Why did science take so long?

[Baby Astronaut]

I'm not so certain. Superstition itself could be listed as one more answer to the thread's question.

 

However, I do agree about how a superstitious ritual could've eventually become a strong tradition, which maybe happened to coincide with beneficial precautions or methodologies.

 

But the same adherence to tradition might have kept ignorance flourishing and even discouraged/punished new thoughts, ideas, or discoveries. Thus in the end, both instances probably evened out along the results.

[padren]

I'm not so certain. Superstition itself could be listed as one more answer to the thread's question.

 

However, I do agree about how a superstitious ritual could've eventually become a strong tradition, which maybe happened to coincide with beneficial precautions or methodologies.

 

But the same adherence to tradition might have kept ignorance flourishing and even discouraged/punished new thoughts, ideas, or discoveries. Thus in the end, both instances probably evened out along the results.

 

I am not sure if I was unclear - that was my entire point about superstition - that it stunted scientific discovery, and reinforced stagnancy, thus being another reason why science took so long.

 

The other points about superstition was simply to say that superstition, while having no scientific value, did serve a function in aiding ancient people's ability to survive, with an effectiveness only recently trumped by modern science. As beneficial as it was of course, it had no basis in any real understanding of the world in which we live.

[swansont]

swansont

I think I agree with you that agriculture was a necessary prerequisite. It meant stable, settled societies. Led to villages, towns and cities.

 

A mobile, nomadic culture could not carry the implements for written records. Imagine a primitive group who relied on slabs of wood and charcoal pens to write. Now imagine a genius writing down his scientific observations and making a book to carry. Kind of impossible. However, it could happen in a settlement.

 

That leads me to the question : why did it take so long to develop agriculture. I note the 'coincidence' between the development of agriculture and the end of the last glaciation period, but this should not affect tropical human societies, and most of humanity should have been tropical. Why did they not develop agriculture? After all, agriculture spread through the entire world, including the tropics.

 

Something investigated in the Jared Diamond book I mentioned. The tropics aren't as well-suited to growing the wide variety of crops as in temperate zones.

[Baby Astronaut]

Something to consider are things like the Antikythera Mechanism. (wiki)

 

The device is remarkable for the level of miniaturization and for the complexity of its parts, which is comparable to that of 18th century clocks. It has over 30 gears, although Michael Wright has suggested as many as 72 gears, with teeth formed through equilateral triangles. When a date was entered via a crank, the mechanism calculated the position of the Sun, Moon, or other astronomical information such as the location of other planets.

 

There have been many losses which slowed the advance of knowledge. One of the most devastating was likely the Library of Alexandria's demise four separate times. The library's purpose had been to collect all the world's knowledge. Then poof! It's gone in a blaze of fire. On multiple occasions spread through a few centuries.

 

It's been said that if all the knowledge contained within the library had survived, then Columbus's first landing would've been on the moon. (History Channel)

[SkepticLance]

To Swansont

Your comment about agriculture in the tropics is a bit puzzling. My experience is pretty much limited to South Pacific islands (mainly Fiji) and to tropical Australia. However, I have mixed with 'primitive people' in both Fiji and Papua New Guinea and seen how they grow their food, and it is really easy.

 

The easiest crop of the lot is cassava, which is a staple in Africa as well as the South Pacific. Harvesting and replanting are done almost simultaneously, and in today's world requires just a machete. The whole plant - edible roots and all - is harvested simply by pulling it out of the soil. A single sweep of the machete drops the roots into a basket, and the stalk is then cut into about 4 lengths. Each length is pushed into the ground and sprouts, growing new leaves and eventually produces a new mass of edible roots. Without a machete a primitive person might use a stone edge to achieve the same thing.

 

This crop is so easy to grow, and produces so much food that it is hard to see why agriculture could not arise in the tropics. Slightly more difficult, but still relatively easy, is breadfruit, taro, yams, sweet potato and gourds.

 

Growing wheat, for example, in a temperate zone, is much harder, requiring more expertise, skill, and just plain hard work.

[Reaper]

@SkepticLance,

 

The current breeds that they have are very easy to plant and harvest, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they were easy to domesticate.

 

Crops such as wheat were very easy to domesticate initially because they were very adaptable and required little effort to plant. As a result they were domesticated very early on and could be used to support a very large population later on...

 

Along with the fact that they had a very convenient season pattern and had a higher nutrient yield per acre too, unlike some of the crops native in Java to give an example.

 

 

The time it takes for civilizations to emerge does largely depend on the available domestic food sources. The Middle East not only had very easy crops and livestock, but they had more of them than any other continent. As such they were able to build civilizations very early on.

[D H]

The time it takes for civilizations to emerge does largely depend on the available domestic food sources. The Middle East not only had very easy crops and livestock, but they had more of them than any other continent. As such they were able to build civilizations very early on.

Livestock is one of the key differences between Africa and the Asia. Horses and cattle were amenable to domestication. Their African counterparts, zebras and cape buffalo are not. They are particularly vicious animals.

[SkepticLance]

Reaper

I am not expert on tropical crops, but I know that some were easy from the very beginning. Breadfruit grows wild with a fruit that is about the size of a softball, and is rich in starch. It is easy to plant, and requires little tending. Captain Bligh on the Bounty came to the South Pacific with the express purpose of collecting breadfruit seedlings to transplant to the Caribbean, to plant so that cheap and abundant food for slaves was available.

 

Sweet potato came from South America, and is so hardy that it grows very well here in temperate New Zealand. Even better in the tropics. You can grow a whole new plant by simply burying a portion of a sweet potato in the ground.

 

Taro also grows in NZ, though less well than in the tropics. In Fiji, they just replant the green top to get a new crop. Bananas grow well in the wild, and can be replanted by breaking off the buds that grow round the base, and planting them.

 

DH's point about livestock is probably a very good one. However, in the Fiji that I know well, livestock was never used. Agriculture consisted of planting tropical crops by hand with crude stone tools, and this practise was well developed, and very easy, well before the first contact with Europeans. Until then, Fiji was a stone age culture.

[Reaper]

Reaper

I am not expert on tropical crops, but I know that some were easy from the very beginning. Breadfruit grows wild with a fruit that is about the size of a softball, and is rich in starch. It is easy to plant, and requires little tending. Captain Bligh on the Bounty came to the South Pacific with the express purpose of collecting breadfruit seedlings to transplant to the Caribbean, to plant so that cheap and abundant food for slaves was available.

 

Sweet potato came from South America, and is so hardy that it grows very well here in temperate New Zealand. Even better in the tropics. You can grow a whole new plant by simply burying a portion of a sweet potato in the ground.

 

Taro also grows in NZ, though less well than in the tropics. In Fiji, they just replant the green top to get a new crop. Bananas grow well in the wild, and can be replanted by breaking off the buds that grow round the base, and planting them.

 

I'm not disputing that they are "easy" or "hard" to grow, especially with their present genes and characteristics. What I am arguing is that they may have taken a very long time to domesticate. Not all the foods that we take for granted were all domesticated at the same time.

 

For example, while wheat was grown by humans as early as 9000 B.C.E., strawberries were domesticated as recently as the middle ages. It took a full ten thousand years since the agricultural revolution before we could easily grow strawberries for consumption.

 

Now it turns out that in New Guinea there was a crop (Taro?) that was domesticated very early on, but that remained their only staple crop until much later. Yams and other South American crops didn't come into the Pacific islands until much later, during historical times. And whether or not the islands were good for farming determined their primary food supply. Add to the fact that they didn't have many plants that could be domesticated easily, and the fact that there were no large (or any) animals that could be domesticated (New Guinea did have domestic pigs, but they were very small...), and it would be very difficult to reach the conditions necessary for civilization to begin.

 

 

In the Middle East, on the other hand, they already had a large number of easily domesticable plants very early on, and it was only a matter of time before those crops diffused along the Eurasian continent in similar climates.

Edited January 23, 2009 by Reaper

[SkepticLance]

Again,

I state that I am not an expert here, but I do have enough knowledge to make me a bit sceptical of the idea that agriculture could not appear in the tropics. I know that polynesians reached South America a long time ago, since sweet potatoes (from South America) spread across the Pacific a long time ago. They came to NZ with the first polynesian settlers in 1200 AD. This was way before the first contact with Europeans.

 

I suspect that the first 'agriculture' might have been the coconut. While this did not reach Africa till recent times, it was widespread across the Pacific and Asia many thousands of years ago. Coconuts reproduce with floating fruit that germinate when thrown up on a beach. It is really easy to pick up one of the incredibly abundant germinating fruits and carry it inland, and put it down to grow into a tree in a more convenient location. This level of cultivation might not be termed 'agriculture' but is so simple that it probably happened throughout Asia way before agriculture as we know it was invented.

[D H]

Why are you arguing so, Lance?

 

Agriculture to the extent that enabled the development of cities developed around grain. Not breadfruit, not sweet potatoes, not bananas. Grain stores for a long period of time. Sweet potatoes - a few weeks under ideal (cool and dry) conditions. Bananas?

 

It didn't take me long to find this: Breadfruit Origins, Diversity, and Human-Facilitated Distribution (pdf). Breadfruit was domesticated about 3500 years ago. Sweet potatoes are an even more recent addition to the limited Polynesian suite of domesticated plants (~2000 years ago).

 

Agriculture grew in the Levant and China because both regions held a large number of useful species susceptible to domestication and because the human population grew large enough to make the hunter-gatherer lifestyle untenable (our ancestors killed off the wild game).

 

Many of the internet searches lead me to the book recommended by Swansont in post #13, Guns, Germs And Steel by Jared Diamond.

[SkepticLance]

DH

I am not arguing. I am quite aware of what the historical data suggests as to the origin of agriculture. I am aware that the early records are of cultivation of grain. I wonder, though, why agriculture did not begin in the tropics? I see no reason to bar it. Certainly, the potential crops existed there.

 

It is probable that agriculture in temperate regions was prevented by extreme weather during the last glaciation period. The beginning of agriculture seems to have been about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, when the world warmed. Yet the climate must have been suitable in tropical regions right through the previous 100,000 years. Why did agriculture not begin in the warmer parts of the world? I do not believe I have yet seen a credible reason offered. I would be interested to know why.

[Mr Skeptic]

A good read on this topic is Guns, Germs And Steel by Jared Diamond

 

I watched his movies; they were excellent.

 

Basically, Europeans were lucky in various ways. They had a few grains, which are excellent food and can be stored for extremely long periods, reducing famines. They had good farm animals, not only for eating but also for heavy work. Since the animals could eat inedible plants, they were extra food, and since they could help farm, also more extra food/leisure time. The continent is very wide at the same latitude, making travel easier and also people could take the plants and animals. The close association with farm animals gave us many diseases, which were absolutely lethal to others (eg native Americans).

---

Merged post follows:

Consecutive posts merged

It took 60,000 years after that bottleneck for the population to grow geometrically from 15,000 or so to 1 million 10,000 years ago at the onset of agriculture.

 

Enough to make one decent sized modern city

---

Merged post follows:

Consecutive posts merged

The easiest crop of the lot is cassava,

...

Slightly more difficult, but still relatively easy, is breadfruit, taro, yams, sweet potato and gourds.

 

Growing wheat, for example, in a temperate zone, is much harder, requiring more expertise, skill, and just plain hard work.

 

The difference is that grains can be stored. Some grains stored for thousands of years were still viable. How long can you store the foods you mentioned? What happens when you get a bad crop? A little famine can really shake up your society.

[SkepticLance]

Mr Skeptic

You may be on to something with the grain storage idea. Tropical crops do not need to be stored, since growing and harvesting is often a year round process. It may be simply that food is abundant in the tropics, and agriculture did not prove necessary to a population whose population size was trimmed by predation and by disease, rather than by hunger.

[swansont]

Reaper

I am not expert on tropical crops, but I know that some were easy from the very beginning. Breadfruit grows wild with a fruit that is about the size of a softball, and is rich in starch. It is easy to plant, and requires little tending. Captain Bligh on the Bounty came to the South Pacific with the express purpose of collecting breadfruit seedlings to transplant to the Caribbean, to plant so that cheap and abundant food for slaves was available.

 

Sweet potato came from South America, and is so hardy that it grows very well here in temperate New Zealand. Even better in the tropics. You can grow a whole new plant by simply burying a portion of a sweet potato in the ground.

 

Taro also grows in NZ, though less well than in the tropics. In Fiji, they just replant the green top to get a new crop. Bananas grow well in the wild, and can be replanted by breaking off the buds that grow round the base, and planting them.

 

First of all, you are arguing a different point — I said "The tropics aren't as well-suited to growing the wide variety of crops as in temperate zones." I never said crops were, in general, hard to grow in the tropics. It's that, as D H has pointed out, you can't grow the right crops, the ones you can store for long periods, and there tends to be a lack of variety of the staple crops. You can't have those crops migrate North and South too far, because what grows well in tropics don't grow so well outside, and vice-versa.

 

Second, here you are discussing transplanting a crop from one place to another using ocean-going vessels, which is a bit off the mark for this thread — we're discussing development of science, or lack thereof, over the course of many thousands of years, so what's the relevance of attempts to spread a crop 220 years ago? The advantage the Eurasians had was that there was an east-west land route, all with a similar climate, so that crops were easily adopted as they migrated, and all of this happened thousands of years ago.

 

Cassava, from what I can find, is native to South America, and brought to Africa and the South Pacific region by the Europeans — i.e. the ones who were more scientifically advanced and were regularly traveling those long distances across the oceans.

 

The crops have to be there before science advances, not after.

[SkepticLance]

Does anyone have good information on where and when agriculture started? I know it spread so rapidly that it often looked like it began simultaneously all over.

[Mr Skeptic]

Does anyone have good information on where and when agriculture started? I know it spread so rapidly that it often looked like it began simultaneously all over.

 

When an animal ate a fruit and shit a seed.

[Reaper]

You could look at the wiki for some basic information on the neolithic revolution.

 

But if you want a more authoritative source, Guns Germs and Steel is pretty good for this topic. Also, read this: http://cas.bellarmine.edu/tietjen/images/neolithic_agriculture.htm as that article seems to suggest that domestication could have occurred earlier than previously thought.

[SkepticLance]

Thanks for the reference, Reaper. It contained the following statement :

 

"This spring, after nearly 20 years of research, the team published its findings in a book entitled The Origins of Agriculture in the Lowland Neotropics. In one study, they measured squash phytoliths from a sequence of layers at Vegas Site 80, a coastal site bordering the tropical forest of southwestern Ecuador. From associated shell fragments as well as the carbon trapped inside the phytoliths themselves, they were able to carbon-date the microfossils. A sharp increase in phytolith size indicated that early Ecuadorians had domesticated squash, likely Cucurbita moschata, by 10,000 years ago--some 5000 years earlier than some archaeologists thought farming began there."

 

This kind of answers my earlier query about why could agriculture not start in the tropics. It looks as though it may well have done, quite early.

[Reaper]

The topic of when domestication of various species began is still well under dispute, but regardless the Middle East seems to have won out in terms of having a large variety of easily domesticated organisms, and being able to store them for long periods of time (which would reduce the effects of a famine should one ever occur...). In the tropics, so far the evidence points out to fact that there wasn't alot of easily domesticable organisms initially...

 

===========================

 

Now that we are on the topic of why science took so long, I'm surprised that ideological and philosophical considerations haven't been mentioned. Clearly it has been shown that societies that lack the ability to generate large surpluses of food will not get very far in terms of scientific and technological development, but what about ideological, religious, economic and philosophical impacts.

 

Lets take the example of China; China was the most technologically advanced civilization on the planet from the Roman Empire, right up to maybe the Enlightenment Age (I would push it a little further, to the end of the scientific revolution, but whatever). Their mathematics was usually on par with Greek mathematics, though they did not develop Euclidean geometry. And as early as the Tang Dynasty, they could have embarked on a scientific revolution, while as early as the Ming Dynasty they already had the tools necessary to embark on an industrial revolution. And yet, it never happened.

 

In fact, from what I've read, they couldn't even decide on whether the world was flat or round right up until the Qing Dynasty, when the Jesuits came in and introduced Euclidean geometry to the region. And while they had extensive knowledge on chemical properties and reactions, their methods for obtaining such knowledge (e.g. making gun powder to give an example) were far from scientific as we see it.

 

And as far as I know, the study and pursuit of fundamental science (i.e. physics) never seemed to have occured...

 

Anyone care to discuss?

[SkepticLance]

Reaper

We are now into a slightly different form of discussion, but still a very valid question. In my own opinion, science in the West began with such lunminaries as Francis Bacon, Robert Hooke and Isaac Newton. It was not their discoveries that mattered, though that was important. More, it was their method. Before their time, some pretty weird methods were accepted, including Act of Faith, various forms of logic, superstitious belief etc. Those guys nailed down the need for empirical evidence. Only real world observation and experiment counted. I think that was the big change that kicked off modern science.

 

Why did this not happen in China? I do not know. Perhaps the culture was opposed to it. After all, religion in the West did its damnedest to stop modern science, with persecution of great thinkers.

 

However, I suspect that, once writing was widespread, the development of science had to follow sooner or later. After all, various forms developed over the past 3000 years in a number of cultures. Galen in Rome. Archimedes in Greece. Arabic science. China. And the scientific revolution in Europe.