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