Scientific origins are information sources that transmit encoded information signals to receivers. Originary sciences identify information preserving receivers and decode the signals to infer their origins. Paradigmatic cases of scientific origination such as the Big Bang, the origins of species, horizontal gene transfer, the origin of the Polynesian potato, and ideational origins in the history of ideas are analyzed to discover what is common to them ontologically and epistemically. Some causes are not origins. Origination supervenes on causation, but has different properties. The unique properties of origins that causes do not share shield theories of origination from the kind of counterexamples and counterintuitive results that challenge comparable theories of causation. The epistemology of origination may serve as a basis for founding a novel epistemic and methodological division of the sciences into originary historical sciences and causal theoretical sciences.

Science Studies, as developed initially in France attempt to overcome the distinctions between science and society, and correspondingly between the philosophy of science and political and social theory. Science Studies considers the theories and beliefs of scientists political rather than direct reºections of an objective natural world. I consider here Science Studies as a political theory that emerged and has developed in reaction to a particular social and political context, a crisis of technocratic politics in France. Some of the leading contemporary French exponents Science Studies, a group around the journal Cosmopolitiques that is loosely associated with the French Green party, including Bruno Latour and Michel Callon advocate the democratization of science. They have developed explicitly and at length the theoretical political aspects of science studies. I examine here critically this political theory against its social background. I argue that the social and political structure of French science explains the emergence of the descriptive and normative political theories associated with Science Studies. I doubt whether the normative prescriptions that Latour and Callon developed would be sufficient to solve the problems that follow from the monolithic and exclusionary structure of French governance and institutional science. Conversely, I doubt their solutions are useful for other democratic systems and scientific institutions that do not share the particular problems of France.