>There also seems to be an economic drive to commoditize humans. If learning can be completely systematized, then science can be rendered into an assembly line process that can be run by bureaucracies, scaled as needed, and in which individual workers can be treated as a 'human resource' commodity. Bureaucracies cannot deal with multi-modality, unpredictable and eccentric 'genius,' etc., so to admit that these things are required for the progress of science is to admit that bureaucracies are inherently limited.
I think the drive to commoditize everything is probably the bigger issue than a "scientific fundamentalism". There are plenty of crank scientists, and always have been! If it were just a matter of generating sufficiently many sufficiently non-mainstream theories to achieve a paradigm leap in a whole field, you would expect that sufficient production of cranks would produce geniuses by chance.
I think the drive to commoditize everything is probably the bigger issue than a "scientific fundamentalism". There are plenty of crank scientists, and always have been! If it were just a matter of generating sufficiently many sufficiently non-mainstream theories to achieve a paradigm leap in a whole field, you would expect that sufficient production of cranks would produce geniuses by chance.