Letter: Science and society

Sir: Your two anti-Wolpert correspondents (letters, 5 July) haven't quite got their act together.

Ray Noble tells us that science finds questions of good and bad "difficult to answer". Nonsense - it simply doesn't address them.

Christopher Hill makes the common mistake of identifying science with the capitalist system in which it is embedded. It is precisely because science is neutral that its application always reflects the values of the larger community, and if we don't like those we'd all better take a long look at ourselves.

In any case I thought Wolpert's piece ("The sociologists of science should shut up", 2 July) was mainly a rebuke to sociological relativism which, at its daftest, seems to imply that Boyle's Law might be true in one culture but not another. Perhaps the sociologists are trying to get their own back for the fact that their own discipline never really made it as science.

D W EVANS

Leeds