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"Thinking About Life": Contents and sample chapter
THINKING ABOUT LIFE
A HISTORICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL SURVEY OF BIOLOGY
Paul S Agutter
Denys N Wheatley
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PREFACE
Our previous book, About Life, concerned modern biology. We used our present-day understanding of cells to ‘define’ the living state, then we used that definition to explore a number of general-interest topics: the origin of life, extraterrestrial life, intelligence, and the possibility that humans are unique. The ideas we proposed in About Life were intended as starting-points for debate – we did not claim them as ‘truth’ – but the information on which they were based is accepted as ‘scientific fact’.
What does that mean? What is ‘scientific fact’ and why is it accepted? What is science – and is biology like other sciences such as physics (except in subject matter)? The book you are now reading is about these questions – and some related ones.
In the first chapter of About Life we defined science, provisionally, as a way of satisfying our curiosity by formulating questions about what we observe and answering them dispassionately, without making value judgements. That definition seemed adequate at the time, but it is easy to pick holes in it. For example, the word ‘science’ is used regularly in television programmes, magazines, websites and broadsheet newspapers, but it seems to be used in different senses. How can we interpret the word when its meaning varies?
For most people, most of the time, ‘science’ means knowledge of a certain sort: a collection of facts and beliefs that helps us to explain and predict the observable world coherently. A science textbook is a repository of such knowledge. When you study science at school or university you learn some of it. But ‘scientific knowledge’ changes continuously. You only have to compare an old edition of a textbook with a recent one to see that. New techniques reveal new facts about the world and our way of thinking has to change to accommodate them. Indeed, many different factors influence the way in which science changes: political, economic, religious, and so on. Therefore, a ‘scientific fact’ – a ‘scientific truth’ - is not constant or absolute or ‘eternal’. Historians of science can tell us how, and in part why, our understanding of nature has changed over time. If we are to understand what science is and in what sense it can claim to provide ‘truth’, we need to understand why it changes. Therefore, much of this book is about history: the traditions from which modern science evolved and the controversies that arose in the process. Our emphasis is on the history of biology.
Practising scientists use the word ‘science’ to describe their day-to-day work: planning and performing experiments, making observations, recording data, interpreting results, deducing, predicting, speculating, and communicating their findings. Before you are entitled to participate in these activities you must pass a number of examinations and serve what amounts to an apprenticeship under the guidance of one or more established practitioners. You then find yourself facing a career structure with various pay scales and competing, often intensely, with similarly qualified people. A code of professional ethics (largely unspoken) helps to regulate this competition. It should also regulate other aspects of your behaviour; good scientists do not invent data or steal each other's results. Understood in this sense - what people called ‘scientists’ do – ‘science’ is a subject for sociologists.
However, when practising scientists are asked what ‘science’ is, they seldom answer in terms of their daily work or their ethics. More commonly they tell us that science is a special and distinctive way of thinking about the natural world, unmatched in the intricate detail, practical applicability or ‘truth’ of what it generates. But what exactly is this way of thinking? How is it ‘distinctive’? And in what sense is the knowledge it produces ‘true’? Those are questions for philosophers.
It is surprisingly difficult to pin down the relationships among the history, sociology and philosophy of science. Sociologists of science study (as it were) single frozen frames in the film of history. History illustrates and tests the arguments of philosophers. The history, philosophy and sociology of science are collectively labelled ‘science studies’, but they remain separate disciplines, each with its own methods and standards of quality. In this book, we shall adopt arguments and perspectives from each of them to suit our purposes, but we shall not go into details. They are specialised subjects.
Many of our colleagues, including some eminent ones, have a deep antipathy to ‘science studies’, which they think distorts our picture of science and its status as a uniquely reliable mode of knowledge. They say that it damages the public image and therefore the funding of science. We understand this antipathy, but the best work in the science studies disciplines should not be dismissed lightly. We need it to answer our questions about what science is, and why it is, and to explore the similarities and differences between biology and other sciences.
Without such answers, we cannot go on to explore the most controversial topics associated with biology and other sciences today: patenting of human genes, cloning, genetic modification of crops, the obliteration of habitats, the extinction of species, and so on. These are matters that concern everyone, and we all need to be able to discuss them rationally, from an informed standpoint. We offer this book in an effort to meet that need.
PSA
DNW
May 2008
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CONTENTS
1. What is science?
What we know
Scientific knowledge
The need to understand cause and effect is uniquely and characteristically human
What is distinctive about science?
Why is science distinctive?
Science originated and flourished in a particular time and place
2. Culture, knowledge and technology
Evolution of beliefs in civilised cultures: a hypothetical scenario
Modern science and technology
Origins of naturalistic thought
Greek naturalistic thought was not science
3. Classical roots
Plato
Aristotle (384-322 BC)
Aristotle’s physics
Athens after Plato and Aristotle
Alexandria
Mystical and religious thought in Alexandria
The dispersal and reunion of Classical learning
4. Mediaeval views of the world
The fostering of knowledge in the Muslim world
Advances in knowledge during the Islamic golden age
Averrës and Algazel
Contemporaneous changes in Europe
The power of the Church
The universities and Scholasticism
Pro and contra Aristotle
Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas
Aristotelianism
Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon
William of Ockham (c. 1282-c. 1348)
The Black Death
The decline of Islamic pre-eminence
5. The Scientific Revolution
The continuing Scholastic tradition
Wider cultural changes: secularisation
The Renaissance
The demise of Aristotelianism
The distinctiveness of natural philosophy
Science and cultural relativism
Taking stock
6. The ‘Scientific Revolution’ in biology
The demise of Galenism
Is there a general process of theory-change in science?
Harvey’s theory of the circulation
Connections with the revolution in mechanics
Conceptions of natural philosophy
Harvey and Descartes
Implications of Harvey’s theory: testing the predictions
The early microscopists
The historical and philosophical context of the early microscopists
7. Aristotle’s biology
Starting from scratch
Historia Animalium
De Partibus Animalium
De Motu Animalium and De Incessu Animalium
De Generatione Animalium
De Anima
Aristotle, Harvey and Descartes
Biology after the late 17th century: Aristotle’s legacy
8. How different are organisms from inanimate objects?
Organisms as mechanisms
Locke: classical empiricism
The Enlightenment
Against mechanism
Living and non-living matter; ‘vital force’
Modern beliefs about living and non-living matter
The third anti-materialist stance
Overview
9. Cell theory and experimental physiology: new ideas in a changing society
Hume: the Achilles heel of empiricism
Kant
The Romantic reaction
Naturphilosophie
Goethe
Geoffroy versus Cuvier
Müller
The birth of cell biology
Mechanistic materialism
An alternative tradition of physiology
Implications for the development of biology
10. Embryos and entelechy
Preformationism
Problems with preformationism
Taxonomy and the critique of preformationism
Epigenesis reborn
The mammalian ovum and the growth of descriptive embryology
Haeckel and the recapitulation hypothesis
Cell division and the beginnings of experimental embryology
Preformation versus epigenesis in a new guise: Roux and Driesch
Fate and competence
11. Spontaneous generation
Redi's experiments: insects are not spontaneously generated
Intestinal parasites
Spallanzani versus Needham
Changing fashions
Pasteur versus Pouchet
Afterword: the origin of life
12. The evolution of Darwinism
Evolutionary ideas prior to 1800
The influence of geology
Lamarck’s concept of transformation
Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and the natural selection model
The argument of the Origin of Species
The philosophical context
Positivism
Acceptance of evolutionary theory and natural selection
The nature of heredity
13. The great heredity debate
Darwin’s account of heredity
The biometric school
The Weismann barrier
Mendel
The mutationist (saltationist) school
The great heredity debate
Chromosomes and heredity
Morgan and the chromosomal theory of inheritance
Philosophical problems and an alternative viewpoint
14. Evolutionary theory attains maturity
Ronald Fisher (1890-1962) and the foundation of population genetics
Sewell Wright (1889-1988)
J. B. S. Haldane (1892-1964)
Julian Huxley (1887-1975)
The synthetic theory of evolution
The main principles of the synthetic theory
Biochemistry is reconciled with the synthetic theory
Bacterial genetics
The molecular basis of heredity and evolution
The modern theory of evolution
15. The problem of purpose
Artefacts and organisms: another view of the living state
The ambiguity of ‘purpose’
Making mechanistic sense of function-statements
Further analysis of function-statements
Goal-seeking behaviour
The limits of meaningful teleology?
16. The scientific status of biology
Can biology be ‘reduced’ to physics?
Matter, energy, information and organisation
Theories in physics and biology
The historical character of evolutionary theory
The incompleteness of biology
Biological nature and human culture
Living with uncertainty
Humans as moral agents
Biology, humanity and world problems
Appendix: science and philosophy
Philosophies of science and scientific practice
The nature of scientific theories
Theory structure and theory change
Experiments
Models
Bibliography
Index of names
Index of subjects
1. WHAT IS SCIENCE?
What we know
Try making a list all the things you know. You will soon give up - the task would be endless. But even a partial list will show that you have different kinds of knowledge.
For example: you know that just now you are sitting down, or standing, or walking across the room. You know the furnishings and the colour of the paintwork. You know what music is playing on the radio. You know, perhaps, that it is a cool day outside but warm in the house, and that you are thirsty. These are immediate, direct sensations.
You went to Benidorm on holiday last summer. A friend told you an amusing story yesterday evening. You once fell downstairs when you were four years old. One of your secondary school teachers had a face like a terrapin. You know all these things because you have a memory, a gigantic store of past experiences. You remember them.
You know how to ride a bicycle, drive a car, boil an egg, write your name, hammer a nail into a wall. So your list of knowledge includes skills as well as immediate and remembered sensations, skills that you have learned and practised.
Two plus two equals four. Dogs bark when they are disturbed or excited. Acorns grow into oaks. Grass is green; water is wet. We turn our experience into generalisations, which make up much of our everyday knowledge. Generalisations tell us about patterns and regularities in the world, so we use them to predict future events. We also depend on them when we try to devise ways of controlling or manipulating events and objects.
You know that the Earth is round (more correctly, an ‘oblate spheroid’), and that the climate is changing, and that uranium is mined and purified from ores – not because you have experienced or discovered those facts for yourself but because you have been told them by authorities you trust. We gain much of our knowledge by learning, usually indirectly, from the people who found it out. Many of our generalisations come from what we hear or read, not from direct experience.
We have moral knowledge (it is wrong to rob banks or set fire to the neighbours’ dustbins). We know our family and friends (what they look like, the sound of their voices, how they dress, what work they do, their mannerisms, their attitudes and beliefs). And we have many other sorts of knowledge.
Few items on this fragmentary list of things-we-know have anything to do with science. So if science is ‘knowledge’, it must be a special sort of knowledge - but special in what ways?
Scientific knowledge
At first sight, it is easier to identify ways in which science is not special.
Like the rest of what we know, much of it relies on sensory experience, immediate or remembered. We test scientific ideas by matching them against what we can perceive: if the idea fails to match the perception, we reject it. Many scientific ‘perceptions’ depend on instruments that – as it were – extend the range of what we can sense. Objects too small to see with our unaided eyes can be seen through a microscope. Radiation with wavelengths longer or shorter than light (infrared or ultraviolet, for example) cannot be perceived through our eyes or other senses, but it can be detected and measured by special instruments. ‘Measured’ is an important word here; whenever we can, we attach numbers to what we (directly or indirectly) perceive. So scientific knowledge includes things that we can perceive using instruments as well as our unaided senses, and – when possible - measurements of these things. Fundamentally, however, it depends on what we sense, just like our ordinary everyday knowledge.
It also includes generalisations. Indeed, specific statements about individual objects or events have limited value in science. We are mainly concerned with general statements, regular and recurrent patterns in what is perceived. Most of the scientific generalisations we accept are learned from other people’s work. That is inevitable; we would never make progress if we had to rebuild scientific knowledge from scratch in each new generation. An important use of generalisations in science – learned or otherwise - is to predict future events; but as we have already said, that is also true of the rest of our knowledge.
Skills are involved, too. A scientist has to learn how to use specialist instruments and understand what they reveal, and must be able to execute experiments. (An experiment is an arrangement by which a particular object or event can be observed and measured without interference from the rest of the world.) But every tradesman makes skilled use of special equipment.
In all these respects, science is only slightly different from everyday knowledge. Reliance on perceptions, generalisations and skills hardly makes it ‘special’. Science is interesting in the way it is organised (theories, hypotheses and experiments), but even this is not particularly special, as the following everyday analogy shows.
Suppose your car is not stopping as quickly as it should when you apply the brake. You ask why. Perhaps there is insufficient brake fluid; you check to make sure. If your guess was right, you top up the brake fluid. You then ask why the level was low – a leak in the system, perhaps? If your guess was wrong, you try another: maybe the brake linings are worn and need to be replaced. You check (or ask a mechanic to check)…
What is happening during this sequence of observations, guesses and checks? First, at the outset, you have an organised understanding of car braking systems and how they work. This ‘organised understanding’ is what in science we call a theory. That may seem an odd use of the word ‘theory’ since it consists largely of matters of fact, but scientific theories do largely consist of matters of fact. Second, you see a problem (the car is not stopping as it should), ask a question about it (why is the car not stopping as it should?), and then use your organised understanding – your theory – to guess a plausible answer. In science, such a guess (‘the level of brake fluid is low’) is called a hypothesis. A hypothesis is a possible answer to a question; it must be consistent with your theory and – crucially – it must be testable (in this case, by checking the level of brake fluid). If the test proves your guess wrong, i.e. the hypothesis is refuted, you try another guess – an alternative hypothesis. If the test seems to confirm your guess, you ask a further question (why was the level of brake fluid low?), propose a further hypothesis consistent with the theory (a leak in the system), test it (by looking for the leak), and so on.
Although this failing-brakes analogy is much simpler than most scientific reasoning, it is the same in principle. A scientific investigation entails exactly the same steps: noticing something odd or interesting, asking questions about it, proposing hypotheses (i.e. guessing possible answers) in the context of the relevant theory, and testing the hypotheses. That is how science progresses.
Notice the nature of the hypotheses in our analogy. They link a possible cause (low brake fluid, worn brake linings) to an effect (impaired brake function). All scientific hypotheses have that character: they are provisional cause-effect relationships that seem plausible in the light of an accepted theory (organised existing knowledge).
Cause-effect reasoning is the foundation of our understanding of the world, not least our scientific understanding. It enables us to make predictions. It enables us to find ways of controlling and manipulating events and objects.
The need to understand cause and effect is uniquely and characteristically human
Chimpanzees seem to have only a limited idea of cause and effect. They can use simple tools such as sticks to recover food that is out of reach, but given a selection of possible tools, they cannot decide which is best for the job. They can pile boxes on top of one another to obtain a food reward, but they never realise that if the floor is uneven the boxes will topple over. A young human child might make such a mistake but will quickly learn from it. Chimpanzees can master human language to some extent, but they do not seem to use language in the wild. Human children acquire language in the first few years of life. Language is crucial for our understanding, not least our ability to think in terms of cause and effect and to learn skills.
Humans are very closely related to chimpanzees but our mental capacities are qualitatively different. We can infer cause-effect relationships, predict events, and express them in language. Our capacity to acquire skills, too, is much superior to that of other species. We touched on the question of human uniqueness in About Life – it may be rooted in our social nature and our bipedalism - but whatever the reasons, our mental and technological capacities are indisputably unique. We depend on those capacities throughout our lives and we prize them highly. They make us human.
Equipped with such capacities, our early ancestors must have found themselves in a world full of objects and events for which there were no evident causes: changes in the weather, the cycle of seasons, volcanoes, birth and death. When we cannot understand the world around us in terms of cause and effect, we do not know how to solve day-to-day problems and we cannot decide what actions to take. We find such uncertainty intolerable. So our ancestors invented explanations for mysterious events; they constructed theories. Those theories probably took the form of myths (explanatory stories). We cope poorly in the absence of some form or system of beliefs – we need to tell stories that purport to explain what happens around us and to us. The price of our uniqueness seems to be a need as well as an ability to explain causes and effects.
What sort of beliefs might our ancestors have formed? The only causal agents they knew from direct experience were animate. Humans and other animals could deliberately cause things to happen, but inanimate objects could not. So all unexplained events may have been attributed to animate, perhaps human-like and almost invariably invisible agencies, which might be appeased or rendered co-operative by appropriate rituals or sacrifices. Early human groups who adopted such a policy probably fared better than those who did not: it would have made for greater social cohesion and enabled them to cope practically with the uncertainties of an unpredictable and often hostile world. It would at least have reassured them. Belief of this primitive religious sort could therefore have become selectively advantageous for early humans.
If so, then we, their descendants, may have inherited a biological predisposition to tell ourselves stories that make sense of our lives and the world around us. Faced with serious uncertainties, mortal dangers or traumas, we tend to become more religious. People with strong religious beliefs often lead longer and healthier lives and deal more effectively with adversity than sceptics do. Belief seems to be biologically necessary for humans, and ‘supernaturalistic’ or religious belief seems to be the most biologically fundamental (and therefore much the most widespread) kind.
‘Belief’ in this context encompasses all the contents of our minds and memories: what we know and understand, how we explain, predict, inquire, and so on. It also includes the articles of faith on which our story-telling depends. Modern science, too, is founded on articles of faith, namely that the universe we observe is intrinsically orderly and that human minds are capable of grasping the essence of that order. These are plausible but untestable premises.
What is distinctive about science?
The function of science is to make sense of the world so that we can answer questions, make predictions and control and manipulate events. But every human culture has its own ways of making sense of the world and of controlling and manipulating it. So what is different about science?
So far, we have found that scientific knowledge is broadly similar to everyday knowledge. Reading between the lines, however, we can begin to see distinctions.
1. Science is naturalistic not supernaturalistic
Supernaturalistic belief, which we have argued is the most basic and widespread kind, differs from science. A supernaturalistic system seeks human, demonic or theistic causes for all events – diseases, for example. As scientists, we attribute diseases to infectious organisms, gene defects, environmental toxins and so on. The orbit of a planet and the progress of an avalanche are explained in terms of antecedent causes and theories of mechanics, not the dispositions and whims of gods. Science presupposes that causes lie in the observable material world itself. That distinguishes a ‘scientific culture’ from the overwhelming majority of human cultures.
Attempts to find naturalistic explanations date back to Classical Greece, which is why histories of western science traditionally begin with a glance at the Greek and Alexandrian philosophers. It is interesting to ask why naturalistic belief began in Greece two and a half millennia ago, and why the modern developed world has adopted it.
2. Scientific explanations are mechanistic
Science explains events in terms of mechanisms. The cause must be a physical situation existing before the event, and it must have nothing to do with motives or intentions or purposes. If events are caused by conscious, animate, human-like agencies, then to explain the causes we must understand the motives – the purposes - of those agencies. If the causes are mechanistic, then it is misleading to consider motives and purposes because there are no motives and purposes. Events in the natural world have no intentions behind them.
You might suppose that if an explanation is naturalistic then it must be mechanistic as well. However, the world-view of the great Greek philosopher Aristotle was entirely naturalistic, but his explanations were deeply teleological, i.e. expressed in terms of purposes. As we shall see, the emergence of modern science, especially biology, entailed a long love-hate relationship with Aristotle’s teachings.
It might seem impossible to eliminate teleology from biology because biological entities - parts of organisms - do have purposes. Nevertheless, modern biology is a science; its explanations are as mechanistic as any in physics. This seeming paradox, and its resolution, will dominate much of this book after chapter 7.
3. Scientific ideas are expressed in ‘value-neutral’ terms
In science, we do not evaluate things as good or bad, desirable or undesirable, beautiful or ugly, etc. We say what is the case and how it fits or fails to fit our existing theories. At least, that is the accepted ideal. Privately, we may (and often do) consider the result of an experiment good or bad depending on whether it is consistent or inconsistent with a favourite hypothesis. The hypothesis may have become a favourite because we find (or found) it aesthetically pleasing.
The claim that science is value-neutral is contentious; sociologists of science find compelling reasons to dismiss it. For example, what we actually choose to study, and the way in which we study it, may be determined largely by political, economic and other influences outside science. But any particular piece of scientific discourse is value-neutral, or should be.
4. Scientific explanations are general rather than particular
Explanations in most cultures have tended to be particular rather than general. For example, the question was not ‘What causes boils?’ but ‘Why has this person, or this group of people, been afflicted with boils at this particular time?’ The answer was expressed in terms of particular practices and moral codes, or particular enmities. The cure would lie in countering a witch's power or appeasing an appropriate deity or practising some sort of incantation. Scientifically, we explain all cases of boils in terms of a common pathogenic agent. The cure lies in an antibiotic suitable for treating all cases of Staphylococcus aureus infection. The explanation is general.
5. Scientific explanations tend towards ‘reductionism’
In science, we usually try to explain large-scale phenomena in terms of smaller-scale parts. For instance, we seek to understand living bodies in terms of the cells they comprise, each cell in terms of its component molecules, and each molecule in terms of its atoms. The ‘reductionist’ approach helps us to explain things mechanistically and in the most general terms. Everything in the world is made up of the same small selection of atoms, in various combinations, so at the atomic scale everything must obey the same laws. The smaller the scale we observe, the more wide-ranging the phenomena. It is large-scale entities that are individual and particular.
6. Scientific explanations seek to be comprehensive
This ‘reductionist’ tendency helps us to find the most widely-applicable patterns of understanding (i.e. theories). Scientific theories aim at comprehensiveness, unifying our knowledge. We look for similarities underlying apparently disparate phenomena such as the falling of an apple and the motions of the planets - which would make no sense in most cultures. This is a hallmark of science. Like naturalism, a quest for comprehensive theories is evident in the work of the Greek philosophers, most obviously Aristotle. In contrast, other cultures tend not to seek general, widely-applicable theories; they are more concerned with the individual and particular and readily accept the ad hoc.
7. Scientific explanations tend to be abstract and, where possible, mathematical
Particular descriptions of objects and events are concrete and (usually) qualitative. We can only connect the falling of an apple with the motions of the planets when we focus on the abstract similarities between these events. Mathematics is a very effective way of expressing such abstractions precisely and deducing predictions from them. If we measure things rather than simply describing them – if we find out how quickly the apple falls - we can test those predictions critically.
8. Science aims to be – and to make things - as simple as possible
This claim may seem surprising, but it is true – provided you do not confuse ‘simple’ with ‘concrete’. In science, redundant ideas are eliminated. The causes proposed for any phenomenon are pared down to the bare minimum. Parsimony is a hallmark of a good theory, and of a good hypothesis: the simpler the suggested cause, the easier it is to test it unequivocally.
9. Scientific theories must be logically consistent
Logical inconsistencies (self-contradictions) are eliminated by the abstraction and paring-down processes, but scientific explanations must also be plausible and cogent. They must be consistent with the rest of our beliefs – particularly with other scientific theories.
10. In principle, scientific knowledge is ‘public’
The means by which scientific explanations are established and tested must be open to public scrutiny, at least in principle. Divine inspiration and individual imagination are not acceptable criteria for belief, as they have been in many cultures. No matter how a scientific idea originates, which might indeed be a matter of individual imagination (hunches), the observations, experiments and reasoning involved in testing it must be reproducible by anyone (provided he or she is appropriately qualified).
11. Scientific knowledge is impersonal
For this reason, scientific writing is never couched in personal terms; it seeks to be objective. As scientists we write ‘A causes B’, ‘Event X happens in such-and-such circumstances’, ‘Objects such as Y have such-and-such properties’, and so on. We do not use ‘I believe…’ or ‘I observed…’, even though what we write about is the product of individual human senses and human thought. That is why scientific English is so peculiar: passive voice, few adjectives and adverbs, no rhetorical colour. It is dry and ‘factual’ – it would be difficult to read, largely devoid of charm, even without the formidable technical vocabulary. Individual personalities, and personal friendships and enmities, should not be allowed to influence science – though they sometimes do, e.g. in ‘personal’ remarks in scientific reports on research activities that are trying to establish new facts.
12. Scientific knowledge is inherently progressive
A scientific hypothesis must be tested, and when you test it you may make novel observations and discover new phenomena through your research work. The knowledge and beliefs that arise during the search for scientific explanations change over time. Most cultures undergo changes in their belief systems, largely as a result of contact with other cultures, but scientific knowledge is inherently progressive and permanently provisional. It is never intended to be as the Laws of the Medes and Persians - though it is often treated as though it were. What we know and believe now is not what we knew and believed in the past – and we will know and believe something different again in the future.
Why is science distinctive?
In many general ways, science is just like everyday knowledge: it depends on sensory experience, memory, generalisations, skills and the search for cause-effect relationships. In other respects, it is unlike the systems of knowledge and belief in other cultures: it is naturalistic, mechanistic, value-neutral, general, reductionist, comprehensive, abstract, simple, logically coherent, ‘public’, impersonal and inherently progressive.
These distinctions are crucial. The findings of science seldom match intuition. Everyday knowledge does not tell us that the Earth orbits the Sun or that humans share half their genes with bananas, but science persuades us. Electrons, quasars and hormone receptors are not objects familiar from everyday life but they are familiar elements of scientific discourse. A way of producing knowledge that generates data so remote from sensory experience, and beliefs so contrary to intuition, is distinctly peculiar.
If science is such a peculiar sort of knowledge, so different from knowledge in other cultures, we would expect it to have arisen very infrequently during the course of human history, and only in particular locations.
That is a definite prediction. We can test it by examining the evidence.
Science originated and flourished in a particular time and place
To find that evidence, look at the major topics covered in science textbooks (school or undergraduate level). For each topic, note the country and the century in which the basic ideas were established. Table 1.1 is an example. When the items in Table 1.1 are displayed on a map of the world (Fig. 1.1) and on a time-scale of human history (Fig. 1.2), the result corroborates our prediction – rather strikingly.
The inference is irresistible: all the topics that we regard as parts of ‘science’ had their roots in Europe (predominantly northern and western Europe) between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries – and apparently in no other place and at no other time.
You may wish to examine a different sample of topics. The result will be much the same, though if you choose disciplines of very recent origin then you might find more of them appearing in North America or some other part of the developed world culturally rooted in European colonisation. None of the sets of ideas we now recognise as ‘scientific’ came from the great civilisations of ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia or India or China - though a great deal of knowledge from those civilisations came down to us via trade links. None of our modern scientific disciplines arose in Classical Greece or Rome, despite the naturalism of Greek thought and despite the great shaping influence that the Classical world exerted on later Islamic and European civilisation. There was nothing quite akin to modern science in Europe itself during the period 1100-1500, though European thinkers at that time had important insights into what we now call ‘science’.
How can we account for this? Why did so curious and ‘unnatural’ a way of seeking knowledge as modern science arise in 16th and 17th century Europe, but apparently in no other place and at no other time in history? And why do we consider it more reliable than the more widespread (supernaturalistic, specific, concrete) alternatives?
While we explore these questions, we should ask whether our data and reasoning are sound. Could appearances have deceived us? Was there, after all, a precedent for what we now call science?