"Well, I am not trying to pick a fight ) but I have NPOV issues with this article.  It reads  at the moment  like a celebration of scientific progress.  I have two problems: first, it moves too easily from science as a generic activity all people engage in, to science as a specifically Western project.  Second, although there has been progress in science in that there is some accumulation of knowledge, the history of science is rather more complicated than that.

One way to deal with this (if others find my criticisms valid) is to distinguish in the article between what we know about changes in scientific method and knowledge (from Aristotle to Bacon to Comte to Popper; from Aristotle to Darwin to Mendel to Mayr; from Aristotle to Newton to Einstein and Planck; etc, on the one hand, and various discussions over how to study and conceive of the history of science (i.e. issues in historiography and the sociology of science), on the other.  For example, I think everyone agrees that Aristotle, Newton, Einstein and Planck are real people who lived at different periods of time and made different claims about the world  but I think different people have vastly different ways of telling the story that connects these people and their claims.  I'd hope a good article on ""the history of science"" would inform me of these issues, and provide me with the different ways of understanding the movement from one period in science to another.

I am no expert on this but I really hope someone who feels very confident of their grasp of, say, Thomas Kuhn and Bruno Latour, could reorganize and develop this article in a way that takes their claims about science seriously, as well as the claims of those with opposing views.

I am glad Ed has begun this article, it can be really important and it is a needed contribution.   SR

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