In the deconstructionist critical age it is hard to assert the truth about anything, especially something that used to be thought tautological: "science". What Discovery Institute has been saying for years is that the guardians of big science, cocooned in walled universities and succored on federal grants, humbly catered to by the major media, and in-bred at small journals with foundation-assured budgets, have become another modern institution suffering from advanced sclerosis--hardening of the very arteries meant to provide society with copious supplies of oxygen.
Real work goes on in the sciences, but with little thanks to the ideological gatekeepers that patrol the corridors these days.
The universities have not yet been inspected by any visiting committees. Nor have the supposed science journals (from the biggest to some of the smallest). Nor, of course, have the grant-making organs of government and philanthropy.
But someone--Virginia Heffernan--finally has taken a look inside the world of "science blogs", the new frontier of alternative media. The doubly amazing thing is that her article just appeared in The New York Times.
What she finds is not science, but self-referencial sophomoric pranks, vitriol and cavil.
That world, also amazingly, seems to be fraying badly.
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