> You can say this with the benefit of hindsight. If you were, say, an American social scientist in the 1920s, you might be supporting eugenics, as it was quite

> You can say this with the benefit of hindsight. If you were, say, an American social scientist in the 1920s, you might be supporting eugenics, as it was quite common at the time. If you dogmatically defended eugenics as being "science," called people who questioned the value of it deniers, and equated it with truth... well, you would be wrong. This is misleading because it assumes that scientific views on all "science" topics are held uniformly. Eugenicists (who were not social scientists), held views that genuine geneticists knew were spectacularly wrong. But eugenicists had public visibility and political power. I think this is the main problem with the article -- it assumes that NYTimes science reporting provides some genuine insight into how scientists think. The public view of science, and perhaps that of some people who study the scientific process, seems confusing and contradictory. The scientists doing the work, in general, embrace or refute the contradictions in with the goal of trying to improve scientific knowledge.