the definition controls social perception of the
phenomenon, with significant distributional implications.
To begin with, it is apparent that “biodiversity” is not a factual observation, but a
cultural construction. One way to construct it is by considering only biodiversity that
arises from evolutionary processes, in which case loss of “traditional” species equates to
loss of biodiversity. Alternatively, one can consider only designed biodiversity, in which
case gains in constructed forms of life, such as GMOs or engineered bacteria constitute
gains in biodiversity. Or one could consider overall information content of biological
systems of all sorts as biodiversity, in which case no one knows whether it’s increasing or
decreasing.
What community gets rights to define the cultural construct of biodiversity
matters because the definition of the term in large part bounds public perceptions, and
thus potential policy responses. Biodiversity traditionally has been defined by the
conservation biology community, which by self-selection, focus and training has a strong
incentive to perceive losses in evolutionary biodiversity, and little experience or interest
in understanding designed biodiversity at all, except perhaps as it overlaps “natural”
systems (a major reason for this is that designed biodiversity tends to be found in
industrial and agricultural systems, as opposed to “natural” environments). This
definition accordingly is based on the construct of “species” generated by evolved
biology, and – given the continued development of the anthropogenic Earth - necessarily
implies a “crisis” in biodiversity, requiring in turn strong policy measures to “preserve
biodiversity”.
For their part, biodesigners have had little incentive, or disciplinary pressure, to
consider issues of biodiversity except defensively (that is, showing that their products
will not adversely affect “natural” biological systems). Moreover, no scientific
community has an interest at present in understanding biodiversity in the fully integrated
sense, including both evolved and designed biological systems. This is primarily because
the conservation biology concept of biodiversity is so dominant, but even if there were
anyone interested in such a reconstruction of the concept, definitional and measurement
issues are daunting. After all, “species” is a convenient measure of biological
information content even if it is partial and increasingly misleading, whereas trying to
understand the relevant measures of information of constructed biodiversity is quite
difficult. The end result is that it is the community that has the authority to construct the
concept “biodiversity” simultaneously constructs a “crisis” and, in turn, policy responses
to the perceived crisis. In other words, the state of crisis is inherent not (necessarily) in
the data, but in the definition of the concept.
This emphasizes the importance of understanding what community lies behind the
concepts that drive modern environmental science, and what their constructions,
perceptual frameworks, and mental models are. Such communities not only explore
facts, but create cultural constructs which reflect far more than facts, and which in turn
are reified in the structure of the science and public perception, and thus policy responses.
This matters because most cultural constructs change existing distributions of costs and
benefits (else, of course, they are not needed); thus, the community that creates such a
construct is able to redistribute costs and benefits across society in line with their belief
systems.