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I wonder if that's always been the case. Maybe humans quickly cleaned up all the easily accessible fossils before realizing what they were. Ancient Greeks thoug

I wonder if that's always been the case. Maybe humans quickly cleaned up all the easily accessible fossils before realizing what they were. Ancient Greeks thought they'd found a giant's bone and other cultures seem to have used dinosaur fossils as inspiration for myths of dragons. Even western researchers a few hundred years ago thought dinosaur bones were just recent animal bones. Imagine how careless every previous civilization was with them. Maybe the biggest obstacle to archeology is having people around who are interested in explaining what they're seeing. Science is a very rare thing for human cultures to spontaneously do. Even the 1000s of years old Chinese civilization never invented science and had to wait for it to be imported. I tend to think that human societies naturally actively discourage science because they'd quickly think up and memetically spread myths for any unexplained phenomena then anyone challenging the popular myths would have to be a misfit and that would come with punishment because misfits were generally harmful to society in the short term.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
Interesting thought in your second paragraph. Through similar reasoning it would also follow that one of the bigger forces promoting science - or at least applied science - would be war. It's one of those things that keep you grounded in reality - the ship will either sail or it will sink; the shell will either land on target or it will miss. When your invention is going to be put into combat use, you can't get away with nice-sounding stories. You get instant and often visceral feedback.
- CryptoPunk 6y ago
  More broadly: survival. The crop that will grow or wither, the patient who will recover or die. Etc.
  - lopmotr 6y ago
    That's quite a different concept. Agriculture techniques would have evolved that way but entirely devoid of science or understanding of how they worked, just evolution of ideas ossified into wisdom. Colonists in new countries experienced crop failures because they couldn't predict how things would behave in the different climates/ecosystems and just applied their "dumb" knowledge. I heard about a hunter-gatherer society that used a seemingly pointless ritual to decide where to get food each day. They had only a superstitious explanation of how it worked until we eventually figured out that the ritual was actually a random number generator that helped them to spread their gathering more uniformly or prevent prey from learning their habits or something along those lines. We can do a lot without understanding. Medicine was a complete shit-show until modern science because people didn't even understand how to test if it caused patients to live or die! Even today in modern China, doctors still prescribe useless herbs based on superstition. They've stripped away the obvious nonsense about stars and planets that it used originally but still explain it using a mythical description of how the body works and how traditional medicines interact with it.
    - CryptoPunk 6y ago
      I guess you could say domains involving physical construction that had to be customized to varying circumstances required better understanding of the underlying physical processes at play. So building war implements, like weapons and armor, and techniques, like how to target a canon, but also non-military disciplines, like the construction of buildings and bridges, the manufacture of commercial goods, etc.
- lopmotr 6y ago
  I'd say so but only once the science is advanced enough to be of more use than technology developed by trail and error and intuition, which is a pretty high bar. Just think that when steam engines were already in use commercially, we didn't even have the law of conservation of energy, and the whole field of thermodynamics was developed afterwards. We made metal and gunpowder without chemistry, electric lights without electromagnetism, etc. For clarity, I'm not counting engineering and technology as science. You can develop techniques for building ships that float without understanding anything about buoyancy or mechanics of materials but just though gradual evolution of ideas and passing knowledge down through generations of craftsmen.
danbolt 6y ago
> Even the 1000s of years old Chinese civilization never invented science and had to wait for it to be imported. This line didn't pass the sniff test for me, so I did a quick Wikipedia check on the history of science in China. [1] Given the fact that Chinese Society has a large population and long written history, it seemed a bit strange to think that science and technology might have been imported from elsewhere 1000 years ago. It was actually quite cool! Turns out gunpowder and crossbows were invented there for gaining an advantage in war. [3][4] In AD 132, Zhang Heng created the first seismometer to study or detect earthquakes. [2] Looks like China's had science longer than the United Kingdom's been united. EDIT: added newlines to break up the Wikipedia hyperlinks [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_and_technology_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_and_technol... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seismometer#Ancient_era https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seismometer#Ancient_era [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossbow#East_Asia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossbow#East_Asia [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Yup. From what I remember my history, it was the other way around: China was ahead to a lot of discoveries, some of which the West has imported only centuries later.

TeMPOraL 6y ago

Interesting thought in your second paragraph. Through similar reasoning it would also follow that one of the bigger forces promoting science - or at least applied science - would be war. It's one of those things that keep you grounded in reality - the ship will either sail or it will sink; the shell will either land on target or it will miss. When your invention is going to be put into combat use, you can't get away with nice-sounding stories. You get instant and often visceral feedback.

CryptoPunk 6y ago
More broadly: survival. The crop that will grow or wither, the patient who will recover or die. Etc.
- lopmotr 6y ago
  That's quite a different concept. Agriculture techniques would have evolved that way but entirely devoid of science or understanding of how they worked, just evolution of ideas ossified into wisdom. Colonists in new countries experienced crop failures because they couldn't predict how things would behave in the different climates/ecosystems and just applied their "dumb" knowledge. I heard about a hunter-gatherer society that used a seemingly pointless ritual to decide where to get food each day. They had only a superstitious explanation of how it worked until we eventually figured out that the ritual was actually a random number generator that helped them to spread their gathering more uniformly or prevent prey from learning their habits or something along those lines. We can do a lot without understanding. Medicine was a complete shit-show until modern science because people didn't even understand how to test if it caused patients to live or die! Even today in modern China, doctors still prescribe useless herbs based on superstition. They've stripped away the obvious nonsense about stars and planets that it used originally but still explain it using a mythical description of how the body works and how traditional medicines interact with it.
  - CryptoPunk 6y ago
    I guess you could say domains involving physical construction that had to be customized to varying circumstances required better understanding of the underlying physical processes at play. So building war implements, like weapons and armor, and techniques, like how to target a canon, but also non-military disciplines, like the construction of buildings and bridges, the manufacture of commercial goods, etc.
lopmotr 6y ago
I'd say so but only once the science is advanced enough to be of more use than technology developed by trail and error and intuition, which is a pretty high bar. Just think that when steam engines were already in use commercially, we didn't even have the law of conservation of energy, and the whole field of thermodynamics was developed afterwards. We made metal and gunpowder without chemistry, electric lights without electromagnetism, etc. For clarity, I'm not counting engineering and technology as science. You can develop techniques for building ships that float without understanding anything about buoyancy or mechanics of materials but just though gradual evolution of ideas and passing knowledge down through generations of craftsmen.

danbolt 6y ago

> Even the 1000s of years old Chinese civilization never invented science and had to wait for it to be imported. This line didn't pass the sniff test for me, so I did a quick Wikipedia check on the history of science in China. [1] Given the fact that Chinese Society has a large population and long written history, it seemed a bit strange to think that science and technology might have been imported from elsewhere 1000 years ago. It was actually quite cool! Turns out gunpowder and crossbows were invented there for gaining an advantage in war. [3][4] In AD 132, Zhang Heng created the first seismometer to study or detect earthquakes. [2] Looks like China's had science longer than the United Kingdom's been united. EDIT: added newlines to break up the Wikipedia hyperlinks [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_and_technology_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_and_technol... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seismometer#Ancient_era https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seismometer#Ancient_era [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossbow#East_Asia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossbow#East_Asia [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder

TeMPOraL 6y ago
Yup. From what I remember my history, it was the other way around: China was ahead to a lot of discoveries, some of which the West has imported only centuries later.