It is a breathtaking accusation, akin to charging a clergyman with breaking his vows or a military officer with treason. These differences in epistemology apply to all kinds of scientists, but biologists are a breed apart even within scientific ranks. Take away the effects of a scientific education, and there remains among biologists a substantial residual misunderstanding of what their proper social role should be. Society expects from biologists what it expects from any other group of scientists, a reliable and dispassionate window on the truth about the natural world. The only personal value of interest to society is honesty.
Most biologists view their social responsibilities somewhat differently.
They are emotionally involved with the conservation of nature, some to the degree that they see themselves not as dispassionate advisors but more as Old Testament prophets preaching damnation to an indifferent society. The result is that the sciences related to the ESA have become contaminated by personal conservation values. Science becomes contaminated by personal values when its practitioners attempt to set social policy by misrepresenting the nature and extent of what they actually know. The injection of nonscientific values into endangered species research has a variety of pernicious consequences. Chief among them is the failure to admit that the study of ecosystems is immature and that its practitioners have little business making sweeping predictions in the absence of high-quality data and theory, local to a problem.