Chapter 14: The Discovery of Ignorance

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Okay, so let's dive into this.

Think for a moment about the sheer,

well, the gap between our lives today and life, say, a thousand years ago.

Right.

Imagine someone from a thousand AD waking up when Columbus sailed.

Big changes, sure, clothes, maybe some customs, but, you know, the basics of life.

Still somewhat familiar.

Recognizable.

Now flip that.

Picture one of Columbus's sailors waking up today, see someone scrolling on an iPhone.

Oh, yeah.

That world would be, it'd be strange beyond comprehension, wouldn't it?

Utterly alien.

Completely.

And it's that

acceleration of human power just in the last five centuries that we're really digging into today.

Exactly.

Our mission really is to unpack the key drivers behind this massive transformation using some really insightful material we've got.

And the numbers themselves are just, wow, they're staggering.

Since 1500, global population up about 14 times.

That's huge in itself.

14 times.

Wow.

But get this total production, what we make up 240 times in energy that's exploded by 115 times.

So it's not just more people.

It's each person on average doing vastly more.

Precisely.

This isn't just, you know, steady growth.

It signals a fundamental rewrite of how humans operate on this planet.

Right.

And to really feel that difference, some comparisons really help.

Think about a single modern battleship.

Okay.

Its firepower could have just

vaporized Columbus's entire fleet.

All three ships gone in moments without taking a single hit itself.

Incredible.

Or shipping.

Just five modern container ships.

They can haul more cargo than the entire world's merchant fleet back in 1500.

The entire fleet.

It's hard to grasp that scale.

It is.

And data.

A standard modern computer can hold, I mean, easily all the written knowledge from every single medieval library and still have, you know, tons of space left.

And money.

The assets of just one major bank today would make all the combined wealth of every pre -modern kingdom look like pocket change.

It really puts it in perspective.

It does.

And look at how we live.

Our cities.

Back in 1500, a city with a hundred thousand people.

That was a metropolis.

A real rarity.

Buildings mostly mud, wood, maybe some stone.

Today.

We've got megacities.

Tokyo, New York, Mumbai.

Teaming with tens of millions.

Living and working in skyscrapers of steel and concrete.

The concentration is just different.

Getting around Magellan's circumnavigation.

That took three years, right?

And most of his crew didn't make it back.

A brutal journey.

Today, someone with a decent job, middle class, can fly around the world in what?

48 hours, maybe?

Comfortably, too.

It's routine.

And then there are these almost philosophical shifts in scale.

In 1500, humanity was earthbound.

Period.

Then, 1969.

We walk on the moon.

Think about that in the grand scheme.

Four billion years of life evolving on this planet.

And for the very first time, an organism steps off it.

It's a cosmic milestone, really.

Hard to overstate.

And even closer to home.

That hidden world.

Before the late 1600s, nobody knew about microbes.

Lugenhoek's microscope in 1674 suddenly revealed this vast, unseen universe teeming with life.

99 .9 % of life, some might say.

Exactly.

And now we manipulate these tiny things every day for medicine, for industry.

Yeah.

It's just normal.

Which brings us to a really crucial point about where all this power acquisition is heading.

And then you have that single, stark moment.

Alan Magordo, 1945.

Trinity test.

Yeah.

Suddenly, humanity didn't just have the power to shape history, but the power to potentially end it with one device.

That's a level of power unlike anything before.

So what fueled this, this incredible, almost exponential curve?

Historians point to the scientific revolution.

Right.

It's this process, this commitment, really, to investing resources, time, money, people into scientific research, specifically looking to gain new powers, new capabilities.

And the revolutionary part is that mindset shift.

Before, say, 1500, the general feeling was that, look, major breakthroughs in medicine or warfare or making stuff, they probably weren't going to happen through human effort.

So the focus was more on preservation.

Exactly.

Rulers, societies, they funded priests, poets, philosophers, people who reinforced the existing order, interpreted the known world.

They weren't really expecting scientists to invent fundamentally new ways of doing things.

But that changed.

Why?

What made people start believing we could get new powers?

Well, I think it was the results, wasn't it?

Over these last five centuries, there's been this growing conviction backed up again and again by actual evidence that, yeah, systematic research does yield new capabilities.

So each success breeds more confidence.

Precisely.

A new vaccine works.

A steam engine powers a factory.

Better farming feeds more people.

And societies think, okay, this science thing actually delivers.

So they invest more.

Look at nuclear physics.

Huge investment driven by military goals initially, but leading to power plants, medical tech.

And it wasn't just science in a bubble, right?

There's this interplay.

Oh, absolutely.

A crucial feedback loop.

You've got science, politics and economics all feeding each other.

How does that work exactly?

Well, political and economic institutions, governments, businesses, patrons, they provide the money, the labs, the resources, science needs.

It's expensive stuff.

Okay.

Then when the science pays off, it delivers new powers, technologies, knowledge that those institutions can use maybe to make more money, win wars, increase influence.

Which generates more resources.

Some of which then gets plowed back into more research.

It's a cycle that drives innovation forward faster and faster.

So the big question then is what kicked off that cycle?

Why did people start believing they could get new powers from research in the first place?

And how did this alliance between science, money and power get so strong?

Exactly.

And as the material we're looking at suggests, a huge part of the answer is about what makes modern science itself so different, so unique.

We can dive into those characteristics now, and later maybe we can tackle the roles of things like European empires and capitalism, which were also tangled up in this.

Okay, let's do that.

So the first big difference, the absolute core of modern science.

It's the willingness to admit ignorance.

Ignoramus.

We do not know.

That's the bedrock principle.

It sounds simple, but it's revolutionary.

It's saying, look, what we think we know now might be incomplete.

It might even be wrong.

And no idea, no matter how cherished to sacred, everything is open to question if new evidence comes along.

Which is a massive shift from how knowledge worked before.

Huge.

Think about the great pre -modern traditions, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Confucianism, and others.

They had their differences, obviously, but they generally shared this idea that all the really important knowledge about the world, about ethics, about our purpose, it was already known.

Revealed by gods or worked out by wise ancestors.

And captured in sacred texts or ancient traditions.

So the main job for intellectuals was to study those texts, interpret them correctly, understand the wisdom that was already there.

Not to go looking for fundamentally new truths about the big questions.

Generally, no, that idea was almost alien.

If you didn't know something, you asked someone wiser, someone who did understand the tradition.

That was individual ignorance.

Okay.

And then there was stuff the traditions didn't talk about,

like how spiders spin webs.

That was seen as collective ignorance about unimportant things.

The sacred texts told you about God or salvation, not spiders.

So the Yorkshire peasant asks the priest about human origins.

He gets an answer from scripture.

He asks about spiders.

The priest might say, well, God made them.

But beyond that, it's not important for your salvation.

Focus on the catechism.

Studying spiders wasn't forbidden usually, but it was peripheral, not core knowledge.

Got it.

But surely some people question the old texts.

Oh, absolutely.

In every age, you had skeptics, people pushing boundaries, but often they were marginalized.

Or ironically, if they gained followers, they often ended up creating a new tradition that claimed to have the complete truth itself.

Like the example of prophet Muhammad,

critiquing ignorance, but then becoming the seal of the prophets.

Exactly.

It shows that pattern of seeking final, complete answers.

Modern science is different.

It embraces collective ignorance, even on the biggest questions.

Darwin didn't call himself the seal of the biologists.

Biologists today readily admit they don't fully get consciousness.

Physicists are still trying to figure out the big bang or how to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity.

These are massive fundamental unknowns.

And feels like economics.

It's constant debate, isn't it?

New theories, new data, challenging old models.

Constantly.

Even the most established theories, plate tectonics, evolution are technically held provisionally.

If truly compelling, contradictory evidence emerged, the theory would have to change.

That openness is key.

But doesn't that create a problem for society?

If science is always saying we might be wrong, how do you build social order?

Don't we need some shared certainties, some myths?

That's a really deep and difficult question.

How do you maintain cooperation if the foundations seem constantly shifting or doubtful?

So how have modern societies managed it?

Well, often by using sort of unscientific methods.

One way is to grab a scientific theory and basically turn it into a dogma, an absolute truth.

Think of Nazi racial theories or some rigid forms of communism.

They took science and froze it against its own principles.

Right.

Claiming scientific certainty for political ends.

Exactly.

The other way is to rely on non -scientific absolute truths alongside science.

Think about liberal humanism ideas about universal human rights.

These are powerful values, but they don't necessarily derive directly from, say, evolutionary biology.

They're more like articles of faith for secular society.

So even science needs some non -scientific beliefs to operate, to justify itself.

It often seems that way, yes.

It needs values to guide it, to justify the cost.

But despite these tensions, the overall trend in modern culture is this greater willingness to say we don't know compared to the past.

There's a kind of faith, almost religious in its intensity, in the process of science and the technology it produces.

Okay.

So admitting ignorance is step one.

What's the second big difference?

It's the central role given to observation in mathematics.

Once you admit you don't know, how do you find out?

Modern science says you observe the world carefully using your senses, often aided by instruments.

Microscopes, telescopes, sensors.

Right.

And then this is crucial.

You use mathematical tools to connect those observations, to find patterns, to build comprehensive theories.

People always observe things, though.

Farmers watch the weather, sailors watch the stars.

True.

But often within that old framework, where the really important stuff was already known.

So new observations might refine existing practices, but they weren't usually seen as pathways to discovering fundamental new laws of nature.

Modern science values new empirical data, new experiments, often more than old traditions.

Scientists study the past, sure, but the goal is to go beyond it.

And just collecting observations isn't enough.

No, you need to connect the dots, build theories.

And modern science uses mathematics as the primary language for doing that.

Unlike, say, old myths that explain things through stories.

Exactly.

Think of Manichaeism, this grand cosmic story of good versus evil, fighting it out.

It offers an explanation, a narrative, but it doesn't give you mathematical equations to predict, say, how strong the force of good will be tomorrow morning.

Then along comes someone like Isaac Newton, his Principia Mathematica in 1687.

That was a game changer.

He showed you could use mathematical laws, just a few elegant equations to explain everything from why apples fall to how planets orbit.

And predict things with incredible accuracy.

Phenomenal accuracy.

If you knew the position mass, velocity, forces, you could calculate future movements.

It seemed like the universe was this giant clockwork mechanism, understandable through math.

Until the cracks started to show later on.

Right.

Late 19th century observations started cropping up that didn't quite fit Newton's model, which eventually led to Einstein's relativity and quantum mechanics.

But even those new theories are intensely mathematical.

As Newton supposedly said, the book of nature is written in mathematics.

But not everything fits neatly into simple equations like physics, right?

What about biology or economics or psychology?

They seem much messier.

They are definitely more complex.

You can't easily write a single equation for, say, the rise and fall of the stock market or human consciousness.

But that didn't mean science gave up on math for those fields.

Instead, especially over the last couple of centuries, we saw the rise of statistics.

Probability and statistics.

Exactly.

A whole branch of mathematics developed specifically to handle complexity and uncertainty.

And there's a great example of this in action way back in 1744.

Two Scottish clergymen, Webster and Wallace, they wanted to set up a life insurance fund, basically a pension scheme for the widows and orphans of other ministers.

How did they approach it?

Prayer?

Divine guidance?

Nope.

They collected data.

They found out how old ministers were when they died on average.

And they went and talked to a mathematician, Colin McLaurin.

Using math for insurance.

That sounds quite modern.

It was cutting edge stuff back then.

They were relying on recent breakthroughs in statistics and probability theory,

especially Jacob Bernoulli's law of large numbers.

Remind me what that is.

It basically says you can't predict a single random event like when one specific minister will die.

But if you have a large enough group, you can predict the average outcome very accurately.

So you can estimate how many ministers out of say a thousand are likely to die each year.

Okay, got it.

And they had tools like Edmund Howley's actuarial tables based on death records from Breslau.

These tables gave probabilities like a 20 year old had a one in 100 chance of dying that year, but a 50 year old had a one in 39 chance.

So they crunched the numbers.

They did.

They estimated how many ministers there were, how many died each year, how many widows that would leave, how many orphans, how long the widows might live, all based on statistical data.

And from that, they figured out the contribution needed.

Exactly.

To guarantee a decent pension, each minister needed to pay in a certain amount each year.

They calculated specific figures like two pounds, 12 set pence for a 10 pound annual pension.

Did it work?

Amazingly well.

They predicted that by 1765, the fund would have about 58 ,348 engine and capital.

The actual amount when 1765 rolled around 58 ,347.

Yeah, off by one pound.

Incredible accuracy.

It showed the power of statistics and that fun they started.

It grew and grew and eventually became Scottish widows.

Still a massive insurance and pension company today.

That's a fantastic story.

And it shows how probability became key.

Foundational for insurance for demography, the study of populations pioneered by Malthus, another clergyman actually.

And demography influenced Darwin.

Yes.

The statistical thinking about populations and variation was part of the background for theory of evolution.

And genetics, of course, is heavily reliant on probabilistic models.

And now statistics are everywhere.

Everywhere.

Economics, sociology, psychology, political science,

even fundamental physics with quantum mechanics, which is inherently probabilistic.

You can see this shift reflected in education, too.

How so?

Look at a medieval university curriculum.

Lots of logic, grammar, rhetoric, some basic math, sure.

But theology was the queen of sciences.

And now?

Now, math is king.

Rhetoric and logic, mostly philosophy departments, theology, seminaries, mostly.

But math, especially statistics, it's required everywhere.

Even in linguistics or psychology departments.

Yeah, try getting a psychology degree without taking stats courses.

Exactly.

Imagine telling Confucius or Buddha or Jesus or Mohamed that to truly understand the human mind, you first need to master statistical analysis.

They'd be baffled.

Utterly bewildered.

It highlights how central mathematics has become to our way of seeking knowledge.

Okay, so admit ignorance, then use observation in math.

What's the third pillar?

The third key difference is the goal.

The acquisition of new powers.

Modern science isn't just about understanding for its own sake.

It aims to use that understanding to do things, to develop new technologies, to gain new capabilities.

Knowledge is power.

That's the essence, famously put by Francis Bacon back in 1620.

The real test of knowledge in this view isn't just is it true in some abstract sense, but is it useful?

Does it allow us to do something new?

Because it's about utility.

Utility is the proof.

A theory that lets you build a better engine or cure a disease or predict an epidemic, that theory counts as knowledge because it gives you power.

Both mental tools like predicting death rates and physical tools like technology.

Exactly.

And we see this intense focus on translating scientific understanding into technology.

Now it's important to realize this close link between science and technology is actually pretty recent.

Oh, I thought they always went together.

Not really.

Before 1500, they were largely separate worlds.

Science or natural philosophy was mostly done by educated elites, often focused on understanding existing knowledge.

Technology was mainly the domain of uneducated craftsmen, developing things through trial and error, practical experience.

Like cart makers improving carts without studying physics.

Precisely.

Bacon's idea of connecting scientific knowledge directly to technological invention was revolutionary back then.

The really tight integration we see today, where scientific breakthroughs rapidly lead to new tech, didn't fully solidify until the 19th century.

So even in, say, 1800,

rulers weren't routinely funding science labs hoping for better weapons or factories?

Not as a primary strategy, no.

There were exceptions, patronage existed, but the assumption that basic research would automatically lead to useful applications wasn't widespread.

Rulers funded education mainly to create loyal administrators and reinforce tradition.

So new tech came from artisans, not scientists.

Mostly, yes.

Innovations came from practical tinkering, not systematic research programs applying scientific principles.

What a contrast to today, where governments rely so heavily on scientific advice for everything.

Everything from economics to defense.

And the military connection is especially strong now.

We talk about the military industrial complex, but maybe it should be the military industrial scientific complex.

Modern wars are scientific productions.

Militaries funding research directly.

Massively.

Think of World War I trench warfare stalemate.

Both sides poured resources into getting scientists to invent ways to break it.

Poison gas, tanks, aircraft.

Submarines, better machine guns.

A technological arms race driven by scientific input.

And World War II was even more science driven.

Germany pinning hopes on V2 rockets and jets.

And the US with the Manhattan Project.

The atomic bomb.

Probably the most stark example of science delivering decisive, terrifying new military power.

And that link continues.

Think about the investment in nanotechnology or brain research today, partly driven by the hope of finding technological solutions to terrorism or gaining strategic advantages.

It seems so obvious now, this military technology link, but you're saying it's relatively new.

Surprisingly recent, yes.

For most of history, major military shifts were often about organization, discipline, logistics, leadership, or just having more soldiers.

Not necessarily better gear?

Not necessarily.

Think about huge conquests.

The Arabs defeating the Sassanids, the Seljuks beating the Byzantines, the Mongols sweeping across Asia, even Rome conquering its neighbors.

The winners didn't always have superior tech.

Rome's legions weren't necessarily better equipped than, say, Hannibal's army.

Their strength was organization, engineering, discipline, logistics.

They didn't have an R &D department constantly churning out better swords or shields.

Roman military equipment changed remarkably little over centuries.

Compare that to the rapid evolution of weapons from Napoleon's time onwards, let alone today.

What about gunpowder in China?

Didn't that change things?

It did, eventually.

But it's interesting how eventually, gunpowder was discovered accidentally by alchemists, probably looking for an elixir of life.

Not weapons research.

Right.

And it took centuries before it was adapted effectively for warfare, with cannons really only becoming decisive on European battlefields around the 15th century.

That slow adoption suggests people didn't immediately grasp its potential, or perhaps didn't believe new technology could be a game -changer in warfare.

So the belief had to change first?

It seems so.

Things started shifting in the 15th, 16th centuries, but it wasn't until maybe the 18th or 19th century that investing heavily in weapons R &D became standard practice for major powers.

Before that, strategy and logistics were often seen as more important than having the absolute latest gadget.

And this really took off with capitalism and the Industrial Revolution.

That's when science, industry, and military technology became truly powerfully intertwined.

And once that happened, the pace of change just went into overdrive, transforming the world in ways no one could have predicted.

This connects to another huge shift, doesn't it?

The whole idea of progress.

Absolutely.

Before the Scientific Revolution, the dominant view in most cultures wasn't really one of progress.

If anything, many believed the Golden Age was in the past.

Things were better back then.

Right.

The world was seen as maybe static or even declining.

The goal was to preserve the wisdom of the ancients, follow the traditions.

Big problems, famine, disease,

poverty, war, were seen as just part of life.

Unsolvable facts of the human condition.

Even the greatest figures, Muhammad, Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, they offered ways to cope with suffering or achieve enlightenment or live ethically, but not really a plan to eliminate poverty or disease through new discoveries.

Exactly.

There might have been hope for a future messiah or divine intervention to fix everything, but the idea that humans could systematically solve these fundamental problems through new knowledge and invention, that often sounded like arrogance, like hubris.

The Tower of Babel story.

Icarus flying too close to the sun.

The Golem legend.

Lots of cautionary tales warning against overreaching.

But science changed that outlook.

It planted the seed.

Admitting ignorance, we don't know, combined with seeing science actually deliver new powers, but we can find out and do new things, led to this growing suspicion, then belief that maybe real continuous progress was possible.

Seeing problems actually get solved.

Yeah.

When science started chipping away at things previously thought unsolvable, it fostered this conviction.

Maybe any problem could be overcome with enough knowledge.

Poverty, sickness, war, famine, aging, even death itself.

They started to be seen not as inevitable destiny, but as technical problems resulting from ignorance.

Problems with potential technical solutions.

Right.

Think of Benjamin Franklin in Lightning.

Before, it was often seen as divine anger, totally beyond human control.

An act of God.

Franklin investigated it scientifically, figured out it was electrical, and invented the lightning rod.

Suddenly, this terrifying act of God could be neutralized by a simple human invention.

That was powerful symbolism.

A tangible example of understanding leading to control.

Definitely.

Or take poverty, Jesus said.

The poor you will always have with you, reflecting that age -old acceptance.

But the modern view increasingly is that poverty is a technical problem.

Solvable through things like better agriculture, economic policies, medicine, education.

Exactly.

Using knowledge from agronomy, economics, medicine, sociology.

And look, we have seen massive reductions in extreme biological poverty in many places.

Starvation used to be a constant threat for most people throughout history.

But widespread famine is much rarer now in many parts of the world.

Thanks to agricultural science, better distribution, safety nets like insurance, government aid, NGOs, it's a huge shift.

In many developed countries now, obesity is a bigger public health problem than starvation.

That would have been unthinkable just a few centuries ago.

Okay, so poverty, disease.

What about the ultimate problem?

Death.

Ah, yes.

Death.

Arguably the biggest, most universal human concern.

And for millennia, the standard approach from religions and philosophies was acceptance.

Making sense of death, finding meaning in it, focusing on the afterlife.

Precisely.

Death was seen as inevitable, part of the natural order, maybe even necessary for meaning.

The focus wasn't generally on escaping death in this life.

You mentioned the Epic of Gilgamesh.

A perfect example.

Oldest story we have, practically.

Gilgamesh is horrified by his friend Enkidu's death.

Goes on this epic quest for immortality.

And fails.

And fails.

He comes back having learned that death is our destiny.

And wisdom lies in accepting that and living life well.

That was the traditional message.

But the modern scientific view is different.

Radically different for some.

The disciples of progress, as Harari calls them, tend to see death not as some metaphysical necessity, but as, well, a technical problem.

Or rather, a collection of technical problems.

Like heart attacks, cancer, infections.

Right.

Things that go wrong with the biological machine.

And if they're technical problems, then maybe they have technical solutions.

Pace makers, chemotherapy,

antibiotics.

We haven't cured death, obviously.

But the approach has changed.

The mindset has shifted.

Instead of just accepting aging and disease, the scientific project is increasingly focused on understanding the biological mechanisms and figuring out how to intervene, repair, slow down, or even reverse them.

And the progress in just basic survival is staggering.

You mentioned Richard the Lionheart.

Yeah.

Dying in 1199 from an infected arrow wound.

Minor wound by our standards.

But no antibiotics, no proper understanding of infection.

Fatal.

Even much later, 19th century medicine was pretty grim.

Terrifying.

No reliable anesthesia for much of it.

Surgeons operating with unwashed hands.

Amputation often the only option for injuries because gangrene was so feared.

But compare that to now.

The last two centuries have seen an explosion in medical capability.

Pills, injections, incredibly sophisticated surgeries.

We routinely save people from things that were automatic death sentences before and cure countless ailments that made daily life miserable.

And life expectancy figures show the change dramatically.

Hugely.

From maybe 25, 40 years in pre -modern societies to a global average of around 67 today and up to 80 in developed countries.

And the biggest gains have been in stopping children from dying young.

Right.

Child mortality used to be horrific.

Appalling.

In typical pre -20th century farming societies, maybe a quarter to a third of kids died before adulthood.

Even in 17th century England, something like 15 % of babies died in their first year.

And maybe a third died before age 15.

Even for the rich.

Even for royalty.

King Edward I and Queen Eleanor, 13th century England, had 16 children between 1255 and 1284.

They had the best food, housing, care imaginable for the time.

How many survived to adulthood?

Only six.

Ten died young, some as infants, some as toddlers, some in childhood or adolescence.

It shows how precarious life was, even for the most privileged.

Today, in a country like England, maybe 5 in 1 ,000 newborns die in the first year, 7 in 1 ,000 before 15.

It's a different world.

So this guilt -managed project, the quest to conquer death, it doesn't seem quite so crazy anymore.

It's moving from the realm of myth into serious scientific discussion.

We're already manipulating genes to double the lifespan of worms.

Okay, worms, but still.

It's a proof of concept.

People are talking seriously about nanotechnology, creating tiny robots to repair cells, essentially a bionic immune system.

Some quite serious scientists and thinkers suggest humans might achieve a -mortality, not being immune to accidents, but potentially living indefinitely, maybe even by 2050.

A -mortality?

Wow.

Whether that happens or not, the ambition itself is remarkable.

It is, and notice how most modern ideologies, liberalism, socialism, feminism, they don't focus much on death or the afterlife anymore.

They're mostly concerned with improving life here and now.

Except maybe nationalism,

promising remembrance if you die for the nation.

That's maybe the closest exception, yeah, but it's often a bit fuzzy, this idea of living on in national memory.

It's not quite the same as promising paradise or reincarnation.

The focus has shifted dramatically towards this life.

Okay, so science offers these incredible powers, the potential for progress, even tackling death, but it doesn't do this alone, does it?

It needs resources.

Absolutely critical point.

Science is expensive.

Labs, particle accelerators, supercomputers, field work, clinical trials,

paying salaries for legions of researchers, it all costs a fortune.

So the wonders we see are only possible because someone is paying the bills.

Exactly.

The reason science has achieved so much in the last 500 years is largely because governments,

businesses, foundations, wealthy donors, have been willing to pour billions upon billions into research.

So funding is arguably more important than individual genius.

You could make that argument.

Obviously, you need brilliant minds, but even a Galileo or a Darwin needs resources to do their work.

If Galileo hadn't had patrons or access to instrument makers, if Darwin hadn't been able to afford his voyage on the Beagle, someone else might have had the same ideas eventually, maybe.

Possibly.

Alfred Russel Wallace came up with natural selection independently around the same time as Darwin.

It suggests the ideas were emerging from the collective scientific effort, which itself depended on resources for exploration, collection, communication.

Without funding, no amount of brilliance can compensate.

So why did the money start flowing?

Wasn't it just pure love of knowledge?

Right, very rarely just pure altruism or curiosity on the part of the funders.

Most scientific research gets funded because someone, a government, a company, a military, believes it will help them achieve their goals.

Political goals, economic goals, sometimes even religious goals.

Can you give some examples?

Sure, 16th century.

Kings and bankers funded long -distance geographical expeditions.

Why?

For discovery, yes, but mainly for conquest, colonies, trade routes, gold.

They weren't funding studies on child psychology back then.

Right, no obvious profit or power in that.

Or the 1940s.

The U .S.

and Soviet governments poured unprecedented sums into nuclear physics.

Why?

To build bombs.

They weren't equally funding, say, underwater archaeology.

So scientists might be driven by curiosity, but the funders usually have other agendas.

That's generally how it works.

Scientists rarely get to set the overall research agenda completely freely.

Even if we wanted to fund only pure science based on curiosity alone, resources are limited.

Choices have to be made.

And those choices are often based on non -scientific values.

Inevitably.

Imagine a politician deciding where to allocate research funds.

Do they fund basic research into quark physics, or research into better teaching methods for schools, or give a tax break to a local factory?

That decision isn't a scientific one.

It's based on political and economic priorities.

There's that hypothetical example in the text, right?

Two biologists seeking funding.

Yeah, Professor Slughorn wants to study a disease affecting dairy cow udders, which costs the dairy industry millions.

Professor Sprout wants to study the mental world of cows, just out of curiosity about bovine consciousness.

Who gets the grant?

In our current system, almost certainly Slughorn.

Not because his research is inherently better science, but because the dairy industry has economic clout and cares about sick udders.

Bovine consciousness doesn't directly impact profits.

Unless Sprout can reframe her research.

Exactly.

Maybe she argues understanding cow psychology could lead to calmer cows, which might increase milk yield.

Then suddenly there's a potential economic angle and her chances improve.

It shows how funding priorities are shaped by external interests.

So science can't really set its own priorities entirely, or even decide what's ethical to do with its discoveries.

No, it can't.

Science can tell us how to manipulate genes.

It can give us the capability to, say, cure genetic diseases, or attempt eugenic selection, or breed superproductive livestock.

But it cannot tell us which of those goals is ethically right or most valuable.

Different ideologies would prioritize those differently.

Absolutely.

A humanist might prioritize curing disease.

An authoritarian regime might be tempted by eugenics.

A capitalist might focus on the super udder cows.

Science provides the tools.

But ideology, politics, and economics largely determine how they're used and which tools get developed in the first place.

So to understand the path science has taken, why we ended up focusing on certain things like atomic bombs or moon landings, we need to look beyond the science itself.

We have to.

We need to understand the ideologies and the political and economic forces that have funded and steered science.

They act as its patrons.

It's sugar daddies, if you will.

And the material suggests two forces have been particularly crucial patrons over the last 500 years.

Yes, imperialism and capitalism.

They have been arguably the chief engines driving scientific investment and shaping its agenda for centuries.

Okay, so those are huge topics we need to explore next.

The links between science and empire and then science and capitalism.

Definitely.

That's where we need to go to get a fuller picture of how we got here.

Right.

So just to wrap up what we've covered today,

this incredible transformation in the last 500 years driven by the scientific revolution.

And its core features are this unique willingness to admit ignorance.

Its reliance on observation and mathematics to gain new knowledge.

And its focus on using that knowledge to acquire new powers, new technologies.

It's a shift from believing all -important knowledge was already known to this dynamic ongoing quest for the unknown.

A fundamentally different way of interacting with the world.

And the impact has been just immense.

Reshaping not just technology and how we understand the universe, but our very ideas about progress, maybe even life and death.

We hope this deep dive has shed some light on those foundations for everyone listening.

Yeah, hopefully given some aha moments about why our world looks the way it does.

And it leaves us with some big questions, doesn't it?

Given how powerful this alliance of science, politics and economics is,

what's our responsibility in guiding where it goes next?

That's the crucial question.

And as we keep pushing boundaries, especially in areas like genetics or AI or longevity,

what does it actually mean to be human in this rapidly changing landscape created by science?

Lots to think about.

And as we said, we'll continue this exploration by looking closely at the roles imperialism and capitalism played in this whole story in our next discussions.

So definitely stay tuned for that.

Until then.

So we thoroughly covered the key ideas about the scientific revolution from our source material for this part of our deep dive.