Patricia Mara’s Science: A Four Thousand Year History is the most enjoyable science history I have ever read and I have read a few. It is enlivened by her strong opinions that make it clear that more than one of our science heroes were unpleasant people to know. She points out how often a false scientific theory reaches preeminence because of good marketing, good luck or good connections, though in the end, science’s self-correcting ethos of trying to prove everything wrong works in the long run.

Science: A Four Thousand Year History is organized in seven units of seven chapters–a prime number product of prime numbers. Her first chapters is called Sevens and talks about the special properties of seven. It has many scientific, religious, mathematical and cultural points of significance. This brings Mara to one of the central themes of the book, what gets to be science and what is left out. It’s all about classification, isn’t it? The Arts & Sciences? What is art, what is science and who decides? Why is astronomy science and astrology hoodoo?

The answers change over time and one thing she wants readers to understand is that today’s answers may one day sound as wrong headed as yesterday’s alchemists. For a time, Lysenkoism seemed as sensible as Mendelism, until millions starved to death as a result of his dominance of Soviet science. And Mendel never even knew the significance of his discoveries.

Mara takes time to point out the contributions of women to science, and how hard it often was for them to make those contributions in a world where they were considered lesser. Well, where they are still considered lesser. She also brings a perceptive class analysis to how science developed and why some scientists were less successful despite their great achievements while men with lesser accomplishment carried the day for a time.

You can read the rest of the review here: https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2016/02/29/science-a-four-thousand-y... ( )

This book has an ambitious title and an ambitious project: it's here to cover the development of "science" from 2000 B.C.E. to 2000 C.E. (more or less). It's not a history of scientific discoveries, or scientific biographies, but a history of science as a process, a history of what it has meant throughout history to do science, to think like a scientist, to see like a scientist. Patricia Fara begins with the ancient Chinese, Babylonians, and Greeks, and works her way forward, pointing out how many people we now retroactively think of as scientists were not really doing anything in accord with the modern scientific process. Or indeed, how modern science is usually not as dispassionate as we think it ought to be, pointing out the sexist, capitalist, or imperialist pressures that move and warp the direction of science throughout time.

Perhaps predictably, for me the book really came alive when it got to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when institutionalized and professionalized and disciplinarized science really comes into existence, all important to what we modern folk think of when we think of "science." She talks about that Enlightenment drive to systematize (which we see in things like Linnaeus's taxonomy, or the various racial classification schemes, or fictionally, in Causabon's Key to All Mythologies), and then that Victorian drive to discover underlying laws that explain the systems: "the goal of nineteenth-century scientists was to unify and discipline the world by finding simple laws that described the behaviour of everything-- people as well as things, minds as well as bodies" (233). And, of course, this all has dark implications, as the "numerical concept of normality enabled subjective judgements to creep right back in again. It was only a short step from describing to prescribing, from social mapping to social engineering. [Francis] Galton was just one of many Victorian scientists who believed that measuring physical characteristics would yield unbiased knowledge of people's mental abilities, psychological tendencies, and racial origins" (262-3). Though Fara can, perhaps, over-emphasize the unsavory and negative aspects of science, I think she does so with thoroughness and fairness; despite its wide span, this is a well-researched and detailed book, and I think it is hard to argue with the conclusions she draws.

This is one of those books where one's biggest complaint upon reading it is that one didn't read it before! It sounds like damning with faint praise, but in addition to being intellectual thorough, it's just very readable. Mimicking the way the ancients tried to arrange the universe, Fara divides her book into seven sections of seven chapters apiece, which means that at 8 pages apiece, each chapter is short and focused, which makes it easy to move through, and also easy to go back to and cite; I am sure this book will find its way into my dissertation. It would also make pieces of it easy to assign to students-- in that far off day when I get to teach a "science and literature" class, I am sure a couple chapters of this book will be in it. And you can't say that about very many academic books!

Really well done. Interesting, readable, and ambitious. There are some vitriolic reviews about this book on Amazon, personally directed against the author, that accuse her of imperfections and generalizations - but obviously, anytime you're writing an overview book (4,000 years of history), you're going to have to take the view from 100,0000 feet up. And that's a different view than the view at 40,000 feet, and a different view from the view at 5 feet. To be accused of missing detail at 100,000 feet seems like a moot point. I admire the scope of this book, and the excellence of it. Good job! And to the author, if you ever read these reviews, don't let those jealous academic colleagues (which I assume they are) get you down. ( )

Science: A Four Thousand Year History is an unconventional take on the history of science. Unlike conventional histories, Patricia Fara, tries to debunk scientists and their achievements rather than celebrating them as heroic genius in pursuit of reality. She Frequently emphasizes where notable figures were wrong or misguided and how their discoveries often involved luck or methods no longer accepted as scientific, often sitting in judgment of what contemporary prejudices colored scientific findings and ideas. Fara never discounts their ideas wholesale, but comes close on several occasions, especially if they come into conflict with our modern social norms and the feminist movement. She stresses how science is fallible and subject to personal, political, and material pressures.

In an effort to destroy the picturesque ideal of mostly European lone scientific genius making great discoveries isolated in their laboratories Fara traces the origins of science to several sources now thought of as magical or unscientific, such as concepts and techniques rooted in astrology and alchemy. Artisans and technicians, not just canonical philosophers and "scientists," have always been important contributors, she points out. She reminds us, too, that amateur observers and collectors have long played significant roles. These observations and many others along the same lines are not particularly controversial or surprising. Fara tries too hard at times to bolster the importance of minor figures, especially women, doing fairly mundane things that were important to scientific discoveries to the point that it feels like she would rather fore sack what the discoveries have given us as a society to build up minor role players to make up for a slight of history.

It is very substantive, thought-provoking, and briskly-paced. In support of the main themes Fara has interesting things to say about science and religion, non-Western contributions (with noticeable omissions; Rome, per-Colombian Americas, India), the contributions of women, the roles of scientific institutions, and many other important related subjects.

However, I can’t recommend it without some reservations. While Fara presents an interesting origin to scientific thought and it is a fairly complete history of the major themes in science. Her clunky largely unsupported arguments for her more critical assertions and criticisms can be frustrating. There are times when her entire argument is based on contemporary paintings from the appropriate time period. While I found it interesting how she interprets art work and how it might relate to the larger social context, it is a pretty flimsy way to support her thesis. A lot of her evidence is actually more intuition and social extrapolation backed with little or to no factual evidence, which is evident in her notes sections. That’s not to say I didn’t gain something out of it at all, because she doesn’t present some interesting, if not bias, perspective on science from a larger social context. I just think that this book would have been better off tackling a smaller scope. ( )