Recently I read a number of books and book chapters on the Scientific Revolution. I wanted to know, what exactly changed in our society’s approach to knowledge? We have modern science today, and in the year 1500 the prevailing approach to knowledge in Europe was something else. What changed and why?

Obviously that’s a big topic and historians of the scientific revolution have tackled this problem from a variety of angles. There were social changes and institutional changes, including those associated with the Reformation and the Renaissance, there was the invention of movable type, the European discovery of the Americas, various technological changes, especially in glassworks that led to the construction of the first telescopes, mircoscopes, and barometers. There is a lot of fodder here for historians, and it would be too simplistic to ask, what was the one thing that caused people to empirically study the world around them? The Scientific Revolution is not about the defeat of superstition by reason (though David Wootton, in his wonderful history, The Invention of Science, argues that the Scientific Revolution led educated people to give up on their beliefs in witches, werewolves, magnets neutralized by garlic, etc.). Nor is it about people deciding to start observing the world – Aristotle himself, as well as many of the Medieval scholastics were very careful observers of nature.

Three of the books I’d recommend are:

1. Peter Dear’s Revolutionizing the Sciences, a concise book intended as kind of a textbook that neatly asks what it meant to know something in 1500 versus what it meant to know something in 1700. Overall, this book most directly gets at my interests.
2. Steven Shapin’s The Scientific Revolution. Shapin has some notoriety for his relativist take on science, but this is a worthwhile book. The philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith, in his textbook on the philosophy of science, says this is not a good history of the scientific revolution, but it’s an interesting book nonetheless. I agree that this is worth reading. Shapin considers what was considered worth knowing and why during the Scientific Revolution. The answer to this kind of question naturally involves a discussion of social changes, which of course were critical in the development of science. My criticism is that this book is too focused on changes in rhetoric alone (largely about the metaphor of a clockwork universe). When you view the Scientific Revolution as largely a rhetorical battle, you miss the impact of the new, quite radical empirical discoveries that occurred during the 16th and 17th centuries.
3. David Wootton’s The Invention of Science. Hands down, this is the best history of the Scientific Revolution out there. It is carefully argued, with its claims backed up much more by extensive evidence than in any other broad book on the subject. Wootton’s unique approach is to understand the conceptual changes of the era by studying linguistic changes, made possible by online, searchable texts. Wootton uses the changing use of words like fact and discovery (and not just in English!) to chart conceptual changes. Wootton also, much more directly than any other historian that I read, directly engages with claims made in the philosophy of science. For example, the discovery of the complete phases of Venus, which was flat-out incompatible with the Ptolemaic system, led to a more silent paradigm shift than Thomas Kuhn would have predicted.

In any case, this is a long wind-up to the main point of this post. As complex as the Scientific Revolution was, for me the most interesting take is this: In the 17th century, the Aristotelian understanding of what it means to know something was replaced by a new understanding that largely still holds in modern science. Here’s what Aristotelians thought of what was called scientia:

The medieval Latin scientia, although cognate with the modern English “science,” referred to any rigorous and certain body of knowledge that could be organized (in precept though not always in practice) in the form of syllogistic demonstrations from self-evident premises. Under this description, rational theology belonged to scientia – indeed, it was the “queen of sciences” – because its premises were the highest and most certain. Excluded, however, were disciplines that studied empirical particulars, such as medical therapeutics, natural history, and alchemy, because there can be no absolute certainty about particular phenomena. (“The Age of the New”, Katherine Park and Lorraine Datson, Cambridge History of Science: Early Modern Science).

For Aristotelians, empirical disciplines were not science because their findings couldn’t be demonstrated with certainty. The Scientific Revolution turned this conception of knowledge upside down: empirical findings of non-self-evident phenomena became more reliable than syllogistic demonstration from self-evident premises. Aristotelians assumed most interesting phenomena were common knowledge, and all we needed to do was reason about them. The new meaning of the word ‘science’, however, was something else: discovery of new phenomena through experiment and explaining them with mathematical principles.

In other words, the old scientia was this: logical demonstration from self-evident principles to achieve certainty. The new science was this: fallible conclusions based on the empirical discovery of new phenomena beyond our everyday experience.

What this means is that, by giving up the need for absolute certainty, we managed to figure out the most reliable way to discovery knowledge that humans have ever hit upon.

With the flood of new substack writers, it looks like blogging is back – at least it’s starting to feel a little like the early 2010’s again. My aim is to add some some possibly interesting and useful thoughts on science, reason, and society, and of course science fiction. For the past few months I’ve been making some notes to myself on what is means to take science seriously: seriously as a description of the universe, seriously as the most effective means to solve human problems, and seriously as an endeavor founded on a set of cognitive, personal, and societal values. I’ll share some of that work here over the coming weeks. While we’re still waiting out this pandemic, it’s a good time to turn on the lights in the virtual pub.

But in the meantime, let me share with you the latest work out of the lab: “Information Content Differentiates Enhancers From Silencers in Mouse Photoreceptors”, work by a hard-working and very talented graduate student who has put together a nice story that combines machine learning and information theory to understand what gives a sequence of DNA the capacity to act as a regulator of gene expression. The punchline is that the ‘rules’ governing these sequences are pretty flexible, but they can, to some extent, be captured by measuring, in a sense, the information content of the sequence.

The solution is to do genetic studies on more diverse cohorts. But when you do that, you run into another problem: people assume that genetic studies of non-whites are motivated by … bad stereotypes, if not outright racism.

A case in point: Dylan Matthews tweeted out a PLOS Genetics paper, with the admittedly striking finding that some African Americans carry a genetic variant linked with an increased preference for menthol cigarettes:

To be clear, I’m not at all suggesting Matthews himself was impugning the authors’ motives. But the replies mocked the study and suggested that this was somehow bad science… as far as I can tell, because it draws a link between genetics and behavior in African Americans.

But this is exactly what a diverse science of human genetics looks like. All sorts of smoking behaviors have genetic links, and scientists (including some of my WashU colleagues) study them because they have the potential to help people live healthier lives. Why do some people quit smoking, while others try and fail? Should the FDA ban menthol cigarettes, as it has proposed to do ?

Genetic studies can help answer those questions. Genetic links with health-related behaviors are pervasive, and many are specific to particular populations. If we want genetics to not just benefit whites, we need studies like this one.

HOW TO VIEW THE SOLAR ECLIPSE SAFELY

In Penny Dreadful, the character of Dr. Alexander Sweet is the director of zoological studies at the very same Natural History Museum. In the second episode of season 3, Dr. Sweet and lead character, Vanessa Ives, tour the museum, which includes a taxidermied okapi specimen positioned correctly, from an evolutionary perspective, near the giraffe skeleton (seen below in the far left of the screenshot).

The enigmatic okapi, the “ghost of the forest”, often considered mythological by European explorers, was formally described to Western science in 1901 CE. Which makes one wonder where Dr. Sweet’s museum found their specimen*?

It could just be a mistake or it could be a hint. I’d elaborate, but spoilers…