Luntz the Dunce

"And yet entire Ph.D. programs are still running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth, that we are always prisoners of language, that we always speak from a particular standpoint, and so on, while dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives."
It seems to me that one of Latour's main points is that people misappropriate this idea of the impurity of science to undermine scientific arguments. Being a biology major I often concern myself with debates about evolution. I am immensely exasperated every time I hear the creationist say that evolution is "only a theory". Ignoring the fact that a scientist's use of the word theory is entirely different from how the layman might use theory in everyday terms, it almost amounts to saying "well since you cant be certain of your idea, any idea I come up with is equally valid." While its true that scientists are constrained by the language they employ and their views aren't inherently free of bias, that doesn't serve as pretext for touting any idea you have as if it is equally valid. In my mind, this issue is not much different from Luntz playing off scientists' lack of "complete evidence". Simply, the problem is that people hold science to unreachable standards. Every time scientists find a transitional form creationists will point out that there are two new gaps between that transitional form and the species which we claim it links. Similarly, Luntz asserts that scientists don't have "complete evidence". Well, I don't think any scientist in the world would claim to have complete evidence, or even that such a thing as complete evidence is actually attainable!