How Not to Tell the History of Science

Two recent books force us to rethink what knowledge is, where it is located, and how it moves. 

(By Eric Moses Gurevitch)

Horizons: The Global Origins of Modern Science
James Poskett
Mariner Books, $30 (cloth)

From Lived Experience to the Written Word: Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World
Pamela H. Smith

University of Chicago Press, $35 (paper) 

According to a familiar story, science was born as a pastime of seventeenth-century European gentlemen, who built air pumps, traded telescopes, and measured everything from the size of the earth to the eye of a fly as they sought to uncover the laws of nature. 

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Both the word and the narrative that came along with it stuck, but “this story,” historian James Poskett declares at the start of his book Horizons: The Global Origins of Modern Science, “is a myth.” The idea that science is the product of a small number of men living in half a dozen European cities, as they dared to question the knowledge they were handed down, is a “convenient fiction”—one that continues to be told and retold throughout popular culture, from K–12 and college textbooks to Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos and popular histories such as David Wootton’s The Invention of Science (2015).

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You fucking racists, who have been manipulating stooges to try to convince me otherwise (@ Charon, 2045, Vigiexpert...), your stupidity was always bare...