The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [149]
[* And in some cases scepticism would be simply silly, as for example in learning to spell.]
Both scepticism and wonder are skills that need honing and practice. Their harmonious marriage within the mind of every schoolchild ought to be a principal goal of public education. I’d love to see such a domestic felicity portrayed in the media, television especially: a community of people really working the mix - full of wonder, generously open to every notion, dismissing nothing except for good reason, but at the same time, and as second nature, demanding stringent standards of evidence; and these standards applied with at least as much rigour to what they hold dear as to what they are tempted to reject with impunity.
18
The Wind Makes Dust
[T]he wind makes dust because it intends to blow, taking away our footprints.
Specimens of Bushmen Folklore,
W.H.I. Bleek and L.C. Lloyd,
collectors, L.C. Lloyd, editor (1911)
[E]very time a savage tracks his game he employs a minuteness of observation, and an accuracy of inductive and deductive reasoning which, applied to other matters, would assure some reputation as a man of science... [T]he intellectual labour of a ‘good hunter or warrior’ considerably exceeds that of an ordinary Englishman.
Thomas H. Huxley, Collected Essays,
Volume II, Darwiniana: Essays
(London: Macmillan, 1907), pp. 175-6
[from ‘Mr Darwin’s Critics’ (1871)]
Why should so many people find science hard to learn and hard to teach? I’ve tried to suggest some of the reasons - its precision, its counterintuitive and disquieting aspects, its prospects of misuse, its independence of authority, and so on. But is there something deeper? Alan Cromer is a physics professor at Northeastern University in Boston who was surprised to find so many students unable to grasp the most elementary concepts in his physics class. In Uncommon Sense: The Heretical Nature of Science (1993), Cromer proposes that science is difficult because it’s new. We, a species that’s a few hundred thousand years old, discovered the method of science only a few centuries ago, he says. Like writing, which is only a few millennia old, we haven’t gotten the hang of it yet - or at least not without very serious and attentive study.
Except for an unlikely concatenation of historical events, he suggests, we would never have invented science:
This hostility to science, in the face of its obvious triumphs and benefits, is ... evidence that it is something outside the mainstream of human development, perhaps a fluke.
Chinese civilization invented movable type, gunpowder, the rocket, the magnetic compass, the seismograph, and systematic observations and chronicles of the heavens. Indian mathematicians invented the zero, the key to comfortable arithmetic and therefore to quantitative science. Aztec civilization developed a far better calendar than that of the European civilization that inundated and destroyed it; they were better able, and for longer periods into the future, to predict where the planets would be. But none of these civilizations, Cromer argues, had developed the sceptical, inquiring, experimental method of science. All of that came out of ancient Greece:
The development of objective thinking by the Greeks appears to have required a number of specific cultural factors. First was the assembly, where men first learned to persuade one another by means of rational debate. Second was a maritime economy that prevented isolation and parochialism. Third was the existence of a widespread Greek-speaking world around which travelers and scholars could wander. Fourth was the existence of an independent merchant class that could hire its own teachers.