Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
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Thus, if there is any secret to reading Bacon's Essays or almost anything else Bacon
wrote, it lies in this sense of performative art whose assurance in performance rose
from controlled language. For Bacon, soteriological purpose for a text demands a
soteriological style and language.
—W. A. Sessions
If it may be supposed that the pervasive evolutionism now so recognizable
in our scientific culture is a function of identity needs that have remained
constant during the past four centuries, then we might fairly ask what a
reasonable baseline would be from which to begin to examine its origins.
If such a baseline antecedent can be identified, then we might also want to
consider why it expressed the scientific ethos as it did and why the proper-
ties of this identity have both endured and changed.
To answer these questions we need to consider again the social and
institutional conditions that make science possible on any large scale. The
transformations of thought that science makes possible, as Benjamin Nel-
son has noted, always follow upon previous breakthroughs “at the social
relations level and the social organization level.”
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Individuals who pursue
scientific careers make vocational choices that, while certain to express
their own scholarly predilections and aptitudes of mind, could never be
realized on these grounds alone. Because individuals are also social beings,
they are unlikely to choose any vocation unless it also enjoys the sanction
of the larger social groups they belong to. The meaning of what we do as
individuals, in other words, is never entirely personal; we are likely to value
a career because it provides pleasure or monetary rewards, but we are also
likely to value it because it enacts a role capable of earning us the approval of
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