Lecture 1

Introduction: What is Science? What is civilization?

Introduction

The world of the 21st century has become so interconnected that the phrase "the global village" has become
acceptable as a term to describe modern society. Today information technology links people and places from all
civilizations, and national economies have become increasingly interconnected.

Whether it is commerce or media, manufacturing or agriculture, the advancing globalization of human activity would
be unthinkable without the development of science and technology. The contributions from science have not always
been beneficial; indeed, many would argue that science is to be blamed for the deterioration of the global
environment that we are witnessing today. But is it science that, through its applications, leads to global warming, the
ozone hole, weapons of mass destruction and widespread poverty? Or do these developments occur through actions
of those who control science and use its findings for their own aims?

This course will ponder such questions by studying the interaction between science, technology, civilization and
society through the millennia, beginning with the earliest human societies and ending at the dawn of the current
century. It will ask what drives people to scientific study, how they can afford the time they spend on their studies
when others have to work on the fields, in factories or in offices to secure their livelihood, and who benefits from the
results of scientific studies. It will investigate the degree to which a civilization depends on its scientists and trace the
development of global science from its infancy to today.

To guarantee the success of such an undertaking we have to base our investigation on clear definitions of the study
objects. We therefore begin with four questions.

What is science?

The most basic definition of science is "systematic knowledge of nature through repeatable observation and
experimentation." Its aim is the discovery of the laws that govern natural phenomena.

Science developed from the observation of regularity in the natural world: The return of spring after winter, the setting
of the sun at a day's end, the falling of the ebb tide after high water. Regularity suggests that nature is not all chaos
but follows rules.

Defined in this way science has been a human activity well before the development of the first civilizations. The oldest
civilizations are believed to have emerged some time before 3000 BC; but excavations from Catal Hüyük in Anatolia
have shown that the people in today's Turkey had developed advanced skills in measurement and accurate mapping
as early as 6200 BC. One aim of our enquiry will be to find out what drove people to scientific study in the earliest
human societies.

Such early evidence of scientific activity does of course not mean that the Anatolian society employed scientists. The
term "scientist" as a description of a profession was first used in the 19th century. In early societies scientific study
was undertaken by priests and monks, and scientific knowledge was taught in temples and monasteries. As
civilizations developed, the link between science and religion weakened and science became the domain of
philosophy. A clear distinction between science and religion did not develop until well into the 18th century.

Religion, like science, attempts to establish a system of knowledge about nature. All religions are based on the belief
that gods act in an orderly fashion and make sure that nature follows rules. The human mind is opposed to chaos; it
can only make sense of an ordered world and finds order to meet its needs, even where order may not exist. Nature
does contain a certain amount of chaos: Comets come and go; some appear regularly, others are just passing
through the earth's realm and are never seen again. The medieval belief that the appearance of a comet was
invariably the cause for great unrest on earth was a misguided attempt to find order in a chaotic process.

There is, however, one central difference between the ways in which science and religion find order in nature.
Science is a system of knowledge based on repeatable observation and experiment. Religion is a system of
knowledge based on unverifiable belief. Early societies had only limited means of experimentation, and their
endeavour to discover the laws of nature had to rely on a range of unverifiable assumptions. As human knowledge
progressed, the need for unverifiable assumptions decreased progressively, and eventually science and religion
separated.

Religious belief can still stimulate scientific discovery today. Einstein's famous words "God does not play dice"
expressed the belief in a God who loves order, a belief that influenced his approach to scientific study and led to new
scientific insight.

People in early human societies had to spend much of their time procuring food and shelter and could not afford to
put much effort into non-essential activities. If science was practiced in the earliest societies it must have been for a
purpose; in other words, science was undertaken for practical applications. The fruits of science translated into new
technological developments.

What is technology?

The word technology has changed its meaning several times since it came into use in Europe during the 17th
century. In the most general terms it can be defined as the application of knowledge about nature to practical aims of
human endeavour. If this definition is accepted it follows that technological development occurred at least as early as
first scientific study: Stone-age humans realized that flintstone produces better cutting tools than sandstone. They
made that discovery and used their new knowledge well before someone found the scientific explanation for the
phenomenon.

Long periods of human history were characterized by the mastering of technologies such as the smelting of copper,
bronze or iron, without much knowledge of the underlying scientific principles. In some societies this lack of scientific
understanding gave technology mystical qualities and lead to misguided activities such as medieval European
alchemy (unscientific attempts to convert lead or other low value metals into silver or gold) or the quest for
immortalitythrough chemical concoctions in ancient China.

Today the relationship is the reverse: Most new technology is the result of scientific research that preceded it. It is
also generally accepted that today science and technology are closely linked and that science provides the
theoretical underpinning for its technological applications. The symbol of this symbiosis is probably Thomas Alva
Edison, the first engineer to establish a factory for inventions just before the 20th century.

In the context of this course technology and science have to be seen as closely related, since both require systematic
thinking and experimentation. They began as parallel developments, initially more or less independent of each other,
but grew closer as the centuries progressed, and became eventually inseparable.

Science and technology are activities exclusive to the species Homo sapiens. But it is not science that sets humans
visibly apart from the animal world, because scientific research produces invisible results, and it is impossible to tell
whether an animal can think and reach scientific conclusions or not. The proof is not in the thought but in the action.
Some animals have been observed to use tools, for example a stick to poke into a bees' nest or to reach a fruit on a
tree; but no animal fashions general tools and keeps them for later use. This is the essence of technology, and if
proof is required that Homo sapiens differs from all other animal species, technology can provide it.

What is society?

We already used the words "society" and "civilization" in the previous discussion, assuming that there is some
general consensus about the meaning of the words. In the context of this investigation we have to be more accurate.
Society is the organizational form in which individuals of a species live together. The animal world contains many
examples of different societies. Bears have a large daily food intake requirement but live in an environment where the
food supply is scattered over a wide region; as a consequence bears live solitary lives through most of the year. Lions
and wolves rely on collaborative hunting and therefore live in small hunting parties. In both cases the internal
structure of their societies is determined by the environmental conditions and the survival needs of the species. Their
societies cannot evolve; bears could not survive in groups, nor could lions live solitary lives.

Other animal societies show more complicated forms with a developed division of labour. Bee and ant societies have
workers, soldiers, drones and queens. Observation shows that ants have in fact several types of societies. Some ant
species raid the nests of other ant species to obtain slaves for their own colony. Because they work their slaves to
death they have to go out on raids again and again. Other ant species practice husbandry; they keep colonies of
aphids, protect them against predators and milk them regularly.

Although different ant species live in very different societies, the fact remains that these societies are as static as bear
or lion societies: Each species of ant has its own society structure and cannot survive outside it. Humans are the only
creatures that live in evolving societies, because they can restructure their societies in response to changes in
environmental and economic conditions.

The earliest human society was the hunter-gatherer society. It relied on food availability from the land and could
therefore only support very small kinship groups. Larger gatherings of many people could be sustained only on
festive (religious) occasions and then only for a few days.

Remnants of the hunter-gatherer society can still be found in extreme environments. Examples are the Inuit (Eskimo),
who go on long Arctic hunting trips in extremely small family groups, and the Australian desert Aborigines who live at
outstations. Division of labour is an early development in these societies; the hunt is the duty of the male, while the
female is responsible for food preparation, clothing and child-rearing.

The introduction of seed planting and animal husbandry changed the structure of the human society. Humans now
lived in village settlements, which could support more than a single family. The associated social organization, known
as the agricultural society, took various forms. Villages of the Pacific region became structured into men's houses and
women's houses, and children grew up with little notion of a particular pair of adults as their father and mother.
European villages developed the system of the "extended family" in which several generations live under one roof.

All village structures continued and redefined the division of labour inherited from the hunter-gatherer society: In
European agricultural societies the male ploughed the fields and planted the crops, the female looked after the
house; in African agricultural societies the male looks after the animal herd, the female after the garden.

The agricultural society is still widespread today and probably the most common society structure across the globe. It
coexists with the more advanced form of the urban society, which developed when the division of labour reached the
stage where individuals specialized in trades and had to receive food and other subsistence in exchange for products
of their work.

Society, technology and class structure

The rise of the urban society is a clear example of the interaction between technology and society. Increased division
of labour resulted from new technological developments and allowed people to live in communities of a size that
could not be sustained before. Technology also defined the size of the new cities: Everything required for daily life
had to be reached by foot, and living quarters had to be within reasonable distance of the public water supply. Ancient
cities were therefore usually small but extremely crowded. Evidence obtained from excavations from before 2000 BC
suggests that cities of up to 20,000 people occupied less than half a kilometre square, a population density nearly
twice that of today's most crowded cities such as Kolkata (Calcutta) or Shanghai.

One reason for the confined character of ancient cities was the need for defence. Cities are places of accumulated
wealth that attracts raiders, and defence becomes essential for the survival of urban societies. Once a city has been
surrounded by a wall and a moat it becomes difficult to extend it, and any population growth has to be accommodated
within its walls.

Another consequence of increased division of labour and urbanization is vertical stratification of society into classes.
Large cities require specialized administrative skills to secure the ongoing maintenance of its infrastructure. The
group responsible for administration and defence soon established itself as the ruling class and took steps to secure
its position into the future.

A second class that did not exist before urbanization was the slave class. In a hunter-gatherer or agricultural society it
was not possible to obtain slaves; defeated enemies were simply assimilated into the tribe; they could not be forced
to work as slaves because there was no police force to stop them from running away. In an urban civilization slaves
could be kept under control, and advanced division of labour made it possible to allocate menial work to them without
the need for supervision. Slavery was part of urban society as early as 3000 BC and grew in importance over the
millennia.

The development of a class society changed the role of kinship as the smallest unit of society in a fundamental way.
In the earliest societies the kinship structure provided the means to organize the division of labour, but the members
of the group depended equally on each other: The men depended on warm clothing made by the women, the women
depended on the results from the hunt for feeding the family. In agricultural societies ownership of land can create
new dependencies, particularly if land is held by individuals and not by the community as a whole. The form of this
dependency varies significantly; in some agricultural societies women are not allowed to own or trade land, while in
others they have independent title to land.

Technological innovation offered opportunities to take up a trade, but these innovations affected mainly the way in
which people hunt or build houses and not so much the way in which people prepare meals. It was therefore mostly
the men who took up a trade and began to bring money into the family. As a result the development of the urban
society increased the economic dependence of women, and women became more and more disadvantaged.

In a vertically stratified society the family structure has the additional role of providing continuity of class by regulating
inheritance. Basic social relationships such as marriage became an instrument to regulate access to wealth and
power. Women of the ruling class did not have to provide meals or clothing - such activities are left for the servants -
and merely became an instrument to produce a heir or increase wealth and power through marriage alliances. (In
Europe this process was restricted through the Christian tradition to strategic marriages between the offspring of the
ruling houses. The Islamic Mughal empire of 16th century India did not have these restrictions, and ruling houses of
all conquered territories had to supply at least one daughter for the royal harem.) For the lower classes, who had less
wealth and little power, women continued to supply labour to the household but became financially dependent on the
"breadwinner" in the family.

The industrial revolution of the 18th century led to further change in the urban society. As industrialization progressed,
more and more people were forced to leave the land and seek work in factories. Opportunities to supplement the
family's resources through small scale garden cultivation disappeared, and working class families had to rely entirely
on monetary income. For women this meant complete economic dependence on the man who had the factory job.
The older generations who did not participate in the industrial process became a burden to the family and were
increasingly sent to "old peoples' homes."

During the 20th century this situation changed again when women began to enter the paid labour force. Although
women's wages were and are still lower than wages for men, women were able to establish their economic
independence and are no longer forced to remain in unequal relationships for lack of alternatives. The development
of modern capitalist technology has thus led to a situation where the independence of women has become a real
possibility.

It has of course to be recognized that family and kinship bonds are not only instruments of economic relationships but
serve to satisfy basic emotional requirements of the human species as well, and it has to be questioned whether the
form in which the economic liberation of women was achieved is adequate to serve these requirements. Modern
capitalism has made it possible for families to break into smaller, financially independent but has not developed a new
structure for social interaction. If the modern capitalist society continues in that direction the future urban society will
consist of the smallest possible kinship units (singles households, sole parent households and retirement homes). To
obtain the minimum daily dose of emotional support they will be connected by mobile phones and computer screens -
another example how human societies can adapt to changing economic conditions and keep the species alive at the
expense of the spiritual and emotional welfare of its members.

Conservative politicians deplore the fact that a large and increasing percentage of households in highly developed
urban societies are single parent families. Through tax reform and family bonuses they try to induce women to return
to family structures of the past. They do not understand that the traditional two parent family is the basic social unit of
early capitalism, that its time has passed, and that efforts to turn time backwards never succeed.

Societies cannot ignore prevailing economic conditions, but there can be choices in their response to economic
change. Village societies in Europe and in the South Pacific existed under similar economic conditions but developed
quite different social structures. The economic conditions of 21st century capitalism can offer economic independence
for all; they do not prescribe a society of isolated individuals connected through electronic technology. It is possible to
imagine a new form of community living in which financially independent individuals of all age groups come into daily
contact with each other in meaningful exchange, respect each other and care for each other.

Society and ethics

An important aspect of the development of societies is that interaction between many individuals is impossible without
rules of socially acceptable behaviour. the establishment of a moral code is therefore a natural product of the
evolution of societies (Singer, 1995). It is a widespread belief that moral codes are based on religious foundations
and that without religion there can be no agreement on what is right and what is wrong. The comparative study of
humans and animal societies shows that moral codes are a natural ingredient and regulator of life in all societies. Any
group of humans or animals falls apart if its members take frequent recourse to totally unrestrained attacks.

In animal groups an attack usually ends when the weaker animal shows submissive behaviour. Animals also show
altruistic behaviour, for example when they defend infant members of the group against attacks, when leading
animals cover the group's retreat from enemies, or when individuals share food that they collected themselves.
Evolution explains this behaviour in terms of survival of the species through a survival advantage for the population
as a whole rather than the individual.

The mechanism of survival advantage operates also on a level closer to the individual. A general observation is that
altruistic behaviour is more likely between closely related animals than between distant relatives. Through
evolutionary history the principle of kinship altruism became one fundamental aspect of ethical behaviour in human
societies as well.

A second fundamental principle is the concept of reciprocity. When a monkey picks parasites from another member of
the group the expectation is that at some later time the roles will be reversed. All human societies accept the principle
of reciprocity; some have developed elaborate rituals that regulate how to respond to gifts and services received.
Experience with reciprocity establishes personal reputations and separates generous, benevolent people from
scrooges and cheats.

Once kinship altruism and reciprocity are accepted as the basis of the distinction between good and bad behaviour, it
is a short distance to the introduction of a system of punishment for those who try to exploit the goodness of people.
Banishment of nonreciprocators from the group's territory or other less severe forms of punishment are common
practice in the animal world.

Human societies follow the same basic moral principles and punish nonreciprocators. In contrast to societies found in
the animal world human societies evolve over time in response to changes of their economic system. Their legal
systems evolve as well; eventually they include regulations designed not so much to regulate ethical behaviour but to
protect the privileges of the ruling class.
The fact that actions of privileged members of society are often judged unethical by the common people even though
they are within the law, shows that the principles of kinship altruism and reciprocity do not necessarily form the basis
of every law but continue to form the basis of morality. They are found in core documents of all religions but do not
require religion to explain their existence.

What is civilization?

The previous section showed how much science and technology impact on the structure of human societies. The
discussion was by necessity brief and compressed, but this course will revisit much of it in greater detail. Before we
move on to that we have to define what we mean by civilization.

Civilization requires that the society has developed a central institution responsible for the organization of daily life
support, for example the maintenance of a water supply or a transportation system. This requires an advanced
administration, which is not found before the development of cities. A civilization is therefore always sustained by an
urban society, although the majority of its people may (and often do) live in an agricultural society structure in the
countryside.

Descriptions of different civilizations often concentrate on their cultural, spiritual and artistic achievements. This is
because the organization of a road network or a water supply is not usually regarded as exciting, and in any case
there are not all that many different ways to organize a road network. Cultural and artistic expression, on the other
hand, can take many forms and vary widely in its appearance and provides much better descriptors of differences
between civilizations. But having developed great artistic skill does not necessarily produce a civilization. People
were artists long before the first civilizations developed.

The situation can be clarified if we distinguish between civilization and culture. The classic definition of culture goes
back to 1871, when the English anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor wrote in his work Primitive Culture that "culture
... is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and
habits acquired by man as a member of society." Culture is behaviour; it includes language, rituals, social customs
and many other elements of expression. We speak of Neolithic culture when we look at artistic expressions of
stone-age humans. Culture was a major consideration in the formation of today's nation states, and we can refer to
"the French way of life" as the French culture.

The existence of prehistoric art demonstrates that human societies developed culture before they developed
civilization. The point where a culture evolved into civilization is difficult to determine, and the boundaries between the
two concepts are indeed blurred.

If culture is behaviour, civilization is structure. One approach at defining civilization lists a few conditions that have to
be met before a society is considered a civilization. Civilization is characterized by

1. the existence of cities;

2. advanced division of labour based on specialized occupational groups;
3. social classes, including a ruling class that is exempt from work for basic subsistence;
4. an administration that can collect "social surplus" (taxes or tribute);
5. public buildings not designed as dwellings but for communal purposes; and
6. record keeping in written form.

Not all civilizations satisfy all of these criteria, but to be considered a civilization they have to satisfy the majority of
them.

Thus defined civilizations are large structures that can contain many cultures. The boundaries between different
civilizations are sometimes not well defined, particularly when one civilization evolved from another. It is therefore not
possible to state with certitude a definite number for all civilizations of the world, but the number is small, much
smaller than the number of languages, nations or art styles. There are a few thousand languages and hundreds of
cultures but only about a dozen civilizations.
Summary

● Science is a system of knowledge based on repeatable observation and experiment. Religion is a system of
knowledge based on unverifiable belief.
● Technology is the application of knowledge about nature to practical aims of human endeavour.
● Technology and science began as parallel developments but became eventually inseparable.
● Society is the organizational form in which individuals of a species live together.
● Human society is the only evolving society; its structure changes in response to environmental and
economic conditions from the hunter-gatherer society through the agricultural society to the urban society.
● The development of cities was accompanied by division of labour and by the development of classes.
● The structure of the basic social unit (family) of the human society evolves in response to changes of the
society, and its role differs between its classes.
● Civilization requires a central institution responsible for the organization of daily life and an advanced
administration.
● Civilization is structure; culture is behaviour.

Reference

Singer, P. (1995) Ethics, Encyclopaedia Britannica 15th ed.