I am a big fan of the history of science—not because it’s helped me do better science (though some of my research, including that on “Haldane’s Rule,” derived from papers that were largely forgotten). I think that it’s interesting to understand the history of one’s discipline, but not essential for practicing good science.

Alejandra Dubcovsky, an assistant professor of history at Yale, thinks that it’s essential for scientists to study history (she doesn’t specify what kind of history, or if she means the history of science), for another reason: because it gives us scientists “a sensitivity that only the humanities can teach.”

Or so she maintains in a new piece at The Chronicle of Higher Education, “To Understand Science, Study History.”

Like the reader who sent me the link, Dubcovsky seems not only defensive about her discipline, but stretching a bit to make her point. To show how history informs our scientific sensitivities, she uses the examples of Rosalind Franklin, which will teach us that science is not gender-blind (she says Franklin is “largely forgotten,” which is simply untrue); of Rebecca Skloot’s wonderful book about Henrietta Lacks (donor of the HeLa cells), which should teach us that science and race have an “uneasy history;” and about Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb, which should teach us that “we find deep, sometimes unforeseen, and often devastating consequences, even from the most theoretical of projects.”

Well, you learn this not from history (what history course outside of science even covers these topics) but from history of science courses. Indeed, most of us know these things without even having taken a course in the history of science. (I didn’t.) The correspondent who sent me the link (a woman) also made the following comments:

Man, the humanities sure are on the defensive these days, eh? Well, yeah–all that context is interesting and important–but where are the data showing any scientists are ignorant of it? SO sick of these strawman arguments…Dunno about you, but I learned all this stuff in science courses–and plenty more! (Of history, science-related politics, etc.) Why do these people have to be so loftily condescending?

Indeed. And as for this statement in Dobcovsky’s piece:

Teaching history to students who plan to be doctors, scientists, or engineers forces them to lift their heads beyond the lab bench or the clipboard and realize the greater social, economic, and racial contexts in which their training plays out. It gives them a sensitivity that only the humanities can teach.

Well, I find that even more condescending. It assumes that all of us are totally ignorant of anything beyond our immediate research. Try to find a Ph.D. in genetics who can’t talk about Rosalind Franklin, or a Ph.D. in physics who doesn’t know about Oppenheimer’s statement, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” when he watched the Trinity explosion.

But even if that were true, it’s simply false to claim that only humanities can teach sensitivity. What about interacting with other people outside academic courses? Do people who don’t go to college, and lack those history courses, also lack sensitivity or awareness of racial and gender inequalities? I don’t think so. You don’t need history courses to see the dangers of technology or the marginalization of women in science. And if you’re a working scientist, you’re almost surely well aware of these things.

No, Dobcovsky is simply trying to defend her discipline by saying that scientists need it. Well, I see great value in the humanities, for it enriches our lives, but her examples of the importance of history don’t buttress her argument.