Final Reflection

Science, which I consider to be the pursuit of knowledge for sake of understanding, has evolved very much over the centuries upon centuries of human evolution. As I’ve said in my previous reflection, prior to this course, I considered science to be rooted in theory and experimentation, based in objectivity. However, as this class has gone on, I’ve learned of the many historical contributions of ancient societies and the pre-Renaissance world, and in turn, have broadened my perspective on what constitutes science. Science doesn’t need to be objective, and in fact, as Cajete points out in his article on Native Science, subjectivity and emotion are key to a full understanding of the world, as much as any human can possibly seek to understand the complexities of the natural world and the cosmos. Science wasn’t always rooted in mathematical experimentation like Galileo’s experiment with the planes and rolling objects to test out the idea of accelerated motion, or the current paradigm of inductive reasoning as proposed by philosophers like Francis Bacon. This course has helped me to understand the shifting of paradigms throughout time— the changes in cultural values and scientific processes from region to region, with the deductive reasoning and pure logic of Ancient Greece to the spiritual stories of creation of the Indigenous Americans— and how this has shaped today’s concept of science, especially in the form of the mechanization of how people interact with nature and how that bleeds into the sciences, such as medical treatment where every symptom correlates to one specific issue and factors such as lifestyle, stress levels, et cetera are not considered. The concept of modern science is ever-changing, as we saw in our debate on whether or not Europe invented modern science, but the foundations are the same: a quest to understand more of the world we live in, more of the universe itself.

This broadened understanding of how science has changed over time has helped me to open my mind more to valuing spiritual and emotional connections to the natural world with the same weight that data and objectivity hold for me. I also have more knowledge about the history of Europe, Asia, and South America— at least in the case of Potosi— prior to the Renaissance than I did before this class, as most of my history classes focused on post-Renaissance Europe and the United States of America. With this knowledge, I can continue to have an open mind with which to approach both my personal life and my professional life in both my environmental science major and writing minor.