I teach several online courses you can join every month. Two include a history of atheism (our western freethought heritage) and a history of ancient science and technology in the West. I highly recommend you check them out. It’s a great way to get in some guided self-learning, with a whole month of being able to pick my brain about each subject for a very affordable price. But I also promote self-learning through reading. My standard recommendations lists include philosophy (contemporary naturalism) and history (the origins of Christianity and ancient science), and I cycle through all three subjects every month. And I’ve been running a series reviewing them all, which this entry continues.
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The books I’ll be discussing today are all on a subject often claimed not to have existed or progressed in the Greco-Roman era: the natural sciences. But these sciences did exist and did progress. The best studies of this include: Roger French, Ancient Natural History (Routledge 1994); Gavin Hardy & Laurence Totelin, Ancient Botany (Routledge 2015); and Adrienne Mayor, The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times (Princeton University Press 2000). There was more (for example, zoology could do with a similar study, one just hasn’t been published yet). And I summarize what there is in my own study. But to really dive the whole depth of what went on, what they discovered, how they thought about all this, these are the three books to read, maybe just a chapter a week at least!
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Why These?
I’ve written on this subject before, in The Sociology of Ancient Scientists Cannot Be Based on Medieval Source Selection, where I describe the problem and give some examples, demonstrating that:
[The] belief that biological sciences “died out” after [Aristotle’s successor] Theophrastus is completely unfounded and wholly contrary to the actual evidence. How then do [historians] make this mistake? By confusing source survival with source existence—and doing no legwork to check how much we know about what was lost. This is the exact same mistake that dooms their attempt to “count” scientists in the fields of physics and astronomy.
Medieval Christians just weren’t jazzed about science, especially advanced science, because it was over their heads and banged against their toxic beliefs against progress and curiosity. So they just didn’t preserve hardly any of it. They chose only very few select things—and even then, maybe only one Christian in one library somewhere may have preserved one book they liked—and in result, almost all ancient science was lost. This especially skewed whose work and what fields made it through. The life sciences were ditched the most, especially when they didn’t relate directly to medicine; though even physics got hit hard, especially stuff that went against theology, like heliocentrism, and all the atomist models that we’d pick back up later, like inertialism and the particle theory of light (for example see Ancient Theories of Gravity: What Was Lost?).
We know ancient studies existed on such subjects as seismology and volcanology, geography and oceanography, zoology and botany, psychology and anthropology, mineralogy and entomology, and beyond. To date no one has written a modern study on ancient achievements in zoology (despite there being a great need of one—because we know they published a lot on that). But Hardy & Totelin’s study of botany exemplifies what the results of such a study would look like, by showing you the results for that field: the study of plants and plant physiology. And you can get a hint from French’s all-encompassing study of ancient natural history, which touches on all these neglected fields like botany, zoology, mineralogy, volcanology, etc. But there is a lot more to the story than even those can convey. Mayor’s specialized study on a single subfield of natural history, what the ancients said and thought about fossils, gives you a good taste of how much depth there is to explore in any such subject. Just the fact that Greeks and Romans collected and studied and theorized about fossils (often correctly, often not) is something few today realize.
These studies all focus more on cataloguing what the ancients said than on collecting everything they got right. There is a bit overmuch about their stories and folklore and mistakes. Which can disguise what the subtext of everything these studies present reveals: the scale and extent of the evidence ancient scientists were looking for, gathered, and found out. For example, Mayor likes to criticize how they interpreted fossils, but read between the lines and you’ll realize how much they were noticing, collecting, and thinking about fossils, and communicating with each other and the public about it. These authors also over-focus on what we have rather than making a point of studying what we know existed that we don’t have (so you might still be misled on that—my book corrects this). This is a problem because they still formulate theories about ancient science based on this doctored evidence (produced solely by medieval Christian selection) rather than incorporating the fact that most, and often the best, evidence of ancient progress we can now reconstruct was in the texts Christians didn’t preserve for us to see (my book is thus loaded with examples of this as another corrective).
But these three books still communicate a lot you should know and will take delight in, even including all the silly nonsense about spitting into frogs’ mouths or speculating about centaur bones. And either way they remain essential readings in their respective subjects, as there are none better to get at present. And they are all fun to read.
I know it’s not your intent, and you clearly deeply appreciate the work and artistry behind these books, but the article does come off like a bit of a backhanded compliment as you’re frontloading it with the discussion of methodological limitations and what you wish the research could include 🙂 . I would have liked a more in-depth discussion of each book’s merits, but I’m definitely still interested, though I need to get through Wonder Man and Lucas Wars first!
Fair enough. I fear boring audiences with random tours of things that don’t make sense except in aggregate. So it’s better, I think, if readers are just warned what they will get and then read the books, so they get the information without getting misframed by it.
This is because there aren’t any particular “mistakes” to call out. It’s a global effect across a whole book, not specific errors to correct. The problem with them is simply that they tour everything indiscriminately, without a more particular interest in errors and successes, but mixing science with folklore, as if there were no difference. Which can get you into the ancient mindset (as that’s how they did see it). But it can mislead as to the undercurrent of real science and that, and why, it made progress. A reader can “miss” that by reading books like these, unaware of how the information is being organized.
In a way, I wrote Scientist to counter this tendency in hist-sci literature, so readers can start to see the signal in the fog.
Conversely, it is still important to get this information, even the folklore and error and its extent, since to know all the things they were still asserting unscientifically keeps you from being misframed in the other direction—as happens when modern scientific histories ignore all the bollocks that we still believed in the age of Newton (and indeed that even Newton himself believed) and misframe the matter as all scientific success and triumph, ignoring that it was, yet again, just a signal in the noise of what remained a ton of folklore and bad ideas.
The literature has this tendency to oversell success when it’s modern science and undersell success when it’s ancient science. And there isn’t any way to convey that except in a rather extensive book. So really all you need is an awareness that this is happening. Then, with that awareness, you can become immune to the framing effects in both bodies of literature.
Oh, absolutely, I personally really appreciate reviews that aren’t just glowing and tell me faults and then sell me on the book even given the faults. The fossil book seems particularly interesting, as it’s the kind of thing I naively would have thought the ancients may not have had really good access to but when you think about it becomes the kind of thing you realize they must have seen sometimes and would, with any dedicated curiosity and academic background, have started thinking about and reasoning from. I just also would have loved hearing about the specific merits of each book and what they do right and how they may correct our misunderstandings!