Have you read a copy of Science or Nature recently? If you have, surely you've noticed that a big chunk of such a journal is devoted to overcoming exactly the kind of specialised rarification that you're talking about. Looking at the table of contents of a recent issue of Nature:
p. 725 - 742: Opinion, News (generally science politics), Commentary p. 743 - 756: Books (most of it), Words, Concepts p. 757 - 768: News and Views ('bird's eye' overview of current trends
in various sciences, and overview of some of the more
interesting papers in the journal, as well as
obit for Claude Shannon) p. 769 - 848: Brief communications, letters, papers (the hardcore shit)
So - a total of 79 pages of papers vs. 43 pages of commentary on books, people, politics and happening things in the fields (I particularly like the one on 'A hunger for cannabinoids' - about a link between THC and leptin - i.e. the scientific basis of the munchies).
Journals like Science and Nature, which are pretty much the flagships of the scientific enterprise, spend a lot of time talking about visions shared by people at large - e.g. Science had a couple of pages on scientists and religion a while back.
The fact that they do not do so in the same way as 'the arts' (which arts anyway? Literature? Architecture? And which science - natural science, social science, etc.) has got to do more with the way natural science as a discipline is constituted, with its 'vision' and worldview. No one - not even the hardest scientist - strides forth visionless. For example, I've just submitted an abstract for a poster entitled ' Integration of transcript reconstruction and gene expression profiles to enhance disease gene discovery.', which covers the work I and my colleagues have been engaged in for the last couple of months. The language is opaque (though that could be changed) and the techniques are rather distant from the concerns of the general population, but every one of the contributors to this poster spends at least some time musing on the 'existential' content of the work we do.
And of course, that 'existential' content is expressed in publications like Science, Nature - also in more specialised ones, e.g. Nature Biotechology. The poverty of the 'existential' insights produced is, I would submit, at least as much a function of the impoverishment of the scientific enterprise by its marriage to capital as it is a function of the (technical) scientific process. This is particularly the case in e.g. Nature Biotechnology, whose letters page approaches the problem of the meaning in biotechnology with the dull monotone so typical of truly One Dimensional Men.
Peter -- Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com> NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics "Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844 k*256^2+2083 OpenPGP: 1024D/0517502B : DE5B 6EAA 28AC 57F7 58EF 9295 6A26 6A92 0517 502B