His contribution to modern science and its organisation is critical. From the point of view of nature, women and marginal groups, however, Bacon's programme was not humanly inclusive. It was a special programme benefitting the middle class, European, male entrepreneur through the conjunction of human knowledge and power in science. In Bacon's experimental method, which was central to this masculine project, there was a dichotomising between male and female, mind and matter, objective and subjective, rational and emotional, and a conjunction of masculine and scientific dominating overnature, women and the non-west. The severe testing of hypotheses through controlled manipulations of nature, and the necessity of such manipulations if experiments are to be repeatable, are here formulated in clearly sexist metaphors.
Science is about knowledge and power.
In our time, natural science defines the human being's place in nature and history and provides the instruments of domination of the body and the community. By constructing the category nature, natural science imposes limits on history and self-formation. Between the First World War and the present, biology has been transformed from a science centered on the organism, understood in functionalist terms, to a science studying automated technological devices, understood in terms of cybernetic systems. Life science moved from physiology to systems theory, from scientific medicine to investment management, from Taylorite scientific management and human engineering of the person to modern ergnomics and population control, from psychobiology to sociobiology. Scientists are scrupulous representatives of the facts.