I'd like to comment on some of  Christopher Maines's comments about bad vs.
good science. 1st The claim isn't that Agassiz was a bad scientist, the
point is very much that he was a good scientist and what he did met the
standards of his time. We (in science studies) turn to cases like Agassiz
because enough time has elapsed so that his claims "seem" biased, and it
leads us to ask about the way culture is working through science now. As
much work has been done on the mystical nature of Newton's work (his, as
seen from the present, absurd belief in inertial frames of reference, by
modern standards an absurdity), Darwin (See Robert Young's recent piece on
anthropomorphization in Darwin's own writings about "natural selection")
and other "successful" scientists.
 
As for the flight of airplanes, you're right, it seems like an indisputable
fact, but airplanes and fluid dynamics are not simply things that came to
be naturally, they come out of a particular view of nature, a particular
will to knowledge, that is again culturally and historically specific.
While it is true that "Republicans, Democrats, members of the Moral
Majority, members of the upper class, the Radical Faeries, feminists,
anti-abortionists" all could fly that plane without jeapordizing either the
laws of physics or their own identity (all the people listed are of ONE
culture), there are people sufficiently marginalized in the
technoscientific west (the Yuqui indians of Brazil, for instance) who could
not be Yuqui and fly the plane at the same time, to fly the plane would
mean becoming "western" it would mean not being Yuqui. My point? That
planes and aerodynamics are cultural "facts" not just natural ones.
 
In a recent issue of the Sciences I noticed articles on Obesity (To be read
with a yiddish-american accent: This is not a cultural category?) which
failed to note how obesity is being constructed in a society killing itself
to stay thin. There is no science or hypothesizing outside of language,
metaphor, and therefore culture and politics. This hold true for science
that "works" (today) and science that "fails" (today). Furthermore, our
critique of science is just as much of a culturally biased critique (The
current emphasis on multiplicity of gender, race, class, ethnicity etc. is
a cultural concern very much of the 90's in the US, not world wide). As
Donna Haraway notes "Science is Culture"
 
Recommended reads (though not easy)
 
Science in Action by Bruno Latour discusses how sciences make and unmake facts.
 
Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death by Evelyn Fox Keller tries to examine how
science can at once be both thoroughly cultural and yet make "true" stories
about nature.
 
in dialogue
Matthew Weinstein