71.{{U}}As a romantic teenager, I believed that my future life as a scientist would be justified if I could discover a single new fact and add a brick to the bright temple of human knowledge. The conviction was noble enough; the metaphor was simply silly. Yet that metaphor still governs the attitude of many scientists toward their subject.{{/U}}
72.{{U}}In the conventional model of scientific "progress ", we begin in superstitious ignorance and move toward final truth by the successive accumulation of facts. In this smug perspective, the history of science contains little more than anecdotal interest--for it can only chronicle past errors and credit the bricklayers for discerning glimpses of final truth. It is as transparent a.s an old-fashioned melodrama: truth (as we perceive it today) is the only arbiter and the world of past scientists is divided into good guys who were right and bad guys who were wrong.{{/U}}
73. {{U}}Historians of science have utterly discredited this model during the past decade. Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information. It is a creative activity, its geniuses acting more as artists than as information processors. Changes in theory are not simply the derivative results of new discoveries but the work of creative imagination influenced by contemporary social and political forces. We should not judge the past through anachronistic spectacles of our own convictions--designating as heroes the scientists whom we judge to be right by criteria that had nothing to do with their own concerns.{{/U}} We are simply foolish if we call Anaximander (sixth century B. C.) an evolutionist because, in advocating a primary role for water among the four elements, he held that life first inhabited the sea; yet most textbooks so credit him.