As we discussed at the end of Chapter 1, all peoples tell stories about their ancestors. Scientific stories about our ancestors are constrained by the assumptions of science, which developed out of 17th-century European philosophy. 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. 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 third is that we learn about nature by principally collecting data, under controlled circumstances, so that anyone, anywhere, can come to the same conclusions. We call such fundamental cultural assumptions like these epistemes, and we can label these as naturalism, rationalism, and empiricism, respectively. Our fourth assumption is that maximum accuracy is the only goal of a good scientific explanation. 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. 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.
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. Many of these ideas had theological implications. 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. Things on Earth tend to move in straight lines, but in the sky they move in circles. Things on Earth decay; things in the sky seem to be eternal. Things here are ugly and uneven; things in the sky are perfect crystalline spheres. 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. Nevertheless, by 1700 it was clear that the same basic rules of gravity and motion govern things up in Heaven and here on Earth. 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.
Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Tyson’s “orang-outang”.
The earth itself is a body in space revolving around the sun, just as the other planets in the solar system do. Things up in the sky and down here on Earth really aren’t so different, after all.
Scholars began trying to reconstruct the history of the earth naturalistically. Around 1700 Thomas Burnet speculated that perhaps a comet smashed into the earth, which set off the Great Flood related in the Bible. At about the same time, the English anatomist Edward Tyson published the first anatomical study of the animal we now call a chimpanzee, demonstrating that it was physically more similar to us than to any other creature known. He even counted up its similarities: the chimpanzee resembled humans in 48 ways, but monkeys in only 34 ways (see Figure 2.1).
Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Tyson’s “orang-outang”.