Not too long ago the blogosphere was rocking with the great debate of Intelligent Design vs Darwinism. It was an interesting debate, though I doubt much that anyone had the mind changed. Be that as it may, the whole thing got me thinking, and today ii occured to me: science is dead. We have reached the end of the Age of Science - what will come after, I don't know, but I don't think that we'll ever again have a time when Science is enshrined as some sort of god-like arbiter of right and wrong. The question now: what killed science?
A lot of different factors - but the main thing was that science could only thrive as it did from about 1650 until 1850 when everyone agreed on the rules. The prime rule of science was truth - everyone involved in science had to tell the truth to the best of their ability, and always be willing to correct one's views when new evidence called in to question previously held beliefs. What killed science was when its strongest advocates stopped telling the truth.
It was, after all, science and its enthusiasts which fell for the Piltdown Man, Haekel's embryos, eugenics, Population Bomb, ALAR, etc, etc, etc. So many bogus theories, dressed up as science, and greeted by the believers in science as the be-all and end-all of existence. After a while, it was bound to errode the foundations of science - and now it has. Science is now so intertwined with myth and political gamesmanship that whatever judgements are pronounced under the cover of science are immediately suspect - everyone who hears such things wonders when some future science will completely refute what is held as rock-solid science today.
Now like John Cole I kept on reading hoping to find some evidence that this was indeed satire. Sadly it's not, it's Mr Noonan frontal lobe that is dead, not science.
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