What is science?

Sapiens, by Yuval Harari, is subtitled A brief history of humankind, and that ' s exactly what it is. It ' s mostly stuff I already knew in broad strokes, although obviously it has a lot of specific detail and illustrative examples I wasn ' t familiar with. I don ' t agree with everything he says -- for one thing, he seems not to have read the Tanakh, which is a bit surprising, and I do not accept his characterization of liberal humanism -- but it pulls together the major strands and important events of history compellingly and it ' s quite illuminating.Obviously, if you want to get compellingly illuminated, read the book. But what I want to note here is the fundamental importance of ideology in driving overt events that most history writing is about. Underlying the European conquest of much of the world that started in the 16th Century, in Harari ' s telling, was, in a nutshell, the acceptance of ignorance and the quest to fill it in with knowledge. Obviously, as people spread out from Africa and occupied new territory they had to gain immense amounts of new information and develop innovative ways of life. But once they got settled down, at least since the neolithic revolution, they mostly decided they knew everything they needed to.  Technological innovation was very slow, and resulted from small discoveries by individual artisans or farmers -- a slightly better way of doing things, transfer of an application from one realm to another. While there were bursts of i...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs