By Logan Drake
When trying to list the most important developments and inventions in human history, there is an interesting test I like to apply: Try to picture the world without it.
Electricity? That's pretty important, and fundamental to so many modern technological advancements. But we've been to the woods, we've been in power outages, we can at least imagine what a world would look like without it. It might not be a world we would love, but we can picture it with no real difficulties.
What about agriculture? That one's a bit harder, but you can probably conjure up some sort of image of nomadic tribes of people hunting and gathering for sustenance. If we never developed agriculture, we probably wouldn't have ended up building cities. |
Without cities, our species would certainly have ended up going down a wildly different developmental path, but we can still take reasonable stabs at guessing what such a world would look like.
What about language? What if humans had never developed any form of symbolic language? We could still warn each other of oncoming dangers by shouting and making noises, but we couldn't say "hey, there's a lion" or "don't step on that tile, Indiana Jones, or else poison darts will fly out of the walls" or "I love you." What would such a world look like? How would humans have evolved, what would society, if such a thing even existed, look like today?
We can picture not being able to talk, but can you imagine not being able to talk to yourself? Not being able to think in complete sentences, not being able to associate commonly understood words with objects?
It's difficult to imagine a world in which you have absolutely no concept of language. This thought experiment, in my mind, goes to show the relative level of importance of each of these developments. Electricity and agriculture have had huge, nearly incalculable impacts on the evolution of human society, but language itself is even more important and fundamental. We can't even picture a world without it!
What about language? What if humans had never developed any form of symbolic language? We could still warn each other of oncoming dangers by shouting and making noises, but we couldn't say "hey, there's a lion" or "don't step on that tile, Indiana Jones, or else poison darts will fly out of the walls" or "I love you." What would such a world look like? How would humans have evolved, what would society, if such a thing even existed, look like today?
We can picture not being able to talk, but can you imagine not being able to talk to yourself? Not being able to think in complete sentences, not being able to associate commonly understood words with objects?
It's difficult to imagine a world in which you have absolutely no concept of language. This thought experiment, in my mind, goes to show the relative level of importance of each of these developments. Electricity and agriculture have had huge, nearly incalculable impacts on the evolution of human society, but language itself is even more important and fundamental. We can't even picture a world without it!
Enter: The Scientific Method.
Now, what would a world without science look like? If we, as a species, never made any scientific discoveries or advancements, it's easy enough to say that our world would look a lot like the world without agriculture from earlier. No cities, no medicine, no space travel, just traveling groups of people managing to get by on whatever they find.
And that's probably the case. But what would our mental life look like without science? More specifically, how would we think about the world if we had never developed the modern scientific method?
Throughout middle and high school, and even in many college courses, every single science class begins with a chapter or an entire unit on the scientific method, or the "science circle." |
You pose a question, conduct an experiment, collect data, draw a conclusion, share the results, and repeat. The exact phrasing and order can change a bit from textbook to textbook, but the basic idea is the same and universal: You come up with an idea, test it, and see if your idea holds true. If it doesn't, repeat until you get an idea that holds up.
If you're at all like me and every single person in every single science class I have ever taken, you roll your eyes a bit every time another teacher begins to explain the scientific method. Yes, it is a powerful tool, but it's also obvious! What, are you going to come up with an idea and not test it? You can't just say something and assume it's true without some sort of test.
My point in all of this (and yes, I am finally getting to it), is that we tend to under-appreciate the scientific method. It's a truly revolutionary idea that changed not only the entire course of history (most people do not live in nomadic tribes, for example. Also, we have been to the moon.), but has also changed our very thought processes.
If you're at all like me and every single person in every single science class I have ever taken, you roll your eyes a bit every time another teacher begins to explain the scientific method. Yes, it is a powerful tool, but it's also obvious! What, are you going to come up with an idea and not test it? You can't just say something and assume it's true without some sort of test.
My point in all of this (and yes, I am finally getting to it), is that we tend to under-appreciate the scientific method. It's a truly revolutionary idea that changed not only the entire course of history (most people do not live in nomadic tribes, for example. Also, we have been to the moon.), but has also changed our very thought processes.
The Arbiter of Truth.
There was a time before the modern scientific method existed. If you scroll through this history of the scientific method, you can see bits and pieces of the modern method appearing throughout the centuries.
The word "scientist" didn't exist until 1833. The idea of "experimenting" (or testing) doesn't appear until the year 1021 with Ibn al-Haytham. And it wasn't until the scientific renaissance of the 1600s that experimentation came to be understood as the arbiter of truth that it is today. |
|
Today we have classrooms full of middle schoolers rolling their eyes at the idea of believing something (at least in science) without testing it. If you tell them a brick painted blue will float towards the sky because the sky is the natural home for blue-ness, most students would simply laugh, the true scientists would perform a simple experiment to quickly disprove the hypothesis.
The basic idea of the scientific method, the idea of testing claims to verify their truth-value, is so ingrained into many modern cultures that we have small children complaining about getting taught something so simple over and over again. But it is taught again and again because of it's incredibly revolutionary nature.
The basic idea of the scientific method, the idea of testing claims to verify their truth-value, is so ingrained into many modern cultures that we have small children complaining about getting taught something so simple over and over again. But it is taught again and again because of it's incredibly revolutionary nature.
A World Without Science
If you look at most of the scientific ideas presented by the ancient philosophers (who were by most measures and accounts, incredibly smart people), they sort of make a little sense, but seem a bit wacky, especially compared to our current understanding of the world.
It was thought that human vision worked because the eyes emitted beams of light. And that change could only happen on Earth, that the cosmos were perfectly ordered and eternally unchanging. And that things made of earth fell to the ground because that was their natural place, and fire rose to the air because fire's natural place was above the earth.
It's pretty simple to think of an experiment to disprove all of these. We now have the means to measure the emission of light and see that, in fact, the eyes aren't shooting out beams a la Superman. We can view the cosmos with a telescope and see that things do in fact change up there (bodies collide, stars explode). We can put a piece of earth in space and see that it floats aimlessly without trying to return to the ground.
Now, to be fair, it would have been difficult if not impossible to disprove most of these theories with the technology around at the time they were created. Aristotle didn't have any easy way to conduct an experiment in space, after all. But it is worth noting that, for the most part, it didn't really occur to anyone to test their claims.
If a theory conceptually made sense, and if no clear exceptions could be thought of, then the theory seemed to work and was generally accepted. The ancient philosophers were incredibly smart, reasonable people who made remarkably significant contributions to humankind's knowledge, but they didn't think to do what seems obvious to today's middle schoolers: test their theories.
It was thought that human vision worked because the eyes emitted beams of light. And that change could only happen on Earth, that the cosmos were perfectly ordered and eternally unchanging. And that things made of earth fell to the ground because that was their natural place, and fire rose to the air because fire's natural place was above the earth.
It's pretty simple to think of an experiment to disprove all of these. We now have the means to measure the emission of light and see that, in fact, the eyes aren't shooting out beams a la Superman. We can view the cosmos with a telescope and see that things do in fact change up there (bodies collide, stars explode). We can put a piece of earth in space and see that it floats aimlessly without trying to return to the ground.
Now, to be fair, it would have been difficult if not impossible to disprove most of these theories with the technology around at the time they were created. Aristotle didn't have any easy way to conduct an experiment in space, after all. But it is worth noting that, for the most part, it didn't really occur to anyone to test their claims.
If a theory conceptually made sense, and if no clear exceptions could be thought of, then the theory seemed to work and was generally accepted. The ancient philosophers were incredibly smart, reasonable people who made remarkably significant contributions to humankind's knowledge, but they didn't think to do what seems obvious to today's middle schoolers: test their theories.
Bringing It All Together.
Going back to our original thought experiment: can you imagine what it would be like to not even think of testing a theory or idea before accepting it? It's a strange idea, experimentation and testing are so deeply ingrained into the very way we think that it seems stupid to not think to test an idea. But there was a time when that thought simply didn't exist. It was more difficult to test many ideas, and we lacked a standardized system for testing and experimenting. We lacked the scientific method.
It's easy to roll our eyes at how often we ask our students to go over the scientific method. But we should appreciate how truly revolutionary the idea once was, and have a respect for what it's done. It's taken something that didn't occur to some of history's greatest minds, and made it into something obvious even to snotty middle schoolers.
It's easy to roll our eyes at how often we ask our students to go over the scientific method. But we should appreciate how truly revolutionary the idea once was, and have a respect for what it's done. It's taken something that didn't occur to some of history's greatest minds, and made it into something obvious even to snotty middle schoolers.