The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [151]
Being freed from superstition isn’t enough for science to grow. One must also have the idea of interrogating Nature, of doing experiments. There were some brilliant examples -Eratosthenes’s measurement of the Earth’s diameter, say, or Empedocles’s clepsydra experiment demonstrating the material nature of air. But in a society in which manual labour is demeaned and thought fit only for slaves, as in the classical Graeco-Roman world, the experimental method does not thrive. Science requires us to be freed of gross superstition and gross injustice both. Often, superstition and injustice are imposed by the same ecclesiastical and secular authorities, working hand in glove. It is no surprise that political revolutions, scepticism about religion, and the rise of science might go together. Liberation from superstition is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for science.
At the same time, it is undeniable that central figures in the transition from medieval superstition to modern science were profoundly influenced by the idea of one Supreme God who created the Universe and established not only commandments that humans must live by, but laws that Nature itself must abide by. The seventeenth-century German astronomer Johannes Kepler, without whom Newtonian physics might not have come to be, described his pursuit of science as a wish to know the mind of God. In our own time, leading scientists, including Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, have described their quest in nearly identical terms. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and the historian of Chinese technology Joseph Needham have also suggested that what was lacking in the development of science in non-western cultures was monotheism.
And yet, I think there is strong contrary evidence to this whole thesis, calling out to us from across the millennia...
The small hunting party follows the trail of hoofprints and other spoor. They pause for a moment by a stand of trees. Squatting on their heels, they examine the evidence more carefully. The trail they’ve been following has been crossed by another. Quickly they agree on which animals are responsible, how many of them, what ages and sexes, whether any are injured, how fast they’re travelling, how long ago they passed, whether any other hunters are in pursuit, whether the party can overtake the game, and if so, how long it will take. The decision made, they flick their hands over the trail they will follow, make a quiet sound between their teeth like the wind, and off they lope. Despite their bows and poison arrows, they continue at championship marathon racing form for hours. Almost always they’ve read the message in the ground correctly. The wildebeests or elands or okapis are where they thought, in the numbers and condition they estimated. The hunt is successful. Meat is carried back to the temporary camp. Everyone feasts.
This more or less typical hunting vignette comes from the IKung San people of the Kalahari Desert, in the Republics of Botswana and Namibia, who are now, tragically, on the verge of extinction. But for decades they and their way of life were studied by anthropologists. The IKung San may be typical of the hunter-gatherer mode of existence in which we humans spent most of our time, until ten thousand years ago, when plants and animals were domesticated and the human condition began to change, perhaps forever. They were trackers of such legendary prowess that they were enlisted by the apartheid South African army to hunt down human prey in the wars against the ‘front-line states’. This encounter with the white South African military in several different ways accelerated the destruction of the IKung San way of life. It had, in any case, been deteriorating bit by bit over the centuries from every contact with European civilization.
How did they do it? How could