Brian Noble wrote from the U. of B.C.:

I'm sorry, but I don't understand what this list is about.  I had thought it
was the list associated with the Journal Science as Culture edited by Les
Levidov.  Am I mistaken?  With all due respect to those who are actively
contributing to the conversation, none of the content, which may very well
be of interest to some, seems to mesh very well with what I know of that
journal.
Could the moderator provide some additional context?
==============================================================

Maybe those of us who haven't contributed for years should 'touch base'.

As a one-off contributor to the Journal many years ago (SaC no. 14), I, too,
would welcome a kind of keynote intervention from Bob Young. Maybe not
everyone remembers / knows the whole history of SaC. And maybe it doesn't
matter much. All things evolve/degenerate - depending on your point of view.
I don't have a copy of every SaC journal: I start from number 4 of the
Radical Science Journal (1976) - the 'predecessor' of SaC - which states:

"The aim of this journal is to provide a forum for extended analyses of the
ideology and practice of science and technology from a radical political
perspective."

I continued to subscribe to the taken-over / sold-out Science-as-Culture
until last year: Robert M. Young, Les Levidow, Maureen McNeil and sarah
Franklin still figure(d) as the "Editorial Board". I never got around to
renewing my subscription this year.


But Bob Young's work is easily available online. The recent thread
"Evolution and Cognitive Dissonance" hasn't yet made reference, for example,
to his works on Darwin: (Darwin's Metaphor: 1985)
http://www.human-nature.com/dm/dar.html

We all move on in different ways: Bob Young has  moved from Darwin and
Science-IS-social-relations to kleinian projective identification. The
recent contributors to this forum (moderated by Young) choose to point to
Husserl and/or to focus on the status of Darwin's theory today - but nothing
stops us discussing recent SaC articles, like Steve Fuller's "Is Science
Studies Lost in the Kuhnian Plot?" - or Dhruv Raina' "From West to
Non-West?", etc

My personal interest has been on the political aspect of the 'Metaphor'
theme (going back to "Darwin's Metaphor"). If that strikes a chord with
anyone, I have short essays available at

http://digilander.iol.it/hobson/essays.html

in particular, "Marx's Metaphor: Newton's Influence on Capitalist
Economics", and

"Mathematicians' Anathema: Mixed-up Metaphors and Analogies ... Mere
Intellectual Abuse ?!" ...

referring light-heartedly to the Sokal-Bricmont "Fashionable Nonsense" chat
from some time ago. If you're interested but the link doesn't work, mail me
by all means.

Living in Italy, I'm interested to follow up Marcello Cini's contributions
in the monthly "La Rivista":  "Elogio della Diversity" (In Praise of
Diversity) feb. 2000 and discussion ... appropriate perhaps to Brian Noble's
perplexity ...

Maybe there is more than one Sysiphus pushing stones up more than one
mountain ...

All the best

Sherren