The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [153]
Yet someone had to figure out all these tracking protocols for the first time, perhaps some palaeolithic genius, or more likely a succession of geniuses in widely separated times and places. There is no hint in the IKung tracking protocols of magical methods -examining the stars the night before or the entrails of an animal, or casting dice, or interpreting dreams, or conjuring demons, or any of the myriad other spurious claims to knowledge that humans have intermittently entertained. Here there’s a specific, well-defined question: which way did the prey go and what are its characteristics? You need a precise answer that magic and divination simply do not provide, or at least not often enough to stave off starvation. Instead hunter-gatherers - who are not very superstitious in their everyday life, except during trance dances around the fire and under the influence of mild euphoriants - are practical, workaday, motivated, social, and often very cheerful. They employ skills winnowed from past successes and failures.
Scientific thinking has almost certainly been with us from the beginning. You can even see it in chimpanzees when tracking on patrol of the frontiers of their territory, or when preparing a reed to insert into the termite mound to extract a modest but much-needed source of protein. The development of tracking skills delivers a powerful evolutionary selective advantage. Those groups unable to figure it out get less protein and leave fewer offspring. Those with a scientific bent, those able patiently to observe, those with a penchant for figuring out acquire more food, especially more protein, and live in more varied habitats; they and their hereditary lines prosper. The same is true, for instance, of Polynesian seafaring skills. A scientific bent brings tangible rewards.
The other principal food-garnering activity of pre-agrarian societies is foraging. To forage, you must know the properties of many plants, and you must certainly be able to distinguish one from another. Botanists and anthropologists have repeatedly found that all over the world hunter-gatherer peoples have distinguished the various plant species with the precision of western taxonomists. They have mentally mapped their territory with the finesse of cartographers. Again, all this is a precondition for survival.
So the claim that, just as children are not developmentally ready for certain concepts in mathematics or logic, so ‘primitive’ peoples are not intellectually able to grasp science and technology, is nonsense. This vestige of colonialism and racism is belied by the everyday activities of people living with no fixed abode and almost no possessions, the few remaining hunter-gatherers - the custodians of our deep past.
Of Cromer’s criteria for ‘objective thinking’, we can certainly find in hunter-gatherer peoples vigorous and substantive debate, direct participatory democracy, wide-ranging travel, no priests, and the persistence of these factors not for 1,000 but for 300,000 years or more. By his criteria hunter-gatherers ought to have science. I think they do. Or did.
What Ionia and ancient Greece provided is not so much inventions or technology or engineering, but the idea of systematic inquiry, the notion that laws of Nature, rather than capricious gods, govern the world. Water, air, earth and fire all had their turn as candidate ‘explanations’ of the nature and origin of the world. Each such explanation - identified with a different pre-Socratic philosopher - was deeply flawed in its details. But the mode of explanation, an alternative to divine intervention, was productive and new. Likewise, in the history