A pathway toward science
Human cultures need mechanisms of conservation and reproduction. In almost all of them, it is possible to observe practices of gathering people in groups to tell and retell origin myths. Origin myths are stories about the creation of the world and humanity (Frazer, 1911). They speak about the beginning, about creation, about the transformations of the universe, and about the evolution of things and human lineages until the current formation of society and the world. The legends of the Scandinavian Edda, the book of Genesis, the stories of Greek or Tupi mythology (Lagrou et al., 2011). All these are origin stories. They describe important points about each people’s worldview. And each society has one or a few stories that serve as common references, which, at the same time, connect people and establish a system of common ideas and a matrix to construct value and reality judgments that keep the social fabric cohesive and organized.
We live today in a society whose everyday life is directly and significantly influenced by technological tools created by our traditions and technical innovations. Like many humans before us, we use and benefit from our ingenuity to use what we know about the world to transform it into a resource that meets our needs and desires. We are not the first and possibly will not be the last to use our capacities for observation, abstraction, and understanding of patterns, prediction, and attribution of causes to operate on nature in a way that makes it more receptive to our existence while transforming landscapes, projecting our imagination and desires onto the terrain, river paths, forest cover, and natural populations in general. Creating a new land in our image and likeness, albeit in an ephemeral way.
Science as a means of transforming nature has accompanied us as a society and as a species for a long time (Andery et al., 1988). We have been planting what we want to eat for several millennia, just as we have been building dams or reservoirs. We have known the cycles of the seasons and the paths of the stars in the sky for the same scale of time, and we have done this independently in various places, from the Mayan people of Central America to the ancient Chinese and Greeks. Like a child who looks at the sky, naming and telling stories about the clouds, we project meanings and significance onto nature. Similarly, we use nature as a source to build, adapt, invent, and define the shape and rhythms of our individual and collective lives, making things parts of ourselves in the form of tools, technologies, or simply art.
Science is, to some extent, an endeavor that various or all human cultures have embarked on building. And yet, not all human cultures have constructed a worldview that is skeptical by principle. Modern science has brought something new to the cultural mix that has persisted with us for at least five centuries. Something whose marks have allowed us to observe the depths of our planet and the edges of the universe, almost at the same speed with which it allows us to understand the impact that our existence and our new ways of living and relating have left on the natural world in recent centuries, in the form of the decline of all living systems and natural populations.
The ancient Egyptians invented a system of measurement and estimation for engineering and agriculture, but — as far as we know — continued to worship their gods and explain the world through the creation of Atum, the god of Heliopolis. The Greeks profoundly influenced Western culture, leaving us a legacy of geometry, taxonomy, and philosophy, as well as their mythology and religious and mystical traditions. The Chinese built the most technologically advanced civilization for over a thousand years and coexisted with different worldviews. Mysticism is perhaps as old as science if we define it as the practice of observation and manipulation of nature among human societies.
However, modern science is not just a practice of technological innovation and intervention in the natural world. It has constituted itself as a transnational, multiethnic, cosmopolitan, and skeptical institution. Contrary to what we see in many introductory science books, Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries was not a welcoming continent for the flourishing of science. The years of the bubonic plague plunged Europe into a period of greater isolation, and Luther’s theses would mark the growth of reactionary waves from the Catholic Church, which would persecute any expression of secular and skeptical thought regarding the doctrines of Rome.
Paracelsus, a Swiss physician and scholar who lived at the turn of the 14th and 15th centuries, had his life marked by these events. Unlike the academics of the early 21st century who have access to virtually infinite information at their fingertips with digital devices connected to the internet, Paracelsus, despite having studied at the University of Ferrara (in present-day Italy), had to travel across various territories of Europe, Asia (in present-day Turkey), and possibly Africa (in present-day Egypt) to gain access to classical texts and to converse with specialists on diverse topics ranging from chemistry to physiology, from medicine to taxonomy (Strathern, 2002). The fragmentation of knowledge hindered the ability to integrate information and compare distinct theoretical systems. Due to his disruptive doctrines in relation to the classical ideas of Plato and Aristotle, Paracelsus was compared to Martin Luther, the theologian and leader of the Protestant Reformation. On this matter, Paracelsus once responded, “I leave it to Luther to defend what he says, and I will be responsible for what I say. What you wish for Luther, you also wish for me: you wish for both of us the fire.”
Galileo Galilei was another who suffered from the persecution of scientific ideas (Brecht, 1977). Galileo became renowned on the Italian peninsula as an investigator, a thinker, or natural philosopher (as they were called at the time) dedicated to comparisons and experiments. Public tests and texts that reached people through clandestine booksellers, often distributed by Galileo himself as a way to provide access to scientific content, made him an eminent figure and a respected scholar among the courts of the Italian principalities of the time. It was as a tutor to the children of nobles that Galileo built his career and sustained himself throughout his life. A noble profession of educator, but one that depended directly on good relations with the aristocrats.
When Galileo invested in testing Aristotle’s mechanics and demonstrated the limits of Aristotelian predictions and theories, his work caught the attention of many for opposing one of the most influential classical theorists promoted by the Catholic Church (Andery, 1988). Galileo’s fame highlighted the contrast between his experimental methods and the Church’s doctrine of authority. In a world where the notion of proof and truth was distinct from ours, it may be difficult to imagine the difficulty Galileo placed himself in. However, when he ventured into the study of astronomy, where he discovered celestial bodies, questioned the distances between stellar objects, and confronted the geocentric doctrine defended by the Church, Galileo ended up being confronted by the Pope himself regarding his ideas and was coerced to abdicate them in favor of a public manifesto of faith that condemned him to house arrest until the end of his life. In his play “Life of Galileo,” Bertolt Brecht (Brecht, 1977) defines the goal of science in the words of his Galileo as “not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.”
Science is, in this definition, a beacon that helps us identify the limits and errors in what we know, to help build new knowledge only on foundations that support it. This definition, guided by the ability to recognize empirical limits — that is, the limits of knowledge capable of being proven through experience and the senses — allowed science to free itself from the doctrinal logic of the monastic thought of the Catholic Church. A religious doctrine is based on faith, the belief that — by premise or a priori — an idea is correct. When we use a doctrine, it seeks elements in the world that help strengthen it and show it as true. It operates on what is today called confirmation bias. The idea is that we seek things in the world that legitimize our prejudices and beliefs before trying to discover or test if they have any factual basis. Galileo’s logic is the logic of experimentation. It aims to attack and try to dismantle and disqualify in every possible way a certain idea about how the world works, and only after failing to prove something as wrong do we accept that fact as something that endures, that resists, and therefore cannot be ignored. Experimentation follows a logic that may seem counterintuitive and non-obvious.
It is precisely this turn that distinguishes science within the body of human knowledge tools. Its methods of testing and doubting are what compel us to maintain respect for the unknown and adopt a posture of humility in recognizing our own ignorance and the challenges and difficulties in seeking the truth about how nature works. René Descartes would construct an essay to demonstrate the value of doubt as an essential method for all science.
In the 17th century, Isaac Newton would use the findings of Galileo, others, and himself to revolutionize the field of natural philosophy in the branch of the physics of bodies. Mechanics and astronomy would rediscover Galileo’s results, and in this repetition after systematic testing — that is, a testing program designed to prove a set of situations or variables — the skeptical science, which demands that we use doubt as a criterion, is so challenging that even Newton, a prolific physicist, was inclined towards the mysticism of alchemy, a practice that used methods of natural sciences to discover the fanciful elixir of life, as well as to obtain gold from any material. It was only about a century and a half after Newton that Antoine Lavoisier (in the 18th century) would introduce the principle that would leave the ideas underpinning alchemy to the past of science (Strathern, 2002): “in nature, nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything is transformed.” Meanwhile, Dmitri Mendeleev, a Russian chemist, would create, in the second half of the 19th century, the system of representing chemical elements in order of magnitude in mass and quantity of elementary particles, the periodic table of elements.
The diversity and transition of chemical elements demonstrated a nature in transformation. Various geological and fossil findings pointed to an Earth in transformation. The extent and role of this transformation remained open. The expansion of international trade in the 18th and 19th centuries would increase the importance of comparative studies and the emergence of Natural History Museums and large collections, archives, and Natural History Collections that would lead to intense debate about the possibility of living organisms also transforming over generations and eras. Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace would identify the first known mechanism of this transformation, evolution by natural selection, whose social impact would be profound. Gregor Mendel, a Swiss monk, would provide the foundations for how this transformation would be possible over generations without dissolving old and new characteristics, but still explaining diversity in light of reproductive mechanisms; genetics and biology were born as a unified science of life.
The last great frontier of natural science would be the science that deals with human actions said to be intelligent, moral, and/or spiritual. Psychology at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century would demonstrate the rules that organized human experience into distinct, predictable, and controllable functions. The psychophysics of Weber and Fechner would show how performance curves repeat across sensory modalities and how their variations follow mathematical principles that are, at the same time, individual in their specific characteristics and generalizable to the human species. Phenomena of learning, intelligence, problem-solving, and creativity would be revealed as phenomena that follow specific rules given the present and past environmental contingencies (in the history of each organism).
Modern science has revised and reinvented the idea that the phenomena of nature are driven by personal or divine wills. In other words, it was born as anti-teleological and showed how much of what we usually define as purpose and intention are ways of projecting our own personal and cultural biases onto the organization of nature. The impact of this revision transformed human relationships in areas related to religion, spirituality, justice, economy, education, health, and many other fields. From the enthusiasm of the invention of vaccines and the steam engine to the pessimism of the polarized post-World War II world and the nuclear terror, science had to face enemies from both within and outside itself, as, being a human institution, it is not immune to the influence of politics and the historical and cultural situations of its time. Eugenics and the persecution linked to an idea of racial purity showed this in its worst form through Nazism and the Holocaust.
In this 21st century, we are experiencing a new enthusiasm for science that comes from the revolution in digital technologies and the computational power we have rapidly achieved in recent decades, which we did not have a century ago. Where will it take us? This is a question we have relatively little time to answer. And we need to answer it well, as the challenge is unprecedented. We have never been so certain of the enormous power we have achieved, which can destroy us in the form of climatic and/or humanitarian catastrophes.
The challenge of science today is to revolutionize human nature itself, reforming our ways of organizing, self-managing, making decisions, and harmonizing these practices with the construction of a new balance in our relationships with natural systems. If the crisis is unprecedented, we have at hand a tool that was little more than an idea a century ago: neuroscience.
A century ago, we knew little more than the fundamental structure of the neuron and were discovering the structure of synapses. Today, we have invented tomography, MRI, and a multitude of other methods for observing, recording, and intervening in the human nervous system. With these, we have discovered the molecular and cellular mechanisms of various diseases and health conditions, understand more about what leads us to age in healthy or pathological ways, and to some extent, how to prevent and treat these conditions. We know more about the connection between areas, being able to design bionic prosthetics that translate the world for the deaf and blind or control bionic limbs. We have made futurism our contemporary reality. And we are reinventing our utopias and dystopias in light of the world we have invented in the last 70–80 years.
The place of science is at the center and forefront of all this transformation. But it is still uncertain whether we will be able to be transformed by it at the necessary speed to restore the planet and care for our civilization before we suffer irreversible disruptions. The time is to learn in order to fight. But this is not new. Science invented the world, and we invented science. We made it survive and improve, and it has given us unprecedented and unimaginable knowledge. Today is the time to rediscover the paths that brought us here in order to do things differently and better. If you have come this far, I believe you have taken an important step toward charting the path of science in light of the responsibilities of our time. Welcome.
Reference
Brecht. B. (1977). A vida de Galileu. São Paulo: Abril Editora.
Bourdieu, P. (2004). Usos sociais da ciência: Por uma sociologia clínica do campo científico. São Paulo: Editora Unesp.
Frazer, J. (1911). O Ramo de Ouro. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar Editores, 1982
Lagrou, E. et al. (2011). Do mito grego ao mito ameríndio: uma entrevista sobre Lévi-Strauss com Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Sociol. Antropol, 1(2). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1590/2238-38752011v121
Complementary References
Andery et al., (1988). Para Compreender a Ciência. São Paulo: EDUC.
Russel, B. (2013). História do Pensamento Ocidental, vol 1. Rio de Janeiro Saraiva. Publicado Originalmente em 1945.
Russel, B. (2013). História do Pensamento Ocidental, vol 2. Rio de Jqneiro Saraiva. Publicado Originalmente em 1945.
Strathern, P. (2002). O sonho de Mendeleiev. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar Editora.
