Science is universal - James Poskett

Science and Technology
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Common misconception. Europeans have never “hid” how they gained information. It’s ironic some people believe this because the only reason the accomplishments of other civilizations are even well known around the world today is because Europeans made the effort to preserve and promote those accomplishments.

For example, Ancient Egypt would not be as well remembered today if it weren’t for British archaeologists. The modern Egyptians don’t care about which Pharoah tried to understand meteor showers or whatever. Nobody has been a bigger cheerleader for the world’s forgotten artifacts than Europeans. Especially Northern Europeans. It is probably a WEIRD trait.

Funny enough, Europeans are the only people who do this.

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Since when is new evidence - alternate theories?
Your bias is showing.

Okay I got a little sloppy.
Still science is often difficult to separate out from the societal milieu that spawns it,
and I thought you read all the books.

How much time have you spent living in other countries, to be able to say that from personal experience?

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I don’t understand this. Did the Black college system start because brown people weren’t allowed into the existing system, or did they just like hanging out with each other? The current view of a world full of smart people with different cultural backgrounds came after a hundred years of speaking up, sometimes with painful consequences.

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I’ve finished my second listen through and it’s packed with information most of us haven’t heard before.

Yeah but, it’s more nuanced than that. As Poskett points out, and in total agreement with you, is that at the time, the contributions, and exchanges of information were acknowledged.
But, there’s also a reality that over time with international conflicts and American xenophobia, our history books wound up ignoring much of that, or Poskett wouldn’t have so many surprises in store for his readers.

And it’s not just scientists from “inferior nations” but also against the “inferior sex” that have had to fight for recognition of their contributions.

I guess the only point I was really trying to make is that science is a human endeavor that rational minds from throughout the world, and the ages*, have contributed to.

*Think of the many amazing ancient civilizations that have been discovered and unearthed, it’s mind boggling how rich human history is that way.

https://www.asianscientist.com/as100/

https://www.science.org/content/article/historians-expose-early-scientists-debt-slave-trade

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Slavery is a different story from this topic, but out of curiosity I looked up Historically Black colleges and they were first established by religious Whites.

It’s not a matter of personal experience, it’s just a fact that people from Asia, Africa, etc. who want to work in academia want to come to the West.

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and they were first established by religious Whites.

You are amazing. The way you pick out a fact that supports your bias. I almost admire it. Quakers were anti-slavery. Of course it took white people supporting that to end slavery. That’s what blacks are still saying today about racism.

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But that’s missing the point.
We have the best richest institutions, thanks to centuries of plundering their nations - Guns, Germs, and Steel, and so on.

I stubbled on an interesting interview this morning. I’ll never convinced you of anything, but this guy (though he can be tortuous to listen to now and then) might be able to make you aware of information and perspectives you weren’t before.

That’s if your curious.

Dec 4, 2022 - Novara Media

Humans have existed for at least 200,000 years. Yet until recently, historians believed that cities, astronomy, architecture and numeracy did not arrive until agriculture emerged some 12,000 years ago. But what if that was wrong?
What if cities existed before agriculture and our hunter gatherer ancestors enjoyed a far more complex existence than we thought?
And if they did, then what are the implications for modern political theory - which justifies inequality on the basis that we live in a higher, more sophisticated form of society that was always inevitable? What if there were social revolutions before documented history?
And what if humankind had engaged in innumerable experiments in how best to live - including ones that involved the rejection of what we would consider to be ‘civilisation’? Aaron Bastani discusses all of that, and more, with archaeologist and co-author of the bestselling ‘Dawn of Everything’ David Wengrow.

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Exactly. It’s conflating the current landscape with the buried foundations. Where the food production was, the industries, the other two major revolutions. It was chance that the Mongols hit the Muslims hard, then fell back, and then Europeans did much worse to the Americas, and kept rolling over them. Small differences in culture, like Muslims allowing Jews and Christians to practice within their empires, while Christians, from Kings to peasants, believed it was their duty to convert everyone, and conquering just went along with that.

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It’s not about wealth it’s about culture. European culture has developed in a way that allows for nearly unlimited intellectual experimentation.

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This is the new code word. Like “inner city”. Words before that are now pretty much banned.

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An interesting point.

Culture is a polysemous word.

In the current langage, a cultured man is a man who knows his humanities, who has read and so …

In a broader meaning, a culture is a social system combining ideas, social relationship, technology and so … .

One would speak of the ancient Romans culture, or of the plains Amerindians culture.

And it is true that since the end of the Middle-Ages, the western culture has favored innovation and experiment, not only in science, but also in arts, in philosophy, in literature. In fact, the move was in every sector.

This move was born from the break with the authorities of the scriptures, and of their interpretation by the church, helped by the printing press.

The reading of the scriptures and the access to the knowledge was no more reserved to the cleric caste.

This movement prepared the ground for the first industrial revolution.

In a contrast, in the 15th century, china sent big sea expeditions up to Ceylan, but desisted. Being sure of its universal superiority, it closed on itself. Colonial powers pillaged it.

Japan did the same, but in the middle of the 19th century, when West broke the barrier, it choose to enter the modern world. The Japanese-Russian war of 1905 was the result. Japanese culture had adapted itself.

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Well said. Especially about how China slowed down because of its arrogance. I think the changes in Europe were more complex than just breaking away from religious authority even though that played a big part.

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It’s a shame the truth is a “code word”.

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Okay if that wasn’t close enough how about:

Culture is sort of brag bag word, after all we have MAGA culture nowadays, and what’s that about?

But more to the point of this thread:

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Depends on how you use it. The causes of poverty and anti-social behavior have been studied extensively for decades now. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that “we know the causes”, but we know a lot. Some of it is obvious, like not having a good home, seeing violence, or a father who doesn’t participate in the family. But when we call those factors “cultural” it can be code for saying it’s their DNA, their country of origin, their ancestry, or their neighborhood. That kind of code ignores the factors that create underprivileged populations. It shifts the burden from all of us, who should be working to make a better world, to the victims of the bad world that already exists. If you are going to point to “culture”, then you need to include the culture of European occupation, resource extraction, and forced religion, that shaped today’s culture.

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Yup, I agree Lausten.

But I think it’s worth mention this an example of how we really can’t understand others, creature or people without appreciating their environment.

And another consequence of consciousness being a feedback loop and not a one way transmission

Gotta admit some like screaming about truth, but haven’t the least bit of interest in actually honoring truth.
Take MAGAman for example, an entire life built upon fraud and deception, but boy oh boy can he howl and scream, when anyone calls him on his life of lies and deception and bullying. That’s when truth become a code words and yes it is a crying shame, we might never recover from.

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The problem with this particular debate is that science can now prove that culture is downstream from biology, but this fact is offensive to many people.

Part of my program of research is to convince people that they should stop distinguishing cultural and biological evolution as separate in that way. We want to think of it all as biological evolution.

We want to distinguish genetic evolution and cultural evolution, and then at some point we may have epigenetic evolution, and there are other kinds of inheritance systems.

It’s going to be a little bit more of a complex story. Culture is part of our biology. We now have the neuroscience to say that culture’s in our brain, so if you compare people from different societies, they have different brains. Culture is deep in our biology. We have people with different cultural backgrounds that have different hormonal reactions as well as having different brains on the MRI scan. So culture is just part of our biology, and we shouldn’t take this dualistic view that there’s this realm of ideas that somehow are separate from this realm of biology, and you’re either talking about the realm of ideas or the realm of biology.

The open culture of Western academia is the result of European DNA. Especially Northern Europeans, which is just the old-fashioned term for the W.E.I.R.D. population. Replace them with anyone else and that culture disappears.

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That seems strange and counter intuitive to me. I would think that the geographical and historical conditions did much. And from what I know, European civilisation results from a serie of very uncertain events.

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I do a simple search and this comes up.

Science

Science may be as old as the human species,[3] and some of the earliest archeological evidence for scientific reasoning is tens of thousands of years old. The earliest written records in the history of science come from Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia in around 3000 to 1200 BCE.

Their contributions to mathematics, astronomy, and medicine entered and shaped Greek natural philosophy of classical antiquity, whereby formal attempts were made to provide explanations of events in the physical world based on natural causes.[4]: 12 [5] After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, knowledge of Greek conceptions of the world deteriorated in Western Europe during the early centuries (400 to 1000 CE) of the Middle Ages, but was preserved in the Muslim world during the Islamic Golden Age[6] and later by the efforts of Byzantine Greek scholars who brought Greek manuscripts from the dying Byzantine Empire to Western Europe in the Renaissance.

more… Science - Wikipedia

Before then we have this;

The Prehistory of South Africa (and, inseparably, the wider region of Southern Africa) lasts from the Middle Stone Age until the 17th century. Southern Africa was first reached by Homo sapiens before 130,000 years ago, possibly before 260,000 years ago.[1]

The region remained in the Late Stone Age until the first traces of pastoralism were introduced about 2,000 years ago. The Bantu migration reached the area now South Africa around the first decade of the 3rd century, over 1800 years ago.[2] Early Bantu kingdoms were established by the 11th century. First European contact dates to 1488, but European colonization began in the 17th century (see History of South Africa (1652–1815)).

‘Multiple origin scenario’

While no human remains were found at the dig, the tools and animal bones showed strong evidence of human activity.

Some of the bones featured cut marks, indicating an early form of butchery, the authors wrote.

The discovery could indicate a “multiple origin scenario,” where humans were making and using tools in different locations across the continent at the same time, they added.

Alternatively, it could mean that a “rapid expansion of stone tool manufacture” took place in the early days of humankind’s existence.

Stone tools were found in China earlier this year that dated back 2.12 million years.

The archaeologists behind that project said their finds suggested that early humans moved out from East Africa and into what is now Asia.

The latest findings could tell a similar story, if earlier remains in North Africa are not found. But they would imply that humans were moving west, as well as east, from their birthplace.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/30/world/human-tools-north-africa-humanity-scli-intl/index.html

Any disagreements?

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Interesting article. It has overlap with Science of Religion course I have linked. Most of it talks about very long term changes, but science is only a few hundred or maybe a few thousand years old. Also, the periods he discusses were times of low communication across tribes, whereas now we communicate globally.

“If your number of minds working on the problem gets small enough, you can actually begin to lose information. There’s a steady state level of information that depends on the size of your population and the interconnectedness. It also depends on the innovativeness of your individuals, but that has a relatively small effect compared to the effect of being well interconnected and having a large population.”

I don’t think the culture of science has had a chance to affect biology in the way this guy is talking. Not yet. Not the way the culture of fire making affected us. I’m not sure what aspects of cultures you are claiming exist where. The evidence is still clear, that Science developed around the globe, before hitting its full stride in the mixed cultures of Europe in the 15th century, or thereabouts.