Modern pharmacy is a science based profession. But that is a fairly recent development for the thousands of years pharmacy was around before that there was plenty of measuring and mixing, but no testing of hypothesis with experiment, no science involved.
I believe lots of modern Pharmacy comes from years of ancient Apothecary and actual early 18-19 century medicinal formularies. And Granny witches who foraged for things their forebearers found that worked.
Something must’ve been learned in all that time.
Even without the modern way of experimenting, trials and paper writing, the spoken record eventually got written and taught.
Then you get many drugs with modern equivalents.
I’d call that iterating over the same steps, but your point is a great one. Although it’s possible to do science as a one-off experiment, in practice, good science is done over and over again. Which goes along well with good documentation.
Just documenting things is actually what a lot of science is. Before someone can look at all the data and figure out any underlying principles and patterns, somebody also has to actually collect that data. And they often aren’t the same person.
Putting it all together I am thinking that the combined process of observation, measurement, documentation (even mental notes), hypothesis, test, reiterated and with data based revisions, done either individually or collectively even between generations, is the minimum for “science.”
None alone is. Measurement alone, to decide what portion of the kill goes to the head of the hunting party and which sacrifice to the god of the forest, for example, is not enough to be science.
At what point in human cultural development do you think that occurred? Clearly agriculture required that process I think. Did early hunter gatherer groups engage in that process?
My initial thought had been that science was not an immediate human cultural feature, but on reflection maybe the process of learning to create tools, experimenting with different knapping techniques, predicting what would happen hit here or there and revising the approach based on the observed results, developing early technology, counts?
I think that a distinction should be made between using science and doing science. For a simple example, a test kitchen tries out recipes, and does experiments with slightly more or less of various ingredients, or shorter or longer cooking times, or different temperatures, or different method for cooking or mixing, or whatever, always documenting the results of all of these many combinations. They’re doing science.
Then, they publish a cookbook. The cookbook does not include all of the data on all of the permutations they tried, just the ones that worked the best (maybe with an occasional note of “If you like yours a little crispier, then set the temperature higher”, or something like that). A home cook buys the book, and uses the recipe, and puts it in the oven at 375º for 23 minutes, because that’s what the book says to do. That home cook is using science, but they’re not doing science.
My question is about the former and any society that achieves the latter has already achieved the former.
But the distinction is important. With our society as an example we have many who use science, often without appreciating that, and relatively fewer who are any part of the process of doing science. And fewer yet who appreciate that what are doing is science.
Several science fiction scenarios have a premise of people continuing to use science but no longer doing, being actively stopped from, doing science, or at least very limited in the science they can do. Silo for example.
I think basic science is unavoidable for a sapient species. Unless basic needs are being met by genetic programming or rote memorization, the species as a whole is making informed decisions based on observations. That is science, even if it’s not formalized.
You’re right that the home cook is not doing the science of developing recipes, assuming they are following the recipes precisely. But unless they are doing the recipes in book order, they are doing the science of selecting which recipe to prepare based on what they and their household enjoy cooking and eating.
You mean the process of measuring?, that is far older than civilization:
If you mean expanding that into actual science, by hypothesis and experiment. Then you have to wait until the scientific revolution:
And it was long time after that before it made its way into areas like medicine in a way that made it more likely to heal you than kill you.
Agree, a distinction between advancing understanding, that is: learning, and applying or benefiting from those new advanvements.
Edit: for example, my routine screening MRI is full of science, some quite recent, but it’s unlikely my results will advance the state of the art of MRI or other medical tech.
Yes.
Why would you exclude the hypothesis that hitting one rock with another might produce a cutting edge, and by experimentation determine which rocks hit with which rocks where to produce best results, from being “science”?
I think of “mixing and measuring” as a tool of science, but it is not itself science. Just because you are mixing and measuring doesn’t mean you are doing science.
IMO no because that not how artisans work. They work on traditions, not innovation. The idea that innovating is a good thing for artesans (or anyone else) is recent thing. In the millennia before that an artisan was considered a good one if they can make a hand axe, or pot, or sword in exactly the same way their father and grandfather did. Its anachronistic to think of innovation as a good thing in past eras.
IMHO, science consists of three parts.
- Collect data either through experiment or observation, preferably the former, although not if you are an astronomer.
- Try to find a hypothesis that explains all those data.
- Use the hypothesis to extrapolate beyond the given data.
Rinse and repeat until you are successful in step 3.
Consider Newton. He sees an apple fall (at least pretend he did) and begins to wonder why. He knows that everything falls unless something, like wings flapping exert a counter-force to prevent it. Eventually he realized that the same force would keep the moon going around the earth or the earth around the sun and announces his inverse square law of gravity. Incidentally, the inverse square law is the only one that allows elliptical orbits and Newton knew that fact.
By contrast, consider Aristotle. He also observed things falling and he noticed that a feather falls slower than a rock and concluded that the rate lf falling is a function of the weight of the body. Did he ever go to step 3? Obviously not. It is his failure to go to step 3 that makes it not science, not the wrong conclusion.
To answer the OP, measuring and mixing is not science unless it is not used for one of the steps above, usually 1, but it might be 3. Making a recipe is not science; it is the application of science.
Suppose you are a baker. You make bread every day. One day you happened to use boiled water in mixing your bread and it doesn’t rise. Hmm. Maybe there is something in the unboiled water that helps the bread to rise. So you try to test this. One thing you might try is saving some of the old dough and find it rises even faster (and tastes better, but that is another question). So you conjecture that something is growing in the rising dough, Since this was before microscopes, you can’t really test this easily. Regardless, this is science.
But someone did the innovation, the experimentation, the science, to create that axe. Yes many generations then just used the science, rigidly adhering to the recipe, no additional experiments done, at least on purpose.
The science may have not been a regular thing, not a cultural fixture, but wasn’t it still there, at least intermittently?
So when Eratosthenes demonstrated that the earth was round, by careful measurements, he wasn’t doing science?
Yes, that’s science, since it’s a calculation, not just an observation.
So a measurement that doesn’t answer “why” is science?
Of course it was science. Observations (e.g. the fact that the sun hit different maximum altitude) led him to conjecture that the earth was round and then he predicted that he could calculate the diameter by taking measurements proved accurate.
I feel what you’re describing is a form of engineering not science. Engineering is when you learn that if you follow this process you will get these results.
Science asks why this process produces these results and attempts to find the answers via testable experimentation.