Another quickie reply, appropriate given you are at Harvard, is that "the 
history of error" story assumes that the sciences are cumulatively 
progressive, which since Thomas Kuhn is, to say the least, a contestable 
proposition, and he wrote with the physical sciences in mind. You might 
add as a stinger that Kuhn was influenced by James Conant, who (I suspect 
you may need to explain) was a former Harvard President. 

The first sentence of Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions reads: 
"History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, 
could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which 
we are now possessed." That's a nice line, no? 

Bruce Caldwell