So in a previous thread, I lauded Mr. Stephen Jay Gould for his essay-based science writing. Just wonderful stuff.
Well, I have been pondering a point that SJG made in one of his first two collections - probably both actually: That Darwin had been reading Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (along with, more famously, Malthus on populations) prior to crystallizing his thinking on his Theory of Evolution.
The minute SJG desribed this - how Smith’s theories on a *laissez faire * capitalistic system leads to a survival-of-the-fittest shaking out of competition and evolution of the market, I heard one word in my head: a resounding “Duh!” I mean - it makes so much sense that, once Smith articulated his capitalistic form of natural selection that the right, broad-thinking person would see how this might apply in other areas, in Darwin’s case, biology. Marrying natural selection with random variation - so the variation is the “power source” and natural selection is the “steering wheel” leading to directed evolution so species adapt to conform to the needs of their local environments - seems like a great, clear connection to me. I would NEVER have come up with it on my own - but really respect the clarity with which Darwin was able to adapt Smith’s thinking to his (Darwin’s) field.
Whadday think about this connection? What other connections would you cite? And yeah, I fully expect folks to cite that PBS series “Connections”…
It feels like the part of your body that your consciousness most directly occupied is right behind your eyes. That’s where your brain is. I wonder if the brain has anything to do with consciousness?
I always thought the same, but when you watch kids, you find out that it’s incredibly NOT intuitive. The basic idea - hypothesis, test, results, change hypothesis, test again, etc. - is, but what is very hard for kids to grasp is the idea of changing only *one *variable at a time. If a kid is trying to bake soft cookies, you can walk them through a number of likely variables: temperature, ingredients, cooking time. But what they won’t “get” without a lot of prompting is that baking with butter at 350 for 20 minutes and then trying vegetable oil at 275 for 40 minutes tells you absolutely nothing in the end. Even if you get different results, you don’t know why! In fact, I know lots of adults for whom this is still a mystery.
So having only one experimental variable is a huge bit of “seems like it should be obvious, but for some reason isn’t”.
My contribution to the OP, though, is agriculture. It seems so obvious now that if you make a special spot for growing things and give them the things they need to grow, that your food gathering will be easier! But it took people tens of thousands of years of wandering around spending a ton of calories just getting food before they figured out they could bring the food to them. (Of course, a lot of bad things happened as a result of this discovery, but that’s another story.)
Nowadays we emphasize the difference between Hunter-Gatherers and agriculturalists. But there are/were plenty of people who can are sometimes described as “horticulturalists”, like the Yanamamo of the Amazon basin that farm plantains but get most of their other food from hunting and gathering. That is, they clear some land, burn the slash, plant some crops, then come back when the crop is ripe, the rest of the time hunting and gathering.
So there was probably a long period of proto-agriculture before the first permanent agricultural villages. And what prompts full-time agriculture isn’t that the agriculturalists do less work, it’s that the population density has grown so much that there isn’t much free land to H&G in, so your temporary fields where you used to just scatter seeds and come back 6 months later to see how much came up become more and more important and intensively managed. And it used to be that you could plant crops anywhere, and if your neighbor wanted to plant crops he’d just pick some other site. But with more people you have competition for the best sites…and now one guy “owns” that really good crop planting site, and if anyone else tries to plant crops there he’ll bash them on the head.
You know, I’ve often wondered about this. How much of your perception of “where’s the ‘me’ in my body” is determined by the fact that you know that your brain is responsible for thinking?
Consider the factoid (dunno about the truth of it, though) that the ancient Greeks considered the brain as an organ just for cooling the blood. If so, where did they think their “me” resided? The heart? The stomach? A more diffuse whole body soul? If you were brought up to believe that your consciousness resided in (say) your left kidney, would you “feel” it in your side when you’re thinking?
That fact, coupled with the high stress of WW II and the shortage of meat in wartime Britain and the lower rates of heart attacks there during the war led to the conclusion that something in meat also caused heart attacks.
That a cumbersome device for math would eventually enable this message board.
Well it’s not intuitive, because “dirt” doesn’t actually equal disease. Living in super congested conditions with poor sanitation equals a higher probability of contagious disease/plague etc., but this was clear to many people as far back as the Romans even if they didn’t know the specfic disease mechanism.
Something a bit closer to the OP, and probably running from Evolutionary theory.
He ended up being mostly concerned with education. “Ya know, maybe instead of teaching kids to just do know their ABCs, and how to use a slide rule, we should try and challenge them to think about stuff.”
Well, I could have written pages about puerperal fever and the resistance of 19th-century surgeons to the idea of basic sanitation of their hands and instruments, but I think “dirt = disease” captures the concept nicely.
To sum up…there is no one method to do science. Different science questions demand different strategies. There may be some similarities, but they are not identical.
They had figured that out by the Middle Ages. But they figured that what made you sick was the smell of bad air, so dirt you couldn’t smell was OK.
That’s only obvious if you’re having sex on the order of once a month. If you’ve had sex more often than that, how are you going to know which time resulted in pregnancy?
That one isn’t obvious even today, because so many of the cues by which we judge someone’s intelligence are culturally biased. Accents, dress, speech patterns, etc, are all affected by culture, and are used by many people to judge intelligence.
Also, you look dumb if you are visiting somewhere with a different culture and you can’t do something that’s obvious and simple to the natives, but that you might never have learned about. There is a Danish couple in Copenhagen that probably had a good laugh about how dumb Americans are, because when Mr. Neville and I were on our first night there, we had to ask them what the 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4 sizes of beer on the menu were.