EXPLAINING HOW LIFE WORKS - DISTANT HISTORY

There are other ways to look at this, but one possible view of human history is that we see Nature in the terms that make the most sense at a given time.  Older societies, without the technology to strongly affect their worlds, saw their world in terms of the things that had the Power:  Nature Spirits, with motivations one might expect from a fusing of human consciousness but the limitations that come from being wind, or forests, or the sun above.  Later, as humans gained the ability to manipulate their own environment, as power over Nature became something in their grasp, the forces of Nature they believed in became much more human, in form and personality, although much more powerful - the human gods controlled those larger aspects of the world in ways similar to the ways that humans controlled the small aspects of theirs, and nature spirits became more human and less powerful.  Today, these explanatory ideas occasionally slip out of the realm of explaining Nature and becomes something more concerned with Human Nature, with those aspects of Life and Afterlife that still seem unexplainable, and the forces conceived are less human and more forces of Consciousness itself.  Meanwhile, centuries of small successes in explaining this or that piece of the big Nature Puzzle has moved humanity, or a sizable fraction of it, from seeing Nature as something that can not really be understood, that must be explained in supernatural terms, to the conviction that everything can be broken down into tiny bits and all of the workings analyzed.  We like the feeling that this has moved us somehow closer to the Truth, and Scientists probably feel some of the same sense of Specialness that used to be the province of priests, of being more In The Know than the rest.  Are we closer to some knowable Truth?

BUILDING UPON KNOWLEDGE FOUNDATIONS 

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 categorize and explain relationships.  Of all the abilities humans have in different amounts than other animals, it may be their greater sense of how cause relates to effect that most 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 patterns in human societies.  If Modern Science is a product of "Western Society" - which is arguable, of course - it may just be an outgrowth of the level of structure and coordination and planning needed for continental systems of connected cities and the support infrastructure to have them interact meaningfully with a globe of trade.

Historically, early biology was a mixture of a need to understand the practical - humans showed a practical grasp of genetics millennia before Mendel began to work out the details - and a compulsion to grasp 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 a larger but definable type of Canines, to a larger but understandable concept that living things with similar 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 systems users today do.