Around 1700 Thomas Burnet speculated that perhaps a comet smashed into the earth, which set off the Great Flood related in the Bible. Scholars began trying to reconstruct the history of the earth naturalistically. Things up in the sky and down here on Earth really aren’t so different, after all. The earth itself is a body in space revolving around the sun, just as the other planets in the solar system do. An apple falls from a tree by virtue of exactly the same laws of matter and motion that keep the moon revolving around the earth, as Isaac Newton showed. Nevertheless, by 1700 it was clear that the same basic rules of gravity and motion govern things up in Heaven and here on Earth. Things on Earth are made of four elements (earth, air, fire, and water), but things in the sky partake of a fifth element, the quintessence, which gives them those different properties. Things here are ugly and uneven things in the sky are perfect crystalline spheres. Things on Earth decay things in the sky seem to be eternal. Things on Earth tend to move in straight lines, but in the sky they move in circles. For example, it was generally believed by medieval European scholars that Heaven was a place up in the sky, and it was fundamentally different from Earth after all, Heaven is where God lives. Many of these ideas had theological implications. Nevertheless, as these particular epistemic assumptions began to dominate European scholarly research in the 1600s, traditional ideas about how the world works began to fall away. For example, when someone in the United States asks how you are, they generally do not really want to know, and if you insist on telling them, they will probably think you are a freak and not talk to you again. All of these are quite unusual cross-culturally after all, the basis of most polite conversation universally is the assumption that maximum accuracy is not desirable.
Our fourth assumption is that maximum accuracy is the only goal of a good scientific explanation. We call such fundamental cultural assumptions like these epistemes, and we can label these as naturalism, rationalism, and empiricism, respectively. The third is that we learn about nature by principally collecting data, under controlled circumstances, so that anyone, anywhere, can come to the same conclusions. The second is that miracles, or capricious suspensions of the laws of nature, are not explanatory in the natural world rather, historical processes are. The first of these scientific assumptions is that the universe is divisible into (a) the natural world of matter and law and (b) the supernatural world of spirit and miracle, and we can focus our attention solely on the former. Scientific stories about our ancestors are constrained by the assumptions of science, which developed out of 17th-century European philosophy.
THE SCIENCE OF WHO WE ARE AND WHERE WE COME FROMĪs we discussed at the end of Chapter 1, all peoples tell stories about their ancestors.
Discuss Darwin’s theory and contributions to our understanding of evolution.Examine and correct several misconceptions about human evolution.Describe what is meant by the “biopolitics of heredity”.
Explain the process of natural selection.Discuss pre-Darwinian perspectives on the nature of the earth and evolution.Discuss differing perspectives about how the human species descended from a primate ancestor.
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