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There's no reason to think that
human beings in ancient times were any simpler or stupider as a group or as
individuals than they are today. They did have a much
smaller pool of accumulated knowledge to build upon, so you might
say that they were more ignorant than we are today.
But certain aspects of humanness were
undoubtedly just as powerful then as now: the need to know
why things happen the way they do, and the need to break
information down into manageable and useful bits, and the need to
label things, place them in categories, and explain their relationships. Of all the abilities
humans have in different amounts than other animals, it may their greater sense of
connection, particularly of how cause relates to effect, that
really is the
basis of science.
You can see aspects of human organization in how
people have investigated Nature - we look for family, tribe, and
nation types of relationships, in patterns that match the patterns in our societies. If Modern Science is a product of
"Western Society" - which is arguable, of course - its intrinsic
patterns
may just be an outgrowth of the level of structure and
coordination and planning needed for a continent of cities and the support infrastructure
that allowed those cities to interact meaningfully with a globe of
trade. Isn't the organization of one remarkably similar to the
organization of the other? Is that a coincidence, are there many
varied ways to perform "science"?
The ideas of PostModernism,
which are applied to everything from art to politics to science, deals
with the idea that all human endeavors and discoveries take forms which
must be influenced by the cultures
that produce them. In science, they argue that the classic approach,
the Scientific Method, is just one way to
determine how the world works, and that other cultures are free to find
their "truth" in other ways. Western science supporters
argue back that the strong role of logic (based on math, which
really doesn't show cultural variance) in science sets it apart
from other disciplines - but then, they're coming to the defense of
something they strongly believe. It is never bad to remember,
however, that science is made - or at least interpreted - by the
scientists, who (whether they like it or not) are products of their
cultures. All of the major ideas of science, from Lamarck and Darwin
through Einstein and Margulis and Hawking, have a bit of each person's
world and worldview embedded in them.
Early Biology
is a mixture of a need to understand the practical - humans had a practical grasp of
genetics millennia before Austrian monk Gregor Mendel began to work out the details -
and a compulsion to see the Big Picture. From a simple
level, as the concept that a dog, a wolf, and a fox were different
types of animals but could be joined together in
the smaller
but definable type of Canines, to a larger but
understandable concept that living things with similar forms and functions
could be placed in groups together - the creatures of the water,
the creatures of the air, the slithering legless things, the
things that grow from the ground, et cetera. It seems a
simplistic way of grouping things together, but one suspects that
it was convenient, and that the ancients who really used the
system probably realized that it had some limitations, as users of today's
systems do.
Early on, the major groupings
of living things were two simple
broad groups: the Animals, things that moved
and ate, and the Plants, which didn't move or appear
to eat (plus the minerals, which were not as
obviously unliving as we see them today). The methods by which living things were classified
(an aspect of biology called taxonomy) were not
widely coordinated until the 17th and 18th Century, culminating in
the development of the binomial nomenclature system
by Carolus
Linnaeus
in the mid-1700's.
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