Category: History

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.

Science has changed so much over the years of human civilization. Prior to this course, I thought of science the same way most people think of it: measurements, experiments, data, theories, etc. With the exception of when I took my Economics in Context course as part of the Green Learning Community experience last semester, I never stopped to think about science prior to Sir Isaac Newton, or to question the terms in which we view science as twenty-first century American university students. However, after starting this course, I began to question what science itself means. Much like I’ve begun to discover in my Environmental Science courses, I’ve come to realize that there is much more to science beyond experiments and technological advancement, as science stretches back to the dawn of ancient civilizations such as Ancient Egypt’s papyri detailing medical treatments or Mesopotamia’s Venus tablet. Science is observation, science involves questioning the very nature of human existence, observing the world around us, and it is intertwined with faith and human connection, something that is so often ignored in the consideration of science today. This course has deepened my understanding of and appreciation of science and how so much has changed since the dawn of civilization.

My newfound understanding of the history of scientific development can aid my understanding of the natural world, as much of studying environmental science involves observation and drawing conclusions from that rather than formulating an experiment in a controlled environment. My cognizance of this transformation also has the potential to inform my personal opinions and belief regarding the significance of ancient civilizations and has broadened my understanding of societies beyond the United States, such as Islamic nations and Greece, as I did not know much of anything about any ancient civilizations prior to this semester. I have spent much of my time in history learning about recent events, which did not provide context for the world views of those eras, often leaving me wondering how such conflicts and relations ever came to be. Now, I have a better understanding of international relationships due to having more knowledge on the Ancient world of Eurasia. Overall, this course has helped me to develop an understanding of world history that I lacked prior to this course.