In this scholarly work, a University of Warwick professor of History of Science and Technology relocates the origins of modern science from European followers of Ptolemy, Pliny, Galen, and Aristotle to the Aztec and Inca empires and even earlier observers of nature in China and the Islamic world. This is particularly applied to astronomy, mathematics, and timekeeping. There is more detail about who was who in those worlds in the dark ages than most readers will ever need or want to know, but the crux of the message is that the colonial Eurocentric view of major scientific discoveries is just plain wrong. For example, the contributions of Mongrel, Byzantine, Ottoman and Persian astronomers were crucial precursors allowing Nicolaus Copernicus to formulate his radical heliocentric view of the universe. However, the astronomic diagrams accompanying this Part I (96 pages) were very confusing to me. This section also made me acutely aware of how little science outside of the world of biology I really understand.
Islamic cartographers lead the world in mapping making drawing routes to Mecca from anywhere, and North Africans in Timbuktu detailed the Silk Road from the Orient to Europe long before Europeans started to map North America’s coastline. There is no mention of the designers of the even more ancient Stonehenge which must have possessed considerable knowledge of astronomy and mathematics, probably because its designers are still a complete mystery.
In Chapter III, Poskett shows that Isaac Newton relied on observations of France’s Jean Richer’s variations of the pendulum clock’s swing time in different locations and the geographic and mathematical data brought back to England by numerous explorers and slave traders; he was far from the lone genius portrayed in some history accounts. This is a theme that recurs frequently in recent revisionist biographies of many other discoverers and inventors from Copernicus to Tesla to Einstein.
Trade in seeds within the slave economy preceded formal genetic studies and Carl Linnaeus both competed and collaborated with Chinese and Japanese botanical classification systems, aided by international trade. Tea arrived in England in 1658, was considered addictive, and sparked a lively international trade war. Throughout the book, there is emphasis on the interconnectedness of science with politics and international relations.
Etienne Geoffrey in Paris and Cairo postulated a version of the theory of evolution years before Darwin, as did Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Alfred Russel Wallace and others around the globe, but they get little recognition for it, not unlike many dedicated scientists in other fields who were more interested in furthering a field than in seeking fame. (Rosalind Franklin’s major contribution to the DNA story is almost forgotten today and barely mentioned here, but Watson and Crick who basically claimed her data without attribution are lauded.)
Other major advances in science were dispersed around the world. The germ plasma theory postulating meiosis in sperm and eggs before they unite to produce a new organism was first proposed by Japanese natural scientists, complimenting the later genetics studied by the Czech botanist Mendel. The concept of ‘social Darwinism’ was first developed by Englishman Herbert Spencer, but was widely applied by Chinese biologists during the first Sino-Japanese war, and applied by those of the dominant Han ethnicity to suppress other Chinese ethnic groups. Later it was, of course, a mainstay of Nazi dogma.
By the late nineteenth century Europeans and North Americans did dominate in new scientific discoveries with the likes of James Clerk Maxwell in electricity, Marie Curie in radioactivity, and Heinrich Hertz in radio waves, but it was the Russian, Dimitri Mendeleev who developed the periodic table and the best mixture of elements for smokeless gunpowder. A Russian female scientist helped him fill in some gaps in the periodic table. In the late 1890s the now almost forgotten Indian scientist Jagadish Chandra Bosch (the boson was named after him much later) demonstrated the characteristics of radio waves, transforming the world of long distance communication. Ernest Rutherford is credited with the discovery of the structure of the atom, although Hantaro Nagaoto in Japan published results similar to those of Rutherford several years before the later’s 1911 paper, a prime example of colonial racism. The proof of the existence of the positron led to a Nobel prize for American Carl Anderson although it was in fact ‘discovered’ earlier by a visiting Chinese scientist Zhou Peiyuan, in the era when both China the new Soviet Union vastly increased spending on sciences.
The book thoroughly debunks the myths of the lone genius scientist and the Eurocentric history of the advancement of all sciences right up to the present. Most of the emphasis is on astronomy, physics and mathematics and there is a paucity of information on the long and checkered history of medicine. Semmelweis, Lister, Pasteur, Banting, and Fleming do not even warrant mention. Galileo is not mentioned either. The field of the history of science is so vast that anyone discussing it can be very selective in choosing what to include so as to fit with any particular bias.
This narrative is also plodding, tedious, dry, and detailed. Not many readers are likely to care much about the specific mutations governing taste and smell in fruit flies, discovered by a female Indian researcher in 1978. The author seemed much more articulate and focused when I listened to his interview with Bob McDonald on CBC radio’s Quirks and Quarks. He seems to have a common affliction that I call the academic’s delusion- the belief that a host of others share enthusiasm for the subject of his or her narrow field of study.
⭐️⭐️
Thanks, Bob McDonald, of Quirks and Quarks.
The Passionate Reader 