Evolution of Science

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[edit] Early Beginnings

Early science and engineering was produced by the priestly king cults as well. Astronomy, writing, mathematics, time keeping, etc. were already established in Mesopotamia some 6000 years ago. We see evidence of massive building projects, e.g. in Egypt, as part of religious practices. But moreover, building had social ramifications, it brought people together. What started as building temples for deification purposes could easily lend itself to building for social purposes, palaces, storage buildings, irrigation canals, otherwise things that had no specific religious aspects, they just made for a better living. This called for a new class of skills: builders, artisans, scribes, otherwise people that by profession had to cultivate their cerebral circuits to do their job.

But increasingly the memetic flow of ideas spread out from the priestly casts and took on a life of its own among this new cast of early thinkers. By the Age Of Access, about 500 BC, Confucius, Buddha, and Zoroaster where putting distinctly nonsectarian flavors on social behavior.

But, it was in the city states of Greece that scientific thinking had come to its own. One can argue as to the why that happened in a relatively short period of time (few hundred years) in such a relatively small geographic area (compared to say, the Persian Empire) to a relatively small population. Until then, the domain of the known was very small, therefore the need for the religious cast to interpret the supernatural. From then on science bifurcated to an evolutionary path of its own, examining and defining nature.

For the first time we see the segregation of the natural and the supernatural and the beginnings of what would eventually become scientific thinking. Scientific thinking codifies abstraction. That is, you have an abstraction, you prove it or disprove it. If you prove it, corroborate it, it becomes a scientific fact; if you don't, then it is just a mental model. That is distinctly different from the preceding religious thinking, which relies on faith, not corroboration. In morphological flow terms, scientific thinking is the way we expand our domain of perception, where new facts get established. And that is done via the codifying aspect of scientific thinking, i.e. corroboration. If a principle gets corroborated and implemented, new tools and devices are built, then the result becomes imprinted on the senses as well, it becomes a new physical fact. Scientific thinking establishes that behavioral modality as a principle, whereas until then truths were often decreed or established by social/religious consensus, whether they were corroborated or not.

In the Greek city states, a relatively small number of individuals established disciplines of mathematics, astronomy, medicine, botany, biology, etc. And they devised philosophical frameworks to integrate these new disciplines into a whole. And the results paid for themselves, in agricultural yields, in building projects, defense projects, health and welfare, etc. The creation and implementation of these scientific abstractions provided for a competitive advantage, a better way of living. One that was evident for all to see, just the kind of impetus that memetic evolution needs to take off.

Though the Greeks city states where eventually conquered, the scientific disciplines perpetuated memetically, in the Roman Empire, Persian Empire, and later in the Islamic Empire.

The Islamic Caliphates absorbed the Greek, Persian, Indian and Chinese bodies of knowledge and greatly expanded it. By 800 AD science had its own reign, separate from the mosque and supported by the priestly-king establishment. The first universities and hospitals were established. All of that got absorbed and gave rise to the European Renaissance period after the fall of the Islamic southern Spain (1492 AD - fall of Granada).

[edit] Renaissance and Industrial Revolution

Divorce of science and religion in the renaissance Europe (15, 16th century AD) was particularly nasty. Christian culture had officially set root in Rome in 313 when the new Emperor Constantine became Christianity's champion and patron. For some 1200 years Roman Catholicism had ruled all of Europe through myriads of kings and princes, all subjects to The Pope. Then a number of events occur in short order:

1- Printing Press is deployed by Johann Gutenberg- 1439

2- Scientific Thinking gets reintroduce after fall of Islamic Spain - 1492

3- Martin Luther starts the Protestant Rebellion (1517)- starting the anti-heretic violence en mass

So, in short order The Catholic Rule faced direct threats of ideas that spread fast by the way of print.

4- Scientific thinking tried to wrestle the heavens from the dominion of the religious order. It was the word of God in bible that set earth as the center of the universe and gave man dominion over earth. Then came along Copernicus who said that earth and other planets revolved around the sun (heliocentric model - 1540). That was heresy to the core, and Copernican thinkers joined the ranks of the heretics (Giardino Bruno was burnt alive at the stake in Rome -1600).

5- Galileo empirically verified the heliocentric model (1610). For that they put him under house arrest for the rest of his life (the Pope was his life long buddy).

All of that was put to rest by Kepler (early 17th century). He actually codified planetary motion. It was corroborated, it was factual. And if that went against the word of God according to any religion, well too bad, fact is a fact. It is interesting that Christianity actually absorbed that. It adapted to a rather devastating body blow.

By late 17, early 18th century Newton had a completely corroborated (all be it partial) model of the universe. But he himself saw God as the master planner. The response was rather brilliant, even if out of necessity. It went like this: if science goes against creation, and the evidence is corroborated, then we'll just absorb the science within the creation domain, and we'll call it creation science (sound familiar?!). Mind you, this is all an argument within Christianity, the rest of the world was doing just fine!

While all of this is going on, Europe is in the thralls of its colonial outbreak. Naval powers of Spain, Portugal, England, France and Netherlands had begun the process of global exploit and colonization. That implied naval vessels, warfare tools and tactics, a huge military and the logistical support structures that go along with it. That meant building all manners of things. So the nascent scientific revolution of the renaissance went hand in hand with engineering, craftsmanship and all of the other skill sets required for the ventures.

The advent of the James Watt steam engine in the 1770s fed right into that industrial build up, ushering in the Industrial Revolution. That firmly established the domain of science and engineering. That domain was no longer one of abstraction for its own sake, it now meant building tools, devices, it meant making money. That domain was now the domain of powerful, wealthy and politically connected industrialist. The domain of science and engineering was no longer manned by few pioneering thinkers. It was well funded, well manned, industry supported, university educated. It was the prime mover of the future of societies, and whoever couldn't jump on the band wagon got left behind, subordinate to the industrial powers.

[edit] Scientific-Engineering Domination as the Social Evolutionary Driver

Through industrial revolution it became self-evident that it is the depth of understanding of the physical nature that allows for invention of all of the tools and technologies that engender that social revolution. So, examination and practice of pure science as well as applied science not only became fashionable, popular, but it was funded in large scales.

Therefore throughout eighteenth and nineteenth century the scientific-engineering domain was expanding exponentially:

• Works in pure and applied mathematics of Leonhard Euler (1707-1783) Pierre Laplace (1749-1827) among many other had pioneered what became modern mathematical physics.

• Works of Michael Faraday (1791-1867), James Maxwell (1831-1879) and many others covered electromagnetism. That work, would usher in the era of electrical devices, for example:
  • Telephone patent was issued to Alexander Graham Bell in 1876
  • In 1876, James Woodward obtained a US patent on the light bulb, selling a share of his patent to Edison in 1885.
  • In September 4, 1882, Thomas Edison switched on the first electrical generating and power distribution system

• Mechanical Engineering had come to its own producing every thing from Steam Locomotives (1804-1829 early models) and Steam Ships (John Fitch Steamboat 1788) to cotton gin (Eli Whitney - 1793) to revolver pistols (Sam Colt 1848) to Gatlin Guns (Dr. Richard J. Gatling - 1861) and everything in between, proliferating in every industrial niche.

• In Biology Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859. The chemical basis of biology and medicine got established by Louis Pasteur (1822–1895), among others.

And that is just to note a few genres in scientific proliferation. The London World Exhibit at the Crystal Palace (1851) brought together over 13,000 exhibitions from around the world, viewed by over 6 million people. Science was popular, even sexy! Scientific thinking and application was now socially selected for.

All of that set the stage for the 20th century where science and engineering molded the global society of today. Our minds can peer into the smallest sub-atomic scales, the largest of cosmological scales. We routinely fly all over the globe. We send spacecraft into the solar system and beyond. We have mapped the genome. We have created a fused global information society where anyone can invent and share anything with anyone, sell anything to anyone with a click of a button a nary a middleman.

And that brings us to the next subject, yet another pillar of our social/cultural morphological evolution, the evolution of our economic systems.

But before doing that I want to make an important point. Notice that within the discipline of morphological flows religious thinking and scientific thinking reconcile. They are two aspects of our morphological evolution. But outside of the discipline, religion and science do not reconcile, they clash. Specifically, science requires scientific thought as its foundation. You have an idea, then you prove (corroborate) it or disprove it and until proven its just that, an idea. Religious thinking goes by faith, there is nothing to corroborate. So, faith and scientific thought do not ordinarily reconcile. But within the morphological flow discipline they do, in fact both make perfect sense. Our brains are wired to create closure. We sense and need to be part of the big picture. So what science can't figure out is punted to the realm of religion. It can provide the psychological refuge that comforts and nurtures. Science is necessarily cold. Religion must be warm and comforting. That is unless you piss off the guardians of religion, in which case they excommunicate you, persecute you, punish you, kill you and then throw you in hell.

All of that makes perfect sense within the discipline of morphological flows. It is perfectly ok to be anthropomorphic, to create God in your own image. After all you encompass all that you know; who else would you create your God in the image of? Of course we model the universe in terms that we understand. What else would we do, model it in terms we don't understand? We are linear creatures subjected to a narrow bandwidth of seeing space-time and we model our universe in that sense. It is imperfect by definition, but perfectly understandable. Within the discipline we don't expect anything differently.

[edit] Link

http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/TOC.html - Comprehensive site on Epistemology, so big it'll probably be under construction forever

http://www.academicinfo.net/religindex.html - Religious gateway

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