Changing Our Animal Behavior I (46)
Morphing metaphorically from Solitary Wasp Hunters to a Beehive with a Thinking Caste Teaching us to Speak Nature’s Simple Truths
Gothic Notre Dame: as a pivotal early thought liberator. “The Condemnation of Aristotle”, emanating from Notre Dame in 1277, was proposed by Pierre Duhem as a plausible trigger for the new freedoms of thought that led to a scientific revolution in Europe, albeit centuries later and after the condemnation was lifted (in our beelining quest to search for the causal sequence leading to the structure of DNA, Aristotle’s denial of the existence of a vacuum was a major obstacle). The Condemnation diminished the thought deadening coercive force of authority that was one reason for an extinction of Greek antiquity’s science. This newly liberated science then led to our behavioral change as we morphed from instinct or myth guided to truth guided animals.
Notre Dame also brings to mind the concentrating learned power of its monks or the high education of its artisans such as the glass blowers, qualities that would later propel science. This finesse of savoir vivre in art or commerce, etc is truth in its own right.
A thesis of this essay will be that earlier cultural preparation was an important contributor to the sudden burst of science proper around 1600, but that there was also an autocatalytic avalanching at work, a bootstrap process. This bootstrap process has to do with discovering simple clear laws that led to a feedback loop of clearing up relevant lingo and speaking truthfully. This approach will support the notion that we didn’t discover science so much as that science discovered and changed us into a behaviorally new species.
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Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla by Louis I Khan. Research Centers like the Salk can serve as emblems of our redirection to research as the main source of present-day human savvy, just like cathedrals were for earlier traditions of the West.
Mechanisms
The West was born because it found ways that were faster than those of the rest of the world. Kinetics selects amongst the thermodynamically possible. This basic science tenet can function also as a metaphor for cultural events; the faster draw in the historical Wild West winning, is another one. Truth about the world was the great discovery of the West (after a fleeting initial discovery in Greek Alexandria). Several factors had to come together for this discovery. My main point is that a bootstrap effect happened when natural law was found to be simple and understandable in some cases, enforcing a new type of transparent language. Yet a shift in interest from saving souls to understanding nature stays more enigmatic and I assign it here to a fashion change of thinking. It went parallel to opposing unwarranted authority that manifested itself in the demotion of Aristotle by the church.
“Science proper” is now a governing new behavior within one species of sentient beings. It involves a small caste that explores truth through experimentation and has mechanisms amongst this caste to agree on what is true. The development of this caste can be seen as a species changing event (with respect to behavior in this case) that reminds of the evolution of bees from wasps, or the termite caste developments. After our genome became rapidly changed in the last two million years and then stabilized, the human savvy or “memome” avalanched away around 1600.
Merlin no more
For millions of years, we were sorcerers at heart, with one witchcraft succeeding another, often in bloody contest. Wizards like Merlin had their competitors, and sometime later, witchcraft was in competition with say religious superstition.
On the positive side, our brains grew during this time due to evolutionary rewards from social exchanges. I assume that a prominent exchange was teaching our young ones. And didn’t this child education naturally invite the fabrication of moralizing fairy tales, which then came to fill our whole existence as myth and myriads of religions? No wonder we needed a big brain to follow this spinning of sheer endless tall tales, presumably for millions of years.
Then around 300BC, or again the last time around 1600, something new was born that changed our behavior as a species. Some cultures changed focus of interest from the visions of shamans or divine revealed law and myth to natural law. This shift is having monumental consequences.
I have often argued that the advent of science had an inevitability about it. One of my arguments has it that when the simplicity of some laws became transparent a whole attitudinal change had to happen in response. There was no way around it. While people were secretive, when understanding nature was tough, say during the time of alchemy, and were producing outright lies as a matter of course, people had to become honest and transparent almost overnight when science laws became translucent. In the presence of simple science laws, there was no choice. To obviously keep lying, when one can easily be convicted of doing so, would result in professional suicide. This was so different from the earlier situation when understanding stayed murky. In this sense I have offered the vision that we didn’t so much discover science, as science discovered us. It did so when it revealed itself as disarmingly simple and dependable, and we responded by the only choice left: of being honest about it and finding ways out of fairy tales.
This peculiar situation, of ethically different behavior, stratified science during a transitional period in an almost absurd way. The first simple laws were of physics, and physicists were the first to become transparent and honest. Chemists were next, etc. But the absurdity pertained even to individuals, who say were both physicists and chemists. Newton and Boyle are examples. As soon as a field clarified, it began switching to modern ethical science conduct. So, Newton and Boyle became honest about physics but obfuscated their chemical studies. Same persons, writing rather different texts, depending on the subject matter. Isn’t it something to behold?
I will here also observe that this change came with a new mind, set on an almost irrational optimism that truth is there to be found out. It was uniformly held by its early discoverers within the beginning third wave of science proper, such as Gilbert, Kepler, or Galileo. They had this confidence already as teens, and it is therefore the new teaching traditions, which reached those teens, that we should be predominantly grateful for. There was a time of advent to the actual birth of science.
What were those traditions? There are many answers. The printing press had opened especially the newly accessible texts of antiquity, a reservoir of learned people came to Europe after the conquest of Constantinople, the discovery of America opened the mind for facts beyond the revealed. There grew an immense increase in material and artistic richness during the Renaissance, in part connected with the wealth of inheritance after the plague.
But I will also attempt to convince you that an additional driving force should be considered. This appears to have been a titanic evolutionarily given urge for change. This urge could on the light side manifest itself in haberdashery, which around 1600 brought up a fascination with fancy neckgear and ruffs. More importantly though, there arose a change in the selection of worthy topics of inquiry, almost suddenly turning out to be focused on nature instead of immortal human soul. It attracted inquisitive minds and turned them into scientists.
Of course, not everybody turned to become a scientist. Even today, in a more encompassing scientific age, only a small percentage of people practice science or its brethren, medicine. Nevertheless, practically everybody on earth today is touched in some way by the science of those few even if their life is still filled with hocus pocus. Science spreads into the farthest region of jungle or tundra, with electricity, plastic, medicines or preserved food as its missionaries. You cannot avoid being touched by it. Science has become essential for human existence as we know it, and it is now the center of existential savvy like art and religion once were. Even where still admixed and diluted with myth, science savvy has become an unavoidable challenge to fairy tales. It has become the fundament of our world view. An old way of life has given way to a new one. In years past, it was the wizard Mermin for millions, but it is Mermin no more!
Science’s hot spots
Life originated probably in ocean hot vents. In analogy, one could say that Western science has its own hot vents as origins, so to speak, and those I want here to focus on. What caused its science’s rise around 1600? And why was it along a volcanic seeming eruption path of creativity from London to Amsterdam over Prague to Venice, and then almost instantly broadening and extending, say to Paris? In fact, especially the western part of this axis is still one of high education, science, trade and living standard, as the full axis once was. A high level of education can be assumed to have contributed to this science take-off.
So, some volcanos of human ingenuity got firing up again, and as I said earlier, we must have gotten where we are because of some inescapable logic from the beginning on. Doesn’t everything have its logic? And wouldn’t we want to find about that logic?
Here I try to muse about what I think could have been important conditions for those spiritual volcanos erupting. After all, it is a fascinating question of how a relatively modest species of superstitious sentient being changes skin to become behaviorally a new species within a few generations, and to reach the moon and enter space amongst others, as an almost immediate result. I want to rub it in once more: since those eruptions, I consider us now becoming qualitatively different from before, and that by the day.
The balmy climate for seeds of a bygone age to sprout again
There were apparently cultural factors that supplied the manure on which this axis of creativity could sprout. Was it mainly the bustling trade and art uptake of the Renaissance that stimulated new fields? The generally high living standards? Or the more egalitarian social setup that mixed various classes and let highly trained artisans come in direct contact with wealthy people to plan research? Was it a newly developed transparency of reporting on experimenting and an honor system of citing previous research? Or was it a force for a common enterprise of knowing that grew out of the age-old Christian traditions? Was it something in the science that had started to reveal itself? Or was it mainly a fashion change of interest from the spiritual to the natural world? A titanic evolutionary urge for change?
Yet to begin with, the most important ingredient for this eruption is usually swept under the rug. General human savvy, and in particular its aspect science, has repeatedly gone extinct or nearly so and revived before. And there were seeds left, not in practicing but in writing, of its earlier prospering. Extinction in the gene world is an irreversible phenomenon. But this isn’t necessarily so in the meme world. If meaningful signs say on paper survive, a scientific understanding can in principle be revived. In this way we could stumble upon the writings of an extinct alien culture and revive it by simply reading and interpreting it, even as the practicing savvy may have perished.
And this written record of an older science proper explains the main part of its sudden regrowth in what appears as a springtime for science within the Baroque in a West that was already soaked in a Renaissance of antiquity. And after all that art and great building in the ancient style, why not push the old existential savvy some as well? In this climate of a great confidence, science found the conditions balmy to germinate again from the seeds of letters on old paper as it were.
Of course, this attitude amounts to a postponement of the question of origin, a sort of cheating. But it is not unlikely that the reason for the enlivenment of science around 1600 won’t be so different from the one of its origins around 300BC. Let’s wait and see where the story gets us.
What is “science proper” to begin with?
What to call science to begin with? Isn’t science not only Alexandria’s levers and buoyancy but also the breeding of plants and animals in ancient River Cultures of the Fertile Crescent? Or a strategic communal hunt of eons earlier? Or art to begin with? To simplify, I will have to define something of a distinction between different levels of savvy. I have in mind the material that university science starts out with and call it “science proper”. And that will be the science of antiquity’s Alexandria first. It will be amongst material on an exam of an introductory university science test. Students may want to have occasionally a hunt on the exam as well, but profs usually deem this impractical, even if tempting, say as a diversion for raw nerves.
I would define this rarified activity thus: Science is the erecting of models of structured worlds following evidence-based methodologies. The erecting is done in a sport-like cooperative/competitive way amongst nature detectives or homesteaders (this science is the presently last step in a teleonomic evolution of us as cybernetic dissipative structures assisting the cooling of the universe, just to remind you once more of the Big or Deep History and its long logic that we pursue in these essays). And now we are home-free to check on: why did seeds grow well in the new spring of the mind?
Nature’s plan and obstacles in our path to Scientificus
Nature navigated like Magellan to make us into a science-based society. Nature’s GPS nurtured us, so to speak, as a medium to do its catalytic work, first by extensively socializing us. In this way the brain had evolutionary pressures to grow and luxuriate for millennia. It fabricated moralizing and often coercive myth to keep fellow tribespeople and their children on the straight and narrow. It did so by confabulating stories about a mysterious world it saw. And then, just recently, almost like yesterday we came to organize ourselves anew, slipped out of our skin so to speak, and changed our plans to now become truth-seers and tellers. It happened when our eyes opened to the fact that some of nature’s laws are simple and easy to comprehend such as free fall or the gas laws. No need to become secretive fabulists about them like the alchemists.
Lures that draw away from truths
We became truth seekers even in the eye of the unquestioned intoxicating lure that ecstatic religious practice must have provided, especially when in the presence of hallucinogens. Just consider the draw of these colorful worlds that will have to be overcome by unadorned truth. Or think of a faith in immunity to death for the warfare of early tribes. How they moved within their myths, with confidence and spears, to be eventually mowed down by Western machine guns. Just think what exquisite feeling there could be obtained with the illusion of being immortal, even if ill-considered in the cool light of a Western bullet’s reasoning. But surely, illusionism had its attractions.
Or, on more complex levels, weigh in your mind the demands of truth-telling. How it can exist in tension with other moral imperatives, such as consolation. Daily life is not only truth; at least it often is manipulated truth. Should we tell an Alzheimer patient the truth or that everything is ok, and no worry needed? Here we enter the blurry corner of the psycho map where we can’t do much more than draw fantastic sea creatures, as was done in earlier times to symbolize our difficulties in understanding geography. “There be dragons”, these regions were marked. There exist questions where there remain no clear moral answers.
But by and large the main line of Western behavior had the power to go away from the cocaine of myth that probably had stayed with us for more than a million years in its addictive power, coming with compliments of our increased brain (I doubt that my dog is superstitious, he doesn’t have the requisite ganglia). Now this increased brain, filled with confabulations, had found a social and motivational mechanism to switch to truth producing and telling. I can’t emphasize enough what a species altering event this was.
So, before I go into looking at details of what it was that drove early scientists of the West, I share my main hints that I developed during writing my last essay. They lie in the early natural confidence that Gilbert, Galileo or Kepler had in their ability to unearth truth by finding out. They apparently gained this confidence during their teen years. As much as we should credit them for their achievements, we should also keep in mind an obvious debt to their prior generations, teacher, parents, or fellow humans who had parented that confidence. And so, it will not only be 1600 that poses questions but also something in its past that became operative. My thesis then will be that this was a cumulative experience about what we can influence on our own. Explorers found out about new unrevealed continents with people of strange beliefs in it. Tradesmen exploited the value of investment; sailors trusted the dependability of the loadstone; art had learned to draw in three dimensions; medicine overthrew antiquity’s advice to treat wounds with organics like manure and its resulting sepsis.
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Antiquity’s Alexandria imagined. Trade appears as a sine qua non for science, and can the painting not remind somewhat of Venice or Amsterdam (picture below) around 1600? They picked up where Alexandria left.
Amsterdam, birthplace of telescopes and microscopes around 1600, ushering in a new age. Imagine a little quarter of lens grinders, or another of painters or have them mixed. It is all small scale but with momentous consequences.
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Science extinctions and regrowth - Let’s start in the West but not forget Alexandria and Islam
I have hinted already at origins for modern science through my essays, and this essay can serve as a summary and jumping board into more detail. I will follow common tradition and investigate in more detail peculiarities in the West, instead of going back to say, Antiquity’s Alexandria. This tradition of focus on the West has probably more to do with historians usually specializing in more recent European history compared with the more exotic Late Greek than with a secondary importance of the latter. Even as I have also concentrated on science’s third wave of 1600, never forget that the true origin of science proper, the type of basic material taught at university, is Alexandria and its more poetic predecessor of the Ionian Enlightenment.
There exist enlightened books on the discovery of science in the West such as a definitive one by David Wootton* “The Invention of Science”. Usually, divergent origins are emphasized, such as a step to transparency of reporting on experimenting in the case of Wootton, or an introduction of new words and concepts. This is perceptive thinking of placing origins in connection with more spiritual roots, rather than sheer discovery. In gratitude for this exquisite book, with its abundance of ideas, many of which I have already cited earlier, I dedicate especially this essay to it.
Nevertheless, a disservice would be performed in this approach, if not also emphasizing the precarious situation science has been in and still is. In my counting we are presently in a third wave of science proper with two prior extinctions, or at least long winters and more winters potentially coming. And with a more relaxed definition of science proper, its list of extinctions and revivals would grow yet.
I am not even a historian but can bring my work-life-long teaching and scientific research into these contemplations. And here it is clear that Ancient Alexandria is the first to be recognized as modern science proper in its conceptual qualitative and quantitative sweep. Introductory science classes start quantitatively with some of antiquity’s backbone of definitions. Think of geometry, of levers, density, or buoyancy, of Euclid and Archimedes. This is far beyond the poetry sort of thinking about imaginary smallest pieces, say of bread, that one cannot cut or pulverize anymore, atoms, initiated in the sea-trading culture of the Ionian Enlightenment and spreading to Classical Greece. This inquisitive Ionian culture mused about common day kitchen activities such as whether cheese cutting is continuous (Aristotle) or granular (the laughing philosopher Democritus) and therefore infinitely dividable, or of atomic particle nature respectively. Yet these natural philosophers suffered the Achilles heel that they had no proof. But at least, the Ionian Island Sea provided a world view, where nature itself was a creator, rather than their somewhat comical pantheon of gods. Nature creates earthquakes, not Poseidon.
But I know too little historical detail, such as sociology, to have a feeling how breakthrough happened then and there in Antiquity’s Alexandria, or later in Islam. For Europe, this question is more graspable for me, and I hope some lines of thought will also hold for the Greek foundational time. But let us not forget, the prime reason for the near simultaneous take-off from 1600 on in the West’s proverbial creative axis from Venice to London must have to do with the considerably earlier discovery of old texts and the traditions built on them by Islam and then Christianity. It was, for European contemporaries, as though they would find extraterrestrials instructing them with superior knowledge. And after some time of puzzlement, they were coming to get their meaning, taking on the burden and carrying on the work of the ancients anew in institutions that resembled Alexandria’s old Academy. And thus, newly outfitted with knowledge, we are now on our way to become increasingly aliens ourselves.
The reason for the demise of Antiquity’s Alexandria’s science have primarily to do with Roman conquest, although a general decline had set in slightly earlier. Remember Alexandria’s Cleopatra and her Antony being defeated by Octavian (Augustus) in 31BC at Actium, a later action-movie hot spot? Action at Actium slowed down the world from the exhilarating Greek ride of natural science to the tedium of Roman war or gladiatorial cruelty. With Islam a precipitating origin of decline was also a destructive conquest, this time by the Mongols.
Yes, the Romans were a plague. They emulated the gruesome Assyrians in their focus on martial brutality. Their whole culture was informed by this. Just compare the noble Olympic games of the Greek to the blood thirsty ones of the Colosseum. In the beelines to science, the Romans were not prominent. They were partly responsible for the temporary science extinction that was to follow their reign.
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In a second part of this essay, I will concentrate more on detail of the complex cultural heritage that led to the science revival of 1600.
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The disarming simplicity of science made it irresistible to the human brain - what a compelling idea!!
Certainly appears that neural networks, carbon-based or silicon-based, basically work by rewarding the use of symbols to find shortcuts between a given input and output. F = ma was just too beautiful a shortcut to ignore!
Perhaps the search for simple truths started in mathematics and astronomy even before physics? Prominent in the beeline would then be the indo-arabic algebra and numbers. The ditching of roman numerals that they allowed was certainly key in Renaissance's accounting, astronomy, etc... I note that the greeks had far less ridiculous numerals than the Romans, similar to that of the Chinese - easier than the Roman's, though not the breakthrough exponential form.
That being said, Roman's development agriculture and construction - without their arch, no bridges, no cathedral...