Your review of Patricia Fara’s Science: A Four-Thousand Year History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) is supportive of her claim that “science is rarely an esoteric effort to attain pure knowledge” (“Crooked Path to Universal Truth,” June 13, 2009). “Rather,” you continue, “it stems from attempts to gain power through activities such as politics, magic, religion, trade, and war.” Indeed. But your conclusion is marred by a comparison between science and art. “Unlike art,” you argue, “science is a collective activity that demands collaboration. If Isaac Newton saw farther by standing on the shoulders of giants, then those giants themselves had been standing on the shoulders of others.” In fact, the very same holds for art. Cave art was a collective endeavor. And so was Cubism, for instance. If Pablo Picasso saw farther by standing on the shoulders of his predecessors, so had they in their turn. If this misunderstanding of art as an esoteric effort to attain pure beauty comes from Fara, she had better consider her next blockbuster—say, Art: A Forty-Thousand Year History.