The most revolutionary idea anyone ever had (now in podcast form)
No, not the electric toaster, it’s evolution by natural selection. Fight me.
The Scientific Revolution never happened. This provocation is one of the themes of my next book, and it’s built around exploration of a few ideas. One is that the constituent parts of the so-called Scientific Revolution occurred over decades and centuries, enacted by disparate, geographically and intellectually unconnected people. The roots of the Scientific Revolution clearly predate the events that define it by centuries too, which makes it look much more continuous to me, and not very revolutionary at all.
The labelling of this long ill-defined period of discovery is largely a 20th century long post hoc invention, and says more about the people who characterised it as a revolution than it does about the main players. Maybe it says something significant about us today, as we cling to this narrative: we are the children of our brilliant European intellectual forebears, who enlightened the world from a doctrine-bound Dark Age where progress was hamstrung by global ignorance, intellectual stagnation, and a superstitious clergy.
Is that true? Please have your essays on my desk next week.
This is a short post cos I’m merely pointing towards a podcast about Charles Darwin, in which I make the case that his one big thesis is truly and uniquely an unrivalled revolutionary idea. David Runciman’s podcast series Past Present Future explores the history of ideas, and I cannot recommend it enough. He themes episodes into series, such as what if counterfactuals, political cinema, or the History of Bad Ideas. I’ve been on a few times, talking about things like eugenics, race science (as you might expect), and how much I loathe both the Nobel Prizes and taxonomy for being antithetical to science. I love these conversations. See also David’s series with the brilliant political theorist Lea Ypi, and the always wise Helen Lewis (her Substack here).
The current series is Revolutions, which range from the actual political (French, American, Haitian), to the intellectual and cultural (Christianity – in which Tom Holland says a lot of things I disagree with – and, scientific, in which Simon Schaffer says a lot of things that I do agree with). The latest two eps in this series are me on Darwin, because though I tend towards rejecting labels such as the Scientific Revolution, and rally against the Great Man Theory of the History of Science, I do think that apart from the electric toaster, Evolution by Natural Selection is the most important idea anyone ever had, and in that sense is truly and uniquely revolutionary. Have a listen: are you persuaded?
PS. In the recording, I got Lucretius’ dates wrong: he was 1st century BCE, not 4th. It just flubbed out of my dufus mouth.
Would be interesting to hear what you disagreed with Holland on in the Christianity episode? That episode and yours on Darwin have been my favourites so far.
I never understood why Darwinism is that revolutionary scientifically, it actually doesn’t explain much except post hoc. The discovery of DNA genomes is infinitely more explanatory. However, it does stimulate the imagination more than any idea since the invention of the periodic table, I’ll credit that