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‘s epic history of science ranges from the astronomers of ancient Babylon to today’s geneticists and particle physicists. But it is no ordinary account of how scientific knowledge has accumulated. Instead, Fara focuses on how science has been guided and controlled by social and political factors. Her aim is to debunk the notion of science as an objective search for truth.

Fara writes, for example, that the ancient Greeks’ attempts to understand the cosmos were inextricably entwined with their view of it as a divine, therefore mathematically perfect, creation. Linnaeus’s plant classification system reflected 18th-century social prejudices by prioritising male reproductive organs. Today’s “big science” is bound to the “five ‘M’s”: money, manpower, the military, machines and the media.

Science is an impressive antidote to the idea of scientific endeavour as a straight line of progress. Yet Fara takes it too far by ignoring how the knowledge produced relates to the external world: she treats all theories as equal, regardless of the evidence. For instance, when arguing that doctors rejected the “animal magnetism” therapies of Franz Mesmer in the 19th century because they feared he was stealing their patients, she discounts the lack of a rational explanation for his theories and does not mention that .

A more worrying case is Fara’s interpretation of global warming. She argues that the theory arose because selling doomsday scenarios helps researchers to win funding. And putting the blame on humanity also enables scientists to “fulfil the same psychological needs as religious prophets who preached that the end of the world represents God’s punishment of the sinful”. She does not appear to acknowledge that scientists might be convinced by global warming because it is actually happening.

The book is a valuable reminder that science is inevitably a product of the people who carry it out, and that the way we explain the world cannot be separated from social prejudices and political priorities. This alone, though, does not explain science’s success. Science has become so dominant because it works. Medicines do save lives, aeroplanes do fly, nuclear bombs do explode. Ignoring this is misguided, and in some cases downright dangerous.