Scientists Behaving Badly

by JS

I’m a scarred and war-worn veteran of my own miniature version of the “Science Wars.” My wife and I continue to fight many battles over the boundaries and validity of scientific thinking while chowing down on dinner. With that in mind, I can say that the following is absolute bollocks:

Dressed up as a belated salvo in the fashionably nonsensical attempts of postmodernist scholars to discredit science as a made-up system of beliefs rather than a human process of trying to understand Nature (known as the “Science Wars”), Heffernan charged that the writers at ScienceBlogs were not so much interested in science as they were “preoccupied with trivia, name-calling and saber rattling.

Heffernan’s critique, whatever its merits, has little to do with postmodernism and science, and everything to do with calling out a particular community for bad behavior.

I love science. I love blogs. But I hate ScienceBlogs. I can’t help but think that part of the reason I feel this way is the prevalence of the same high-octane bullshit quoted above on ScienceBlogs and other “science” sites.