Citizen biologists

Figure 1. Sex is an important concept for students of the biological sciences. At the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, sex is even more important because several of the professors are reputed specialists in the field (Bernasconi et al , 2006). Therefore, as at any university with a biology department, biology students learn everything we know about the evolution of sex, its importance and effects. However, for students of the social sciences, sex has a very different meaning, particularly when focusing on gender studies. This is even more true for some of their professors, several of whom take the view that biological sex is of little importance; that only gender—what society makes out of sex—matters.> It is no longer possible to view science as an enterprise that is somehow disconnected from society…During their second year of the biology curriculum, and as part of the University of Lausanne's Biology and Society course, biology students have to analyse and discuss a topic with relevance to society. On occasion, one group had the task of understanding the views of social science students undertaking gender studies. To this end, they held intensive discussions with their peers, attended courses relating to gender studies and finally reported to the rest of the class with two conclusions. The first was that the discussions had been extremely difficult and any exchange of views was virtually impossible—the students in gender studies held vastly different opinions and theories about sex than did the biologists. The second was that only two years before, the biology students had no problem discussing and exchanging their points of view with these former high‐school friends. Two years at the university had succeeded in putting them—perhaps forever—in separate and impregnable compartments. What a strange university.This anecdote is worrying, but hardly surprising. The responsibility for this poor state …