Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

The Wind Makes Dust
physics class. In Uncommon Sense: The Heretical Nature of
Science (1993), Cromer proposes that science is difficult because
it's new. We, a species that's a few hundred thousand years old,
discovered the method of science only a few centuries ago, he
says. Like writing, which is only a few millennia old, we haven't
gotten the hang of it yet - or at least not without very serious and
attentive study.
Except for an unlikely concatenation of historical events, he
suggests, we would never have invented science:
This hostility to science, in the face of its obvious triumphs
and benefits, is . . . evidence that it is something outside the
mainstream of human development, perhaps a fluke.
Chinese civilization invented movable type, gunpowder, the
rocket, the magnetic compass, the seismograph, and systematic
observations and chronicles of the heavens. Indian mathematicians
invented the zero, the key to comfortable arithmetic and
therefore to quantitative science. Aztec civilization developed a
far better calendar than that of the European civilization that
inundated and destroyed it; they were better able, and for longer
periods into the future, to predict where the planets would be. But
none of these civilizations, Cromer argues, had developed the
sceptical, inquiring, experimental method of science. All of that
came out of ancient Greece:
The development of objective thinking by the Greeks
appears to have required a number of specific cultural
factors. First was the assembly, where men first learned to
persuade one another by means of rational debate. Second
was a maritime economy that prevented isolation and parochialism.
Third was the existence of a widespread Greekspeaking
world around which travelers and scholars could
wander. Fourth was the existence of an independent merchant
class that could hire its own teachers. Fifth was the Iliad
and the Odyssey, literary masterpieces that are themselves
the epitome of liberal rational thinking. Sixth was a literary
religion not dominated by priests. And seventh was the
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