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A large number of people apparently believe that the experimental method was something invented in Renaissance Europe. This has always seemed like ludicrous non

A large number of people apparently believe that the experimental method was something invented in Renaissance Europe. This has always seemed like ludicrous nonsense to me. Local peoples around the world have certainly conducted experiments for centuries if not millenia before then. For example, consider pottery, and the invention of glazes. It's generally thought that the invention of the ore -> metal process involved potters experimenting with different glazes and finding lumps of metal after the firing process was complete. With toxic plants, well, most peoples kept domesticated animals and would probably use them to test the toxicity of potential food sources. Feed it to the chickens, pigs, llamas, etc. and see what happens. Soak the potential food source in water, see what happens. Try adding other substances, like charcoal or clay, and see what happens. Why don't people recognize this? Simple - infantilization of native peoples as a justification for the ravages of European colonialism.

choeger 5y ago
That's a very plausible theory you have there (except for the hit on European colonialism). But there's the question of why someone should sacrifice so many domesticated animals just to discover another food source (after all, they already had animals). Also, some of these steps are so off, that even reasonable experimentation wouldn't explain it. I mean, how would someone come up with the idea of mixing non-food with ash? There's probably some utility in this step (e.g., making color?) and only later it turned out to yield edible matter.
- photochemsyn 5y ago
  The history of the potato is instructive. The wild varieties that the first South American human settlers discovered (dates vary but > 14,000 years ago probably) were toxic, but if eaten with a small amount of clay, were discovered to be edible. Andean peoples didn't stop there however: they began breeding less toxic varieties of potato (there are now ~ 4000 cultivars) which also was a process of experimentation and selection of optimal results over a long time period. Breeding of maize followed a similar experiment-and-select process. As far as why the architects of European colonialism wanted to deny that native peoples had such capabilites, well: > "In a secularizing world, infantilization quickly became a moral posture and a theological necessity. It allowed the main actors in slavery and colonialism to make peace with their own consciences, and the intelligentsia and the Church to produce a powerful mix of justifications for the new world order. It allowed glib talk of the historical necessity to care for the retrogressive, irrational, ignorant savages and the Christian responsibility to guide them towards a better future." https://newint.org/features/2007/10/01/roots/ https://newint.org/features/2007/10/01/roots/
  - torstenvl 5y ago
    The cited source - a socialist magazine that got started with features on Castro, Mao, and Guevara - may, perhaps, be slightly biased in its interpretative lens.
    - ahthat 5y ago
      Absolutely
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - washadjeffmad 5y ago
      Objectivity in journalism is awareness of biases, not a lack of them. An example of poor objectivity is corporate media not disclosing that they don't report potentially damaging information about companies because they share parent companies, the owning and operating families are closely tied with the outlets, or they share members across boards. Another example would be showing that they're perfectly capable of critical reporting of a presidency but not applying that neutrality to all presidencies.
  - zasdffaa 5y ago
    Your link doesn't say anything about spuds and/or clay, something I'd consider deeply dubious. AFAK tater toxins take considerable heat to denature. A reference would be very interesting, thanks.
  - voldacar 5y ago
    > "In a secularizing world, infantilization quickly became a moral posture and a theological necessity. It allowed the main actors in slavery and colonialism to make peace with their own consciences, and the intelligentsia and the Church to produce a powerful mix of justifications for the new world order. It allowed glib talk of the historical necessity to care for the retrogressive, irrational, ignorant savages and the Christian responsibility to guide them towards a better future." This whole spiel is a just-so story. I've learned not to expect much from communists in terms of argumentation, but this is really embarrassingly bad
- TremendousJudge 5y ago
  There's right now on the HN front page a thread about people using Excel [0]. I'll quote from some comments in that thread: >Nobody is born knowing what tools to use or how to use them, but Excel is one of the first pieces of software that deal with data for a lot of people, and as such one of the first things they turn to when faced with a new problem. >I’ve done some travel to Africa and am amazed at the ingenuity/batshit workflows that exist to get work done and live life. >I'm continually shocked at how technically incompetent academics can be. Otherwise brilliant people with the most batshit technical workflows I've ever seen. >People are very inventive to get their job done. These crazy uses for manipulating something that isn't really understood by its users (Excel) happened only in one generation. In only that short amount of time, many people came up with a lot of ideas the original designers didn't even dream of. Why do you say that over a timeline of thousands of years, people couldn't come up with some ideas that you would never think of? I have no idea why somebody would think that mixing non-food with ash would yield something edible, but I'm not surprised that somebody came up with the idea at some point. Other people always seem have a knack for coming up with stuff you never could've imagined. [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30986329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30986329
- StanislavPetrov 5y ago
  > But there's the question of why someone should sacrifice so many domesticated animals just to discover another food source (after all, they already had animals). You aren't necessarily sacrificing the animals, you are putting them at risk with the hope that they will be okay. Discovering more food sources was absolutely critical for subsistence living. The more potential sources for food the more able you were to stave off starvation (or stockpile extra food for hard times or trading). >I mean, how would someone come up with the idea of mixing non-food with ash? There are a variety of ways, even if it wasn't done spontaneously. Maybe the bucket of ash next to the fireplace spilled on some food. Rather than throwing the food away, why not try feeding it to the pig and see if its palatable? Maybe there was a forest fire that left a layer of ash over all the food, and there was no choice but to try to eat some. Over the course of time and the multitudes of people incidents like this were inevitable.
- imtringued 5y ago
  >But there's the question of why someone should sacrifice so many domesticated animals just to discover another food source (after all, they already had animals). Cassava will paralyze your legs, not kill you. A paralyzed person or animal can still continue experimenting until the food is safe. >I mean, how would someone come up with the idea of mixing non-food with ash? By dropping their food on ash or by using an earth oven...
barry-cotter 5y ago
Scientific method. The explicitly reasoned about scientific method involving observation, hypothesis, prediction, testing, is new. The hypothesis is the important bit, the thing that’s new. Trying things and seeing what happens was not new in the 1500s or 1600s. The scientific method was. No doubt there were people who had similar ideas before Francis Bacon but they didn’t write them down and explain them in any way that we’d recognize as the scientific method.
- dgellow 5y ago
  Yes, it's the formulation, formalization, generalization of the whole concept that is new.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
culi 5y ago
The indigenous group whose land I'm on rn are the Cahuila. In Cahuila culture the doctors/shamans were basically botanists. They would claim certain patches of land where a particular plant was growing and study it for many years and everyone respected that and would avoid foraging that plant. There was a lot of knowledge built up, some of which was only passed down to people in their lineage or the apprentices that would study under them. Their folk taxonomy had a name for every species of oak that modern botany names. Which is an incredible feat in that area especially since those oak species hybridize very readily Similar aspects of cultures can be seen across the world. Like with variolation techniques in China
- dissent 5y ago
  I don't get this constant acknowledgement of which peoples' land we're on. If you feel this is a bad thing, would you not simply get off the land? If you feel that it is a good thing, are you not gloating about your conquest? Question asked in good faith.
  - culi 5y ago
    What do you mean? I brought it up because it's directly relevant to my comment... Genuine question, would you rather I danced around it somehow or figured out a phrasing that left that detail out? Part of the point of that detail was to show how commonplace this type of thing is by talking about just the group of people's who's land I happen to be on and not some exotic far away group. Also I don't see how either of those two questions are relevant. If I point out that the native biome here is a chaparral am I necessarily implying that I feel guilt that it's been paved over or showing off that I live in the society that paved it over?
    - dissent 5y ago
      I wouldn't say I'd rather anything. But it's an odd phrasing that I didn't see people using very often until a couple of years ago. I see it on Twitter bios too.
marginalia_nu 5y ago
Interrogating the consequences of hypotheses goes at least as far back as Plato in the Parmenides. It wasn't a scientific experiment with beakers and test tubes, but the chain of logic behind such an experiment is all there. > Why don't people recognize this? Simple - infantilization of native peoples as a justification for the ravages of European colonialism. To be fair most people have only a Hollywood idea of history. In fact, painting this as an European mindset ignores the fact that most cultures in history have engaged in brutal expansionist warfare when given the opportunity. Ultimately I think this point sort of trips on its own shoelaces. The same infantilization of native peoples prevents you from seeing that if the west wasn't doing this, someone else would have come and done the same at the first opportunity. It's easy to cry western colonization and then brush over the Umayyad caliphate colonizing the Iberian peninsula and a hefty chunk of Northern Africa, and a number of other similar historical events across the world. Singling out European colonialism as worse than the millennia of ceaseless warfare it displaced has a quiet assumption that western europe isn't just another civilization, that it is somehow to be held to a superior moral standard to the βάρβαροι; the reason it's especially bad is because Europe is the hero in the story. That is a colonialist mindset indeed.

choeger 5y ago

That's a very plausible theory you have there (except for the hit on European colonialism). But there's the question of why someone should sacrifice so many domesticated animals just to discover another food source (after all, they already had animals). Also, some of these steps are so off, that even reasonable experimentation wouldn't explain it. I mean, how would someone come up with the idea of mixing non-food with ash? There's probably some utility in this step (e.g., making color?) and only later it turned out to yield edible matter.

photochemsyn 5y ago
The history of the potato is instructive. The wild varieties that the first South American human settlers discovered (dates vary but > 14,000 years ago probably) were toxic, but if eaten with a small amount of clay, were discovered to be edible. Andean peoples didn't stop there however: they began breeding less toxic varieties of potato (there are now ~ 4000 cultivars) which also was a process of experimentation and selection of optimal results over a long time period. Breeding of maize followed a similar experiment-and-select process. As far as why the architects of European colonialism wanted to deny that native peoples had such capabilites, well: > "In a secularizing world, infantilization quickly became a moral posture and a theological necessity. It allowed the main actors in slavery and colonialism to make peace with their own consciences, and the intelligentsia and the Church to produce a powerful mix of justifications for the new world order. It allowed glib talk of the historical necessity to care for the retrogressive, irrational, ignorant savages and the Christian responsibility to guide them towards a better future." https://newint.org/features/2007/10/01/roots/ https://newint.org/features/2007/10/01/roots/
- torstenvl 5y ago
  The cited source - a socialist magazine that got started with features on Castro, Mao, and Guevara - may, perhaps, be slightly biased in its interpretative lens.
  - ahthat 5y ago
    Absolutely
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - washadjeffmad 5y ago
    Objectivity in journalism is awareness of biases, not a lack of them. An example of poor objectivity is corporate media not disclosing that they don't report potentially damaging information about companies because they share parent companies, the owning and operating families are closely tied with the outlets, or they share members across boards. Another example would be showing that they're perfectly capable of critical reporting of a presidency but not applying that neutrality to all presidencies.
- zasdffaa 5y ago
  Your link doesn't say anything about spuds and/or clay, something I'd consider deeply dubious. AFAK tater toxins take considerable heat to denature. A reference would be very interesting, thanks.
- voldacar 5y ago
  > "In a secularizing world, infantilization quickly became a moral posture and a theological necessity. It allowed the main actors in slavery and colonialism to make peace with their own consciences, and the intelligentsia and the Church to produce a powerful mix of justifications for the new world order. It allowed glib talk of the historical necessity to care for the retrogressive, irrational, ignorant savages and the Christian responsibility to guide them towards a better future." This whole spiel is a just-so story. I've learned not to expect much from communists in terms of argumentation, but this is really embarrassingly bad
TremendousJudge 5y ago
There's right now on the HN front page a thread about people using Excel [0]. I'll quote from some comments in that thread: >Nobody is born knowing what tools to use or how to use them, but Excel is one of the first pieces of software that deal with data for a lot of people, and as such one of the first things they turn to when faced with a new problem. >I’ve done some travel to Africa and am amazed at the ingenuity/batshit workflows that exist to get work done and live life. >I'm continually shocked at how technically incompetent academics can be. Otherwise brilliant people with the most batshit technical workflows I've ever seen. >People are very inventive to get their job done. These crazy uses for manipulating something that isn't really understood by its users (Excel) happened only in one generation. In only that short amount of time, many people came up with a lot of ideas the original designers didn't even dream of. Why do you say that over a timeline of thousands of years, people couldn't come up with some ideas that you would never think of? I have no idea why somebody would think that mixing non-food with ash would yield something edible, but I'm not surprised that somebody came up with the idea at some point. Other people always seem have a knack for coming up with stuff you never could've imagined. [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30986329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30986329
StanislavPetrov 5y ago
> But there's the question of why someone should sacrifice so many domesticated animals just to discover another food source (after all, they already had animals). You aren't necessarily sacrificing the animals, you are putting them at risk with the hope that they will be okay. Discovering more food sources was absolutely critical for subsistence living. The more potential sources for food the more able you were to stave off starvation (or stockpile extra food for hard times or trading). >I mean, how would someone come up with the idea of mixing non-food with ash? There are a variety of ways, even if it wasn't done spontaneously. Maybe the bucket of ash next to the fireplace spilled on some food. Rather than throwing the food away, why not try feeding it to the pig and see if its palatable? Maybe there was a forest fire that left a layer of ash over all the food, and there was no choice but to try to eat some. Over the course of time and the multitudes of people incidents like this were inevitable.
imtringued 5y ago
>But there's the question of why someone should sacrifice so many domesticated animals just to discover another food source (after all, they already had animals). Cassava will paralyze your legs, not kill you. A paralyzed person or animal can still continue experimenting until the food is safe. >I mean, how would someone come up with the idea of mixing non-food with ash? By dropping their food on ash or by using an earth oven...

barry-cotter 5y ago

Scientific method. The explicitly reasoned about scientific method involving observation, hypothesis, prediction, testing, is new. The hypothesis is the important bit, the thing that’s new. Trying things and seeing what happens was not new in the 1500s or 1600s. The scientific method was. No doubt there were people who had similar ideas before Francis Bacon but they didn’t write them down and explain them in any way that we’d recognize as the scientific method.

dgellow 5y ago
Yes, it's the formulation, formalization, generalization of the whole concept that is new.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

culi 5y ago

The indigenous group whose land I'm on rn are the Cahuila. In Cahuila culture the doctors/shamans were basically botanists. They would claim certain patches of land where a particular plant was growing and study it for many years and everyone respected that and would avoid foraging that plant. There was a lot of knowledge built up, some of which was only passed down to people in their lineage or the apprentices that would study under them. Their folk taxonomy had a name for every species of oak that modern botany names. Which is an incredible feat in that area especially since those oak species hybridize very readily Similar aspects of cultures can be seen across the world. Like with variolation techniques in China

dissent 5y ago
I don't get this constant acknowledgement of which peoples' land we're on. If you feel this is a bad thing, would you not simply get off the land? If you feel that it is a good thing, are you not gloating about your conquest? Question asked in good faith.
- culi 5y ago
  What do you mean? I brought it up because it's directly relevant to my comment... Genuine question, would you rather I danced around it somehow or figured out a phrasing that left that detail out? Part of the point of that detail was to show how commonplace this type of thing is by talking about just the group of people's who's land I happen to be on and not some exotic far away group. Also I don't see how either of those two questions are relevant. If I point out that the native biome here is a chaparral am I necessarily implying that I feel guilt that it's been paved over or showing off that I live in the society that paved it over?
  - dissent 5y ago
    I wouldn't say I'd rather anything. But it's an odd phrasing that I didn't see people using very often until a couple of years ago. I see it on Twitter bios too.

marginalia_nu 5y ago

Interrogating the consequences of hypotheses goes at least as far back as Plato in the Parmenides. It wasn't a scientific experiment with beakers and test tubes, but the chain of logic behind such an experiment is all there. > Why don't people recognize this? Simple - infantilization of native peoples as a justification for the ravages of European colonialism. To be fair most people have only a Hollywood idea of history. In fact, painting this as an European mindset ignores the fact that most cultures in history have engaged in brutal expansionist warfare when given the opportunity. Ultimately I think this point sort of trips on its own shoelaces. The same infantilization of native peoples prevents you from seeing that if the west wasn't doing this, someone else would have come and done the same at the first opportunity. It's easy to cry western colonization and then brush over the Umayyad caliphate colonizing the Iberian peninsula and a hefty chunk of Northern Africa, and a number of other similar historical events across the world. Singling out European colonialism as worse than the millennia of ceaseless warfare it displaced has a quiet assumption that western europe isn't just another civilization, that it is somehow to be held to a superior moral standard to the βάρβαροι; the reason it's especially bad is because Europe is the hero in the story. That is a colonialist mindset indeed.