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Science is political. Religion is political. There is a wholeness in things that can not be avoided.

For example there are topics in science that are not studied because of politics and there are topics that are because of politics. The Space Shuttle -- once politically favored science; Larry Summers recent comments on male-female differences -- and such studies are politically disfavored.

Science is highly political.

"Science is highly political."

And don't forget who gets grants and peer reviews and publications. Anyone who argues that science isn't politcal must not live in the real world.

I'm not of the opinion that the space shuttle is science. Experiments on crystal growth in zero gravity (gravity is already an extremely weak force compared to the other forces) which never seem to give results, studies on human response, and exploration of low earth orbit are engineering, and no longer exciting engineering. Science is the mars rover, Cassini, Hubble, etc. Sorry, just my own rant.

As for Larry Summers, he had no evidence. Had he had evidence, people would have yelped and examined it, but if he was right... then he was right. Being a mathematician myself, (and married to mathematician member of the female species), I would disagree with him simply because mathematics is the study of categories of objects and the relationships between them. My incredibly sexist observation could that men are good at studying objects, woman at relationships between them. Sexist, yes, evidence, no, so I won't say it on TV, or to a journalist. But if I had evidence, from an experiment say, it would be science, even if it was unpopular.