Rivals: How Scientists Learned to Cooperate

by Lorraine Daston

Why is the scientific community so unified?

In the last 350-odd years, the international “scientific community” has come to be the bastion of consensus and concerted action, especially in the face of two global disastrous climate change, and a deadly pandemic. How did “the scientific community” come into existence, and why does it work?

Rivals is an attempt to answer these questions in the form of a brief historical overview, from the late seventeenth to the early twenty-first centuries, through the creation of two enormous projects—the Carte du Ciel, or the great star map, and the International Cloud Atlas, pioneered by the World Meteorological Organization after World War II. These new models of intergovernmental collaboration and global observation networks would later make the mounting evidence of planetary phenomena like climate change possible.

Drawing upon original documents stored in Paris, Geneva, and Uppsala, historian of science Lorraine Daston offers a fascinating, lively study of successful and unsuccessful scientific collaborations. Rivals is indispensable both as history and as guidance.

Genres: History Of Science, Science, Nonfiction

158 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 17, 2023

About the author

Lorraine Daston (born June 9, 1951, East Lansing, Michigan)[1] is an American historian of science. Executive director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin, and visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, she is considered an authority on Early Modern European scientific and intellectual history. In 1993, she was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Reviews

[Michael Erickson · Rating 3 out of 5]

When you think about it, "the scientific community" is a really nebulous concept, and it is odd that it exists at all considering it ignores national boundaries, doesn't share a common language or faith, and doesn't have an overall "ruler" for lack of a better term. There's no "Pope" of science, and everyone who engages in that community are simultaneously in cooperation with each other peer-reviewing work and replicating others' experiments, but also in competition with each other over scarce grants and research contracts.

This short book did a good job giving an overview of the history of how scientists deal with each other. It felt a touch euro-centric, but when your starting point is in the 18th century when colonial powers were kinda at their height and already disproportionately important on the world stage maybe that's unavoidable. Also wish it had attempted to peek into the near future a bit, and the possible outcomes of the replication crisis, but maybe it wanted to stay in a narrower lane than I did.

[Meg Briers · Rating 4 out of 5]

it has peirce, planck and 19c astronomers in it - can i ask for more??

[Anastasia Neklyudova · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is such a promising topic, but the book was actually very boring. Hope to find more sources on the subject!

[eesha · Rating 3 out of 5]

this took me eons to finish. and that is NO fault of the book itself truly i simply started and restarted this book at least a million times throughout the years bc i still need to get used to nonfiction nonfiction (outside of memoirs and essay collections) and especially historical nonfiction novels which MY FAULT entirely. BUT! i persevered bc i KNEWW it would be worth it, as both as an aspiring scientist who HAS had this question before and someone who’s what i like to call a shallow enjoyer of history.

and in my opinion, it was! outside of the topic itself (which is already fascinating enough i love science history), some of these accounts demonstrate that figures in history were also regular ole people like you and me. almost every annotation in this me going wait hes real as fuck/funny for this. like history is interesting!!! and historical figures are funny!!!!! there’s one in particular where a scientist describes why he prefers the dead because “ghostly companions were always on their best behavior..plato is never sullen..dante never stays too long” like he’s real as fuck. at one point these scientific societies had to put a ban on name calling both irl and on print. i just KNOW their hate mail game went crazy. NO ONE was safe they’re calling random NIECES “annoying chatterboxes” (which literally me) like damn! i also reallllyyy appreciated the last chapter discussing the issues within the modern research industry, the cherry picking the government involvement the mounting pressure on academics to police their research, etc...yeah…yeahhhhh

teee bee aychhh what DID dampen the mood was every few paragraphs i would realize these events were happening when literally every single country in the entire world was under colonial rule which did actually piss me off repeatedly throughout i truly had to go like WHATEVER!!!! ex: “75 percent of which involved industrialized nations (not their colonies)” like hello..how can i not feel righteous anger at this?? which NOOO fault of the author it’s simply a fact i had to get used to when reading about all these white men…💔

overall. did a lot of the actual history stuff go above my head despite my hardest efforts? yes! was it a drag kind of sort of? yes! will i probably retain little to no info from this book? also yes! but you know what, i think it’s still decent! and in part the rating is me rewarding myself for FINALLY finishing this (trust me it has been burning a hole in my downloads for years. YEARS..)

[Andrea · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rivals is the story about collaboration amongst people/groups in the sciences. This book goes through what is essentially the history of scientific research - it starts with people working on projects on their own, which in this book, is shown to end with Rene Descartes. Then it goes to individual people finding each other, then the formation of societies (and all that goes with them), etc.

Personally, though the topic is of interest to me, I did not find myself a huge fan of this book - most due to flow. However, I don't discount this book as a chance to gain some insight and knowledge of how our scientific community today came to be.

[Marina Illaric · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book delivers the content the title promised, but fails to provide any real insight on how political diversity impacted academic disciplines.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rivals presents a short history of collaboration and competition in the modern scientific pursuit. Datson tells interesting stories about the last three decades of the international science community, what drives science, and how science has progressed forward a a result of both cooperation and a bit of rivalry. Science and history buffs alike will gain new insight into the development of modern science culture and they driving forces behind scientific innovation. Datson tells the histories might be overlooked in other texts. An informative read for folks deeply interested in the topic!