Patricia Fara’s ‘Four Thousand Year History’ of Science

Some scientists believe that rape was an urge encoded in the genes of man during the Pleistocene Age, with the thought that rapists gained an evolutionary edge by spreading their seed more widely. At least that's the hypothesis of a certain segment of evolutionary biologists, the fashion setters in science since the 1980s. Although anthropologists and others have started to amass contrary findings, some members of the evo-bio gang still hold the high ground of popular media attention, probably because their deterministic theorizing can be shaped into an excuse for any sort of bad behavior. Maybe Bernie Madoff was genetically "hard-wired" to amass wealth at the expense of others? Surely, greed provided our Stone Age ancestors with an evolutionary edge.

In Science: A Four Thousand Year History (Oxford University Press), Patricia Fara takes aim at evolutionary biology superstar Richard Dawkins, author of the reactionary idea of the "selfish gene." Dawkins contends that apparently altruistic acts conceal a deep-seated struggle for survival at the cellular level, where the fittest genes ensure the future by influencing human behavior for their own ends. Kindness, like rape, is nothing more than a means to gain that all-important evolutionary edge. Fara points out the obvious: Genes don't think; they lack motives and are unable to strategize. And yet Dawkins' views are sought after. Doubtlessly, his notion of the selfish gene has provided much inspiration on Wall Street since the '80s.

As a faculty member in Cambridge University's history and philosophy of science department, Fara has often investigated the exclusion of outsiders, including women, from the way science is constructed. She never denies that science has produced benefits for humanity. But far from always being an objective quest for abstract truth, Fara finds that science is sometimes for hire, the handmaiden of commerce and the errand boy of governments, and that what scientists see often depends on how they look at the world through lenses prescribed by culture. Fara: "In practice, theoretical preconceptions of how the universe ought to function have often overridden the evidence provided by observation."

A Four Thousand Year Historyis also a reminder that the roots of science cannot be disentangled from what the modern age calls superstition. Astrology provided astronomy with its original database, and chemistry would have been impossible without alchemy. Fara questions the Eurocentric view that "in the Great Race Toward Scientific Truth," the Arabs and Chinese were hundred-yard runners, soon overtaken by the marathon endurance of Western Europe and its New World offshoots. Although she overlooks the scientific contributions of some civilizations, including Byzantium and India, Fara's thesis is worth hearing out. Other societies amassed great stores of ideas and knowledge in fields we deem as the preserve of science. Often, they had different aims in their quest for knowledge that were prescribed, as in the West, by cultural boundaries.

The shifting history of science lends credence to the ideas of 20th-century philosopher Michel Foucault. The Foucault essay in Philosophy (Oxford University Press) concerns his concept of "episteme," a complex of beliefs and methods of inquiry peculiar to each culture and "defining what counts as rational for that culture."

Edited by the University of London's David Papineau, Philosophy assumes the huge task of summarizing 2,500 years of thought in tiny type. The major trends shaping Western civilization and the persistent questions are covered. As for how to know what is true, the answers offered by philosophy are as varied as the lives and times of the philosophers themselves.