Introduction / 11water and how to use it effectively, they knew how to make bricks and were expert in the use of
stone. People have always constructed mental frameworks to describe and explain the world around
them. Not all were as positive as that of the Egyptians, but humans have an inherent need to understand,
to make sense of their surroundings and locate themselves in them.
If we are to understand the world about us we must discover an order underlying phenomena or,
failing that, impose one. Only then can we categorize things and so bring coherence to what
would otherwise be chaotic. Most early attempts at classification were based on a mythological
world-view. The anthropologist Mary Douglas has suggested, for example, that the biblical
distinction between ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’ animals arose because Hebrew priests believed that
sheep and goats, both ruminant animals with cloven hoofs, fitted into what they supposed to be
the divine scheme, but pigs did not, because they have cloven hoofs but are not ruminants
(BOWLER, 1992, pp. 11–12).
Science, in those days called ‘philosophy’ (‘love of wisdom’), began with Thales (c. 640–546
BC) , who lived in the Greek trading town of Miletus on the Aegean coast of what is now
Turkey. He and his followers became known as the Ionian or Milesian school and the radical
idea they introduced was that phenomena could be discussed rationally. That is to say, they
suggested the mythical accounts of creation could be tested and rational explanations proposed
for the order underlying the constant change we see everywhere. It is this critical attitude,
allowing all ideas to be challenged by rational argument based on evidence and weaker theories
to be replaced by stronger ones, which distinguishes science from non-science and pseudoscience.
It originated only once; other civilizations developed considerable technological skills, but it
was only among the Greeks living on the shores of Asia Minor that the modern concept of a
‘scientific approach’ emerged. All our science is descended from that beginning, and it began
with environmental science. The Greek development reached its peak with the Academy, founded
by Plato (429–347 BC), a student of Socrates, and the Lyceum, founded by Plato’s disciple
Aristotle (384–322 BC). Aristotle wrote extensively on natural history. His studies of more than
500 species of animals included accurate descriptions, clearly based on personal observation,
that were not confirmed until many centuries later. He recorded, for example, the reproduction
of dogfish and the mating of squid and octopus. He also wrote about the weather in a book
called Meteorologica (‘discourse on atmospheric phenomena’), from which we derive our word
‘meteorology’.
Roman thinkers continued the Greek tradition, Pliny the Elder (c. AD 23–79) being the best-known
Roman naturalist. His Natural History, covering what are now recognized as botany, zoology,
agriculture, geography, geology, and a range of other topics, was based on fact, although he mingled
records of his own observations with myths and fantastic travellers’ tales. Muslim scholars translated
the Greek and Latin texts into Arabic, but it was not until the thirteenth century that they became
generally available in Europe, as Latin translations from the Arabic.
Throughout this long history the central purpose of the enterprise has survived. There have been
digressions, confusions, theories that led into blind alleys, but always the principal aim has been to
replace mythical explanations with rational ones. Since myth is very often enshrined in religious
texts, it may seem that the scientific agenda is essentially atheistic. Indeed, it has been so at times
and in respect of some religions, and to this day scientists are often accused of atheism, but most
modern thinkers regard the conflict as much more apparent than real. The writings of the Arabian
physician Avicenna (979–1037) and philosopher Averroës (1126–98) kept classical ideas current in
the Muslim world, where they were accommodated quite comfortably by Islam, and St Thomas
Aquinas (c. 1224–74) used the natural order revealed by Aristotle as a proof of the existence of God,
thus permitting science and religion to coexist in Christendom.