The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [150]
That all these factors came together in one great civilization is quite fortuitous; it didn’t happen twice.
I’m sympathetic to part of this thesis. The ancient lonians were the first we know of to argue systematically that laws and forces of Nature, rather than gods, are responsible for the order and even the existence of the world. As Lucretius summarized their views, ‘Nature free at once and rid of her haughty lords is seen to do all things spontaneously of herself without the meddling of the gods.’ Except for the first week of introductory philosophy courses, though, the names and notions of the early lonians are almost never mentioned in our society. Those who dismiss the gods tend to be forgotten. We are not anxious to preserve the memory of such sceptics, much less their ideas. Heroes who try to explain the world in terms of matter and energy may have arisen many times in many cultures, only to be obliterated by the priests and philosophers in charge of the conventional wisdom, as the Ionian approach was almost wholly lost after the time of Plato and Aristotle. With many cultures and many experiments of this sort, it may be that only on rare occasions does the idea take root.
Plants and animals were domesticated and civilization began only ten or twelve thousand years ago. The Ionian experiment is 2,500 years old. It was almost entirely expunged. We can see steps towards science in ancient China, India and elsewhere, even though faltering, incomplete, and bearing less fruit. But suppose the lonians had never existed, and Greek science and mathematics never flourished. Is it possible that never again in the history of the human species would science have emerged? Or, given many cultures and many alternative historical skeins, isn’t it likely that the right combination of factors would come into play somewhere else, sooner or later - in the islands of Indonesia, say, or in the Caribbean on the outskirts of a Mesoamerican civilization untouched by Conquistadores, or in Norse colonies on the shores of the Black Sea?
The impediment to scientific thinking is not, I think, the difficulty of the subject. Complex intellectual feats have been mainstays even of oppressed cultures. Shamans, magicians and theologians are highly skilled in their intricate and arcane arts. No, the impediment is political and hierarchical. In those cultures lacking unfamiliar challenges, external or internal, where fundamental change is unneeded, novel ideas need not be encouraged. Indeed, heresies can be declared dangerous; thinking can be rigidified; and sanctions against impermissible ideas can be enforced - all without much harm. But under varied and changing environmental or biological or political circumstances, simply copying the old ways no longer works. Then, a premium awaits those who, instead of blandly following tradition, or trying to foist their preferences on to the physical or social Universe, are open to what the Universe teaches. Each society must decide where in the continuum between openness and rigidity safety lies.
Greek mathematics was a brilliant step forward. Greek science, on the other hand - its first steps rudimentary and often uninformed by experiment - was riddled with error. Despite the fact that we cannot see in pitch darkness, they believed that vision depends on a kind of radar that emanates from the eye, bounces off what we’re seeing, and returns to the eye. (Nevertheless, they made substantial progress in optics.) Despite the obvious resemblance of children to their mothers, they believed that heredity was carried by semen alone, the woman a mere passive receptacle. They believed that the horizontal motion of a thrown rock somehow lifts it up, so that it takes longer to reach the ground than a rock dropped from the same height at the same moment. Enamoured of simple