The trickle-down of political and economic control: On the organizational suppression of environmental scientists in government science.

In many countries, attempts to suppress scientists as public experts have become more prevalent. In democratic countries, environmental scientists have been a particular focus of control. This article looks at structures and mechanisms of suppression of government researchers. It is based on a qualitative analysis of ten in-depth interviews with environmental researchers being employed or engaged in government science. The analysis is influenced by a power-theoretical perspective on the suppression of science. By analyzing the interviewees' accounts, it scrutinizes the different ways in which political and economic control can trickle down in research organizations such as state research institutes and come to affect individual researchers. The focus is especially on the interlinking of political and economic influence of external actors with different forms and practices of control at the organizational level. Three forms of such trickle-down are identified and discussed: internalization of political and economic control, external influencing and bureaucratic control, and economic/interest group influence in research organizations. We argue that these forms of control function as a filtering layer of suppression between political and economic control and individual scientists out of the public eye regarding government science.

Public perception of evolution and the rise of evolutionary psychology in Finland.

In this paper we analyse the media debate in Finland that began after the publication in Science of a survey on the public acceptance of evolution. According to the results Finland ranked 17th among 34 countries. This was unexpected in a secular high tech nation with a consistent top performance in international comparative surveys on public education. We trace the main arguments in this debate in relation to previous studies on the public understanding of science and argue that newspaper claims of declining acceptance of evolutionism in Finland were based on rather ambivalent data. Furthermore, in the debate, evolutionary theory became a metonymy for science in society. The results published in Science provided a platform for a critique of religion and alternative movements, something quite uncommon in Finnish media. Finally, the debate was taken as an opportunity to promote evolutionary psychology as a legitimate social science.