In the conventional model of scientific "progress", we begin in superstitious ignorance and
move toward final truth by the successive accumulation of facts. In this smug perspective,the
history of science contains little more than anecdotal interest --for it can only chronicle
past errors
and credit the bricklayers for discerning glimpses of final truth. It is as transparent as an old-
fashioned melodrama: truth (as we perceive it today) is the only arbiter and the world of past
scientists is divided into good guys who were right and bad guys who were wrong.
Historians of science have utterly discredited this model during the past decade. Science is not
a heartless pursuit of objective information. It is a creative human activity, its geniuses
acting more as artists than as information processors. Changes in theory are not simply the
derivative results of
new discoveries but the work of creative imagination infulenced by contemporary social and politica
forces. We should not judge the past through anachronistic spectacles of our own convictions --
designaating as heroes the scientists whom we judge to be right by criteria that had nothing to do
with their own concerns. We are simply foolish if we call Anaximander (six century BC) an
evolutionist because, in advocating a primary role for water among the four elements, he held that
life first inhabited the sea; yet most textbooks so credit him.