This has been making the rounds on the net. I first came across it on the blog of one "Jon Swift", whose commenters seem to have a knowledge of literature, and a radar for satire, which leaves something to be desired.

According to Mark Noonan at the blog Blogs for Bush, which either has a very hard sell-by-date, or knows something we don't, science is dead. Well, to hear Noonan tell it, it's actually been pushing up daisies since before 1850. It seems Darwin did it in (bludgeoned it to death with the jawbone of an ape perhaps?).

[...]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.

And good riddance to bad indoor plumbing! He then goes on to diagnose who the culprit was. And it wasn't Colonel Mustard in the pantry with a candle-stick.

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.

A-ha, so because some scientists try to pull a fast one, and not every scientist's hypothesis or theory pans out, science is doomed. OK. I think someone is getting their science mixed up with their religion on a very basic level.

It is the sad reality that each scientist has to face that even if he, or she, comes up with a major break-through, like Newton, there will probably, sooner or later, come along an Einstein and, if not directly disprove your work, at least tweak it. Science has never been about finding The Truth, with a big T. It is the search for facts, and the testable theories that best explain those facts.

And this was the case long before 1850 and the Piltdown Man came along. Anyone remember Phlogiston?

Back in the 17th century one of the theories to explain the process of combustion was that all things combustible contained the ellusive substance phlogiston, which was what was released when something burned. Now, this theory of course turned out to score a big fat doughnut-hole in the annals of science. But it hardly took science itself with it to the grave.

No, if science really were to die out, and a new Dark Age descend on us, it would not be the work of scientists, not even the bad, or even dishonest ones. It would be because political leaders followed the cue of people like Noonan, something which is sadly not as silly as it once sounded.

This is also one of the main reasons why the secular Europe on the whole rejected the Bush Administration's contention that the Iraq adventure was part of Huntington's "clash of civilisations", with the US holding the line for Western civilisation against the forces of religious fanaticism. From the point of view of Europeans it looked suspiciously like two parties, fuelled by twin Middle-Eastern religious creeds, going at it in the name of their Truth, with a big T, and none of them fighting for Western values, liberal democracy, Darwin, or science.