It is a somewhat nutty idea, but it tells us a great deal about the 19th century. Critically, Daston's story has a message for practicing scientists. Most of the time these blur together for us, but a more detailed look can tease out how these projects can sometimes differ. In sum, Daston showed that conceiving of scientific inquiry as monolithic not only clouds our historical view but risks impoverishing the intellectual enterprise we call science. The word for what Daston warns against is anachronism , the name for a number of sins against time, the most deadly of which is assuming the past was just like the present.
Anachronistic accounts erase historical difference.
The result is a muddle. It is precisely this sort of muddle that Robert Richards tried to clear up in his paper, which argued that modern biologists have had a tendency to read too much of modern biology into the work of Charles Darwin. A bracing splash of historical context can help. By situating Darwin in the world of Romanticism, by detailing his fascination with the Prussian explorer-naturalist Alexander von Humboldt , by excavating the purposeful, intelligent, and even moral character of Darwin's conceptions of natural selection, evolution, and nature itself, Richards gave the audience a new picture of the most celebrated scientist of the last century. Richards successfully countered an unfortunate tendency to treat The Origin of Species as if it were basically the same as Biology 101.