Retorts

Eurocentric View

I was very surprised at the appallingly Eurocentric orientation of the March NZSM editorial "When did science begin?". The Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, as we use these terms in a specific historic context, apply only to Europe. You assert that science didn't really exist in the 600-1600 AD period, and that the scientific method began with Bacon's (1620s) emphasis on the search for facts, experimentation and observation.

That's all fine in the narrow confines of European thought, but Europe was no more the world in 1620 than it is now! To emphasise my point I'd quote just one passage, taken from Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China, Vol. 3 (Cambridge University Press, 1959: 615-6), dealing with fossil brachiopod shells, spirifers, which have the shape of outstretched bird wings and which, in numerous Chinese texts dating back at least to the 4th century AD are termed stone-swallows. A scholar of the Sung dynasty, Tu Wan, in 1133 wrote:

It was said in ancient times that when it rained they flew about. In recent years, however, I have climbed up high cliffs, and found many of these stone shapes with the form of swallows. Some of them I marked with my pen. As the rocks were exposed to the blazing sun they cracked and weathered when thunder showers came, and the ones which I had marked fell to the ground one after another. It was because of the expansion in the heat and contraction in the cold that they fell flying though the air. They cannot really fly.

This is 500 years ahead of Bacon! This is scientific observation, motivated by a real sense of inquiry and thirst for knowledge. Tu was not only a Sung scholar, he was certainly, in my book, using the scientific method.

One could cite many other Chinese, Arab, Indian examples of scientific enquiry from the periods of the Dark and Middle Ages of Europe, and it was partly from encounters with this "Eastern" knowledge that "Western" science flowered during and after the Renaissance in Europe. One-eyed Eurocentrism chooses to forget these details!

Jack Grant-Mackie, Geology Department, University of Auckland

The editorial began by mentioning that the question of "when did science begin?" arose during a discussion of medieval times which, by its very definition as you yourself note, is a term applied to Europe alone, and hence confined itself to that context.

Certainly the revival of scientific thought and investigation in Europe in the 12th century owes a huge amount to Islamic culture which, as well as preserving much of Greek thought, built up an impressive body of knowledge over a broad range of areas. As you point out, both China and India loom large in developing methods of scientific inquiry and one could add that many other cultures had inquiring minds of one form or another, from Incan mathematicians to Polynesian sea-farers.

As better forms of communication developed, some of these bodies of knowledge came to be incorporated into the general corpus that makes up what we now think of as "science" (as opposed to culturally or temporally limited forms of knowledge or ethnosciences). In trying to develop an objective way of examining the world, early thinkers encouraged the internationalisation of science which remains one of its strengths.

It is ironic to note that science has been criticised recently for being solely as a Western cultural construct, rather than as a way of thinking about the world that has the ability to transcend national boundaries.