Caption: The change in focus from saving souls to understanding nature, during the Renaissance, reminds us of a change in the fashion of how to do things. Isn’t it akin to how to dress up and the like? The above Rubens shows the new fashion during the time of science’s birth. Note the fancy ruff, signaling the new beginning. Let’s not belittle laces and ruffs, they are our rebirth insignia.
But while this gusto for the new, expressed in fashion, is only a specific aspect of the time, it wasn’t all pervasive, and that wouldn’t be my point. It was a gusto for novelty in some classes, a fermenting general spirit that drove aspects of the time and the general spirit is what I am after. This general spirit lifted science. Interest in haberdashery, in fact, did not pertain to scientists so much. When you look at the garb of Newton say, doesn’t he remind you more of the resident clochard, sleeping under bridges as it were? And yes, that is not the gist of my argument. Not the fashion of Newton or faculty at any research university. No, not I included. In fact, I once read that our communal pool keys should be redone because it appeared that a homeless is frequenting said place in the early morning hours, perhaps sleeping there. It slowly dawned on me that I must have been this suspected homeless, in my worn jacket.
Studiolo of Federico da Montefeltro (1476): the change from interest in religious collection of say crucifixes to naturalia and worldly art in studiolos is more directly related to the origins of science than say the fashion change in haberdashery. This studiolo was inside the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino. The crowning glory of Federico da Montefeltro's private suite was his studiolo ("small study"), depicting him as one of the most cultured people of his time. The lower walls are lined with trompe l'oeil wood intarsia. Books, scholarly equipment, and musical instruments are all convincingly rendered, mimicking the actual objects kept behind the cupboard doors. Above the intarsia two rows of paintings depict the major fields of scholarly learning from antiquity through to Federico's own time.
Introduction
In two preceding essays I have stressed specifics in the development of “science proper” (my term for introductory university science, that essentially starts with ancient Alexandria, focusing on physics, chemistry, and biology). Here I include some final thoughts on this volcanic type of eruption that changed human behavior, turning us into a behaviorally new species.
This safari into a new land of understanding was of course planted already in evolution of earlier times within sentient beings who acted as “bionauts” with their sensual and executive endowments. Our ancestors had prepared for us that which we then ran away with. So, it will be natural for us to return towards the end of this exposition to this basic drive of intelligent organisms for finding new niches of existence.
In our behavior we are now wildly different from the one exhibited say 400 years ago. At that time even our most advanced specimens were largely guided by superstition. While there was bustling city life, transport was slow. Today we have magnificent hospitals and air and rocket traffic, including outer space. I think it is fair to call us a behaviorally new species.
I like to think of a similar event hitting say bees (Apis mellifera). No doubt that the precipitating events for the transition to scientific bees would be nothing short of astounding too. Think of beehives extending in a network over large parts of the world with farming and animal husbandry attending; there being bee history with some form of writing perhaps derived from dancing, and of course endless warfare. Think of bees having exterminated or strongly reduced many of their bee relatives and large numbers of other species. But be yet more flummoxed by what happens next. “Bees dominating the planet”. “Bees on the moon”. “Bees with bombs”. “Bees understanding space-time, doing CRISPR and the like”. So, maybe it’s a staging from super-bee to hyper- bee?
In any event, there is the line of thought that sentient beings have a drive to perfect their cyber potential. And this propelled me to the following, at times somewhat whimsical observations. But before that I want to summarize what I have observed so far.
Summary of previous thoughts
My first essay dealt with the extraordinary clarification of language when the simplicity of experimental results became apparent. Metaphorically one is reminded of the end of fermentation when the grape juice exits the state that in German is called “sturm” (storm), a turgid bubbling wild drink for the strong of heart. Or take the cooling of the universe through the plasma state when it almost suddenly turned transparent. This clarification happened first with physics from 1600-1700 say, and then around 1800 it spread to chemistry.
In my second essay I focus on Zilsel’s observation that science grew out of medieval artisan guilds, concerned say with century long cathedral building. As these artisans became more educated and enterprising, they started to open new ways of doing things and being able to communicate with educated people of means. In art, Giotto or Alberti discovered the science like 3D representation and Brunelleschi or Leonardo built a new type of cathedral. And later, Galileo, Kepler or the Netherland lens grinders followed that tradition with a long line to today’s scientist “guilds”. An interesting intermezzo pertained to the participation of rich people in experimental pursuit. Gilbert comes to mind, the Holy Roman emperor Rudolph himself, or more convincing, say the perhaps richest man in England: Cavendish. So, both rich or poor had a chance to become immortal.
Here I want now to add a more general observation about an innate restlessness that can befall a time for doing things new. Think of the change from focusing on saving one’s soul by collecting paintings of martyrs, to establishing studiolos of nature’s curiosities. What drove this?
An evolutionarily given driving force for fashion change
In my partly unsatisfied quest for the origins of the appearance of science proper, I therefore felt stimulated by something seemingly peripheral to science’s search for truth. It has to do with fashion. There are the vivid changes in fashion or haberdashery over increasingly short times towards 1600, perhaps triggered by the increasing living standards. Was it the ruff after all, the lace, the knickerbockers?
Well, perhaps not the ruff? But doesn’t there appear to exist a deeper driving force for this restlessness within the superficiality of fashion that might also direct us to understand the forces driving science? My thinking on it is that this drive, of individuals of a species to act within accepted norms, but to dramatically change them from time to time almost in unison, has an impetus for change programmed in, evolutionarily. And I started to see that this impetus for fashion change was harnessed, in a swing from the mainly spiritual interests of religion to the almost sudden new attention that natural objects drew. As a result, revelatory stands switched to “finding out” ones, when it came to the basics of existential understandings. I sense a teleonomy to it, an info directed development, one that critically depends on the info of a preceding state. To me, there is no ontological difference between an electron curling up within an outer shell of an atom, the geese taking to the south in fall, or the fact that science started in antiquity’s Greece and revived around 1600 in Europe. These are teleonomic happenings at various levels of complexity. They have a spring wound up that moves them forward. This, just as a reminder of the big picture we are after.
Concentrating on fashion may look shallow. But translated into the more spiritual attitudes, it may hold promise for parameterizing an explanation. When science first bloomed, it was a fashion, especially of rich men, and their artisans, to study natural phenomena and law. And they did it for the good of humankind, reminding at first sight of the idealistic aims of religion, which still morally supported early scientists.
As a group, you do things one way for a time and then it irks you to do them another way. We call it jumping on different bandwagons today. Just consider the enormity of this change in architecture between the Gothic and the Renaissance. There was no utilitarian need to change the architecture; in fact, the new one started out less ambitious, more personal in style, smaller, more intimate. In fact, it never decidedly outdid the old in sheer magnitude of effort. Basically, I think it was a question of whimsically changing tastes to the one of the “new” old, exemplified in antiquity.
Similarly, there is a fashion change during the Renaissance from religious artifacts or paintings to the peculiarity of the new studiolos with their natural curio collections. Attention just naturally flipped from paintings of tortured bodies of martyrs to portraits of well-off personalities, to city paintings and landscapes, from cabinets of crucifixes to crustaceans (of course the easy fashion flip has a nasty possibility in it of switching back. One notices present day forces for religious fundamentalism. I am especially afraid of a situation where science is employed for things like weapon production but not for informing on a good life. I fear some more science extinctions in our future).
Such an approach encourages us to look for signs of emerging scientific paradigms also in contemporary cultural trends and fashions, positing that today's cultural shifts could be harbingers of the next scientific revolution. In this respect the extraordinary stimulating influence of Artificial Intelligence comes to mind. Its constant presence for intellectual stimulation is a propitious sign for its potency to also influence scientific thinking.
Evolutionary basis of science and increased understanding
So, this focus on fashion finally does something for me: isn’t the new fashion of the studiolo at the heart of people wanting to know about nature’s laws? The Holy Roman emperor had several studiolo collections, nobility tried to collect too and find out about nature’s law in the process. And the fashion spread over Europe, as natural curios became desirable in many countries, just think of the tulip crash (it is still ongoing say in gardening; and yes, you are in this tradition if you maintain, say aquaria). It all kicked up in a competitive way and when science probing revealed some repeatable simple pauci-parameter laws, wasn’t it sealed? Don’t all our present comforts essentially go back to laws like the ones of the spring of the air and to the barometers it spawned and populated studiolos with?
I argue that the fashion for collecting curiosities in studiolos during the Renaissance—where the wealthy amassed artifacts, artworks, and scientific instruments—was not merely a display of wealth or curiosity but a manifestation of a changing worldview. This shift towards collection and categorization can be seen as parallel to the burgeoning desire to understand and systematize the natural world, which is foundational to the scientific method.
This idea challenges the conventional separation between cultural and scientific evolution, suggesting instead that they are deeply interconnected. It implies that to fully understand the genesis of scientific thought, one must also consider the broader cultural trends and transformations that accompany and possibly facilitate this intellectual development.
With nature’s revelation of its simple laws, so different from the ones of revealed religion, and so easy to prove and speak, it forced humans to participate in a new reward system of finding out and telling with skill. Truth became defined by what could be experimentally proved and survive in vigorous discussion and citation. Speak “your truth” became a new motivator, let it compete evolutionarily, is the meaning. Let truth be something relative that is allowed to change. It is no more than an attempt for a better simulacrum of the world after all. May the strongest truth win!
I sense evolution also in this change of the human mind, in us gaining new faculties and changes to our animal behavior, somewhat akin to solitary wasps morphing into socially stratified bee castes. Evolution can be successful when many mutations arise. Let a thousand flowers bloom! There will then be a selection for the expedient, for function amongst those, which in our case is truth telling by a professional caste of scientists. Often, when one of our ancestors spoke such new truth, it thrived in the telling and got selected and multiplied.
Overlook
In reconsidering the narrative of science's evolution, we have here visited many factors contributing to the miraculous 17th century science. We started with celebrating earlier the condemnation of Aristotle by the bishop of Notre Dame as a liberating effect concerning his coercive influence, and we continue here with Notre-Dame’s three magnificent rose windows. They speak of the extraordinary expertise of their artisans. To me those artisans are the most remarkable contribution of Medieval times to human history. I am grateful to them for this role perhaps even more than for their immortal gifts say of cathedrals and windows. The further education of artisans was a likely sentinel contributor to the rise of science around 1600. At that time, artisans could converse with learned people to achieve the practical in the quest for the theoretical. The fine glass equipment for experimentation is an example for Torricelli and his air pressure equipment. There were artisans assisting Boyle in his vacuum pumping.
Yes, there was also the impact of technological innovations, and the exchange of ideas across cultures. The invention of the printing press, for example, democratized access to knowledge, allowing a broader segment of society to engage with scientific ideas and debates. Yet still, something was missing in my view, and I was relieved when my mind turned to evolution principles to begin with. I sense a restive nature in sentient beings, a talent for exploration. And perhaps amusingly it also showed up in the increasingly elaborate haberdashery of the times. Sentient beings are having fashions for doing things, as animal research shows. And from time to time the fashions change, even if apparently for no ostensible reason. It is a driving force of evolution.
I now round out these thoughts with some references to earlier academic work in this direction.
Evolutionary Basis of Human Behaviors
Curiosity and Exploration: Humans' innate curiosity and drive to explore can be traced back to evolutionary advantages. These traits would have enabled our ancestors to find new resources and adapt to changing environments. For instance, the work of scientists like Charles Darwin and psychologists like George Loewenstein, who has theorized about the curiosity drive, can provide a framework for understanding how these traits have evolved and their role in the development of science.
Social Learning and Imitation: The ability to learn from others and imitate behaviors has been crucial in human evolution, allowing for the rapid transmission of knowledge and skills across generations. This social learning is not only a foundation for the development of culture but also for the scientific method itself, which builds upon shared observations and accumulated knowledge. Researchers like Michael Tomasello have extensively studied these aspects of human cognition and can offer insights into their evolutionary origins.
Tool Use and Technological Innovation: The evolutionary history of tool use and technological innovation reflects a growing understanding of the natural world and the application of that knowledge. From the earliest stone tools to the development of agriculture and the creation of complex machines, this trajectory highlights an evolving capacity for problem-solving and manipulation of the environment, which is at the heart of scientific inquiry.
Impact of Cultural Trends on the Development of Science
The Printing Press and Information Dissemination: The invention of the printing press in the 15th century revolutionized the way knowledge was shared. By making books more accessible, it allowed ideas to spread more quickly and widely, laying the groundwork for the Scientific Revolution. Elizabeth Eisenstein’s work on the printing press as an agent of change provides a comprehensive look at its impact on science and culture.
The Renaissance and Humanism: The cultural movement of the Renaissance, with its emphasis on humanism and a rediscovery of classical knowledge, fostered an environment that was ripe for scientific innovation. Scholars began to question traditional beliefs and investigate the natural world with a new sense of curiosity. The works of historians like Frances Yates or Paul Oskar Kristeller can provide detailed accounts of how these cultural trends influenced the development of science.
The Enlightenment and Rational Thought: The Enlightenment further promoted the value of empirical evidence and rational thought, principles that are foundational to the scientific method. This cultural trend towards questioning and critically examining the world encouraged a systematic approach to scientific inquiry. Reading historians and philosophers like Jonathan Israel or Peter Gay can give deeper insights into how Enlightenment ideals propelled scientific advancements.
And here are some thoughts for the future.
The Evolution of Curiosity and Continuous Learning
Adaptation to Rapid Technological Change: The evolutionary basis for human curiosity and the drive for exploration have positioned us to navigate and adapt to rapid technological changes. These innate tendencies will become even more crucial, suggesting a future where continuous learning and adaptability are not just valuable but essential traits for individuals and societies.
Collaborative and Interdisciplinary Research: The social learning and imitation that have been key to our evolutionary success point towards a future where collaborative and interdisciplinary approaches to knowledge become the norm.
Impact of Cultural Trends on Scientific Progress
Digital Revolution and Information Accessibility: Just as the printing press revolutionized access to knowledge and spurred scientific progress, the digital revolution is poised to have a similar impact. The future could see an even more democratized access to information, where the barriers to education and scientific knowledge are further lowered, enabling a broader segment of the global population to contribute to scientific discovery and innovation.
Globalization and Cross-Cultural Collaboration: The Renaissance and Enlightenment periods show how cultural movements can radically shift perspectives and open new avenues for exploration. Today, globalization and the ease of cross-cultural exchange promises to lead to a new era of scientific and intellectual renaissance, characterized by the fusion of ideas from diverse cultures and disciplines.
Future of Human Knowledge and Behavior
Integration of AI and Human Intelligence: The stimulating influence of artificial intelligence (AI) on intellectual activities hints at a future where AI and human intelligence are more deeply integrated. This will lead to an enhancement of human cognitive abilities, where AI assists in pattern recognition, data analysis, and even creative processes, potentially leading to unprecedented levels of innovation and understanding.
Ethical and Philosophical Evolution: As scientific understanding advances, so too will our ethical and philosophical frameworks. The future of human knowledge and behavior will involve a more nuanced understanding of ethics in science and technology, prompting shifts in societal values and behaviors. The discussion about the ethical use of CRISPR technology, for example, is just the tip of the iceberg.
Environmental and Societal Challenges: The evolutionary drive towards exploration and adaptation will be crucial as humanity faces environmental and societal challenges. Understanding our place in the natural world, and applying our knowledge towards sustainable living, will be significant themes. The future of human behavior may increasingly align with principles of sustainability and ecological stewardship, influenced by a deepened scientific understanding of our impact on the planet.
Outlook
Our mission basically is in creating within ourselves better cybernetic machinery for handling the physical chemical drives of the world. If there are good selection mechanisms within various competing truths, then we can better realize ourselves in this teleonomy (Elsewhere I have likened this to becoming better catalysts or dissipative structures. How about that for personal aim setting?) This teleonomy experienced a major move at the beginning of the 17th century by utilizing the best achievement of medieval times, their splendid artisans. But contrary to opinions for a real beginning of science around this time, I hold it to be a renaissance of Alexandria mainly. In searching for more basic origins, we will have therefore to go back to antiquity’s Greece. This is material that university science starts its quizzes with. Or think of the Antikythera mechanism with its at least 30 meshing bronze gears, dating back to around 100 BC. Discovered in 1901 this ancient Greek analog computer and orrery is used to predict astronomical positions and eclipses for calendrical purposes. Its complexity is considered at least a millennium ahead of its time, continued say with the Netherlanders, the missed millennium deplored in these essays. Yes, one can lose science with bad stewardship; calamity is always around the corner.
In closing I want now to muse about something that is perhaps the deepest evolutionary force of all: with the new know-how about nature, a whole world of provable facts has become available and laid open for enjoyment. With science discovering us, a new bliss of understanding settled on us; we overtly started to display the pleasures of a happy satiated baby. Just look at Baroque angel putties. Isn’t it like theories about mammals gaining conscience, and with it or because of it, enjoying life more? So, a feedback loop came into being: the more conscient, the happier (Nicholas Humphrey’s Beautiful Theory of Mind | The New Yorker). This enjoyment is perhaps one of the most promising expectations for the future of humanity. And this enjoyment is deeply evolutionary.
For me the arc of sentient beings extends to a development in humans of a ravenous appetite for knowledge, evolving along a cooperative capability of enjoying intellectual stimulation. So, evolutionary principles took a hold of humanity, we started to smile the enjoying smile of reason; and becoming conscient of it, we lifted anchor and are still sailing, sweetly enjoying the enjoying of our times of understanding.
𓆤 𓆤 𓆤 𓆤 may the beelines never end 𓆤 𓆤 𓆤 𓆤