Salamantis is the kind of defender science does not need. His ranting and ignorant attack on Michel Foucault only proves that he does not understand him; and his statement that peer-reviewing is an automatic defense against error (let alone the rabid arrogance he puts in said statement) is a joke. For his information, Foucault did not invent the idea of culturally conditioned discovery; before he ever published anything, CS Lewis had set it out with striking clarity in his The Discarded Image and elsewhere. His argument was not that scientific discovery was not based on fact, but that of the infinite amounts of fact and truth available in the universe, the mood or fashion of one period predisposed and predisposes people to accept some, which fit, and fail to notice others, which don’t fit. The fact that Darwin’s explanation of reality tended to flatter - as being the ultimate success in Evolution - his own upper-middle-class English caste, which in his time dominated and legislated for one-quarter of the world, was noticed as early as Nietzsche. The point is not that it is not true, but that it is the kind of truth that would best be noticed by an English Philistine of the age of Macaulay. And that also answers your idolatry of peer reviewing. Peer reviewing is indispensable and irreplaceable; but it does not mean that it is proof against groupthink, faddish thinking and narrow-mindedness. Science is the product of human minds. It suffers from all their flaws and conditions. End of story.