For 2,000 years plus doctors and physicians practiced killing their patients with the best of intentions.
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Introduction and 3 minute history of 5,000 years of scientific evolution
The concept, idea and philosophy that is ‘science’ is frequently misrepresented, misunderstood and speciously attacked. Here I discuss what science and scientific thought, which truly can and should be applied to all disciplines, is.
Science isn’t a body of specific knowledge, is isn’t a list or catalogs of facts about chemistry, biology, physics etc. While this scientific knowledge is certainly valuable, the knowledge we gain from science isn’t actually the magic that is ‘science’. Science is fundamentally a process or a set of algorithms that provide us with a systemic way to look at any idea, thought or belief and test how accurate it may be.
Like most things, science didn’t appear fully formed. It emerged gradually through centuries of trial, error, and insight and continues to evolve and improve.Aristotle made systematic observations of the natural world and attempted to categorize and explain what he saw. However, Aristotelian science relied heavily on reasoning from first principles and rarely involved experimental testing. This led to some interesting insights and some huge errors that lasted for thousand of years.
For 2,000 years plus doctors and physicians practiced killing their patients with the best of intentions. The Greeks, (Aristotle & Galen being the famous ones in this scenario) believed there were 4 elements – earth, water, wind and fire. And by extension they deduced that the body stayed healthy by balancing four ‘humors’ – blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. If someone were sick their humors were out of balance. If someone had a fever, they clearly had too much hot, wet blood. The solution? Remove the excess through bloodletting by either cutting them or applying leeches. Leeches were big business at one time.
George Washington likely died because of this elegant logic. In December 1799, suffering from a throat infection, he was bled four times in sixteen hours, losing perhaps forty percent of his blood volume. His physicians were educated, caring men following what two thousand years of medical authority told them was the correct treatment. They probably killed him.
Yet the theory persisted because it seemed to work often enough that nobody realized it was wrong. Sometimes people recovered and doctors remembered (or recorded) their successes more than their failures. The framework was so comprehensive that it could explain any outcome. If the patient died the imbalance was too severe and/or treatment began too late. If the patient recovered the humors were successfully rebalanced!
It wasn’t until the mid-1800s, when physicians like Pierre Louis actually counted outcomes and compared treated versus untreated patients that the truth emerge – bloodletting killed more people than it helped. Thousands of years of logical medical practice had been systematically wrong, and all it took to realize was the scientific method.
For over a 1,000 years after Aristotle people knew that objects of different weights fall at different speeds. Stand on a bridge holding a bowling ball and a marble. Drop them simultaneously. Which hits the water first? For nearly two thousand years, everyone “knew” the answer: the heavier bowling ball would fall much faster. Aristotle had reasoned it must be so, it intuitively makes sense, and so everyone presumed its true. Larger, heavier objects accelerated faster than slower ones.
Aristotle’s logic seemed rather unassailable. Heavy objects contain more “earthiness”—more of the element earth seeking its natural place at the center of the universe. A ten-pound stone has ten times more earthiness than a one-pound stone, so naturally it should fall ten times faster toward its natural destination. When you dropped a rock and a feather, the rock obviously fell faster, confirming the theory. The reasoning was so convincing that for nearly two millennia, virtually no one in Europe bothered to test whether objects of different weights but similar shapes fell at different rates.
And then in the 16th Century Galileo Galilei changed everything. It wasn’t that he had some great flash of inspiration, rather he was the first person to systematically test the assertion.
According to legend, he dropped objects from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, though the actual work he did to demonstrate this involved rolling balls of different weights down inclined planes of different angles and timing them. And what he discovered contradicted one of our most basic human perceptions, as anyone whose been in a grade 8 science class knows – objects of different weights fall at the same rate.The feather fell slower not because it was lighter, but because air resistance affected it more. Remove the air, and feather and bowling ball fall together—a fact NASA would later demonstrate beautifully when an astronaut dropped a hammer and a feather on the airless Moon, and they hit the ground simultaneously.
In the 11th century, the brilliant polymath Alhazen (Ibn al-Haytham) conducted what many historians consider the first true (recorded) scientific experiments. Working in Cairo he designed controlled experiments specifically to test competing hypotheses. For instance, he investigated whether vision resulted from light entering the eye or from the eye emitting rays (as many believed and Aristotle had predicted).
Through careful experiments with dark rooms, pinhole cameras, and light sources, he demonstrated that light travels from objects into the eye, not the reverse. The remarkable thing though, what brought him to incredible results and discoveries in this and other areas was his methodology. He would state a hypothesis, design an experiment with controlled conditions to test it, observe and record all the results systematically, and then draw conclusions based solely on what the evidence showed. Philosophy, religion, per-conceived notions and what he had for breakfast that morning had nothing to do with his results.
In his Book of Optics, Alhazen explicitly argued that experimentation and empirical verification must take precedence over theoretical speculation or appeals to authority, declaring that the seeker after truth “should make himself an enemy of all that he reads” and test everything through experiment and demonstration. This approach – hypothesis, controlled testing, evidence-based conclusions – is the basis of scientific theory as it would be formalized 500 years in the future.
Before I continue on to the scientific revolution I would like to note that humans had actually been using parts of this methodology for thousands of years, the Edwin Smith papyrus (c. 1600 BCE) and the Ebers papyrus (c. 1550 BCE) demonstrate early empirical approaches to medicine, including examination, diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis, reflecting proto-scientific methodologies. Babylonian astronomers, by the middle of the 1st millennium BCE, became the first scientific astronomers we know of, providing a refined mathematical description of celestial phenomena that influenced later traditions.
Between 1500AD and 1700AD something remarkable happened. A breakthrough that would leading to the second or third greatest invention of all time (or at least all the time we know of until now). Over these centuries through the work of a number of remarkable individuals and due to a confluence of circumstances, the modern scientific method was born.
Francis Bacon – who many consider to be the father of the modern scientific method – never made a major scientific discovery himself, yet his influence on science is immense and unquestionable. In the early 1600’s this English philosopher and statesman, writing in the became science’s greatest advocate and methodological architect. Bacon looked at the scholastic tradition of his time: endless debates about what Aristotle or other long dead people had really meant and realized that many of the arguments, due to them being disconnected from observation, were disconnected from reality. Knowledge, he insisted, must be built from the ground up through systematic observation and experimentation, not deduced or guessed at from abstract, untested, principles.
In his Novum Organum (The New Instrument), published in 1620, Bacon laid out a revolutionary approach: inductive reasoning. Rather than starting with grand theories and reasoning downward, scientists should gather specific observations, identify patterns, and gradually build toward general principles.
Bacon also warned about the “idols” that cloud human judgment: the Idols of the Tribe (biases inherent to human nature), the Idols of the Cave (personal prejudices from individual experience), the Idols of the Marketplace (confusion from imprecise language), and the Idols of the Theatre (blind acceptance of philosophical systems). By identifying and naming these cognitive pitfalls, Bacon gave future scientists tools to learn about, recognize and combat their own biases.
The Royal Society, founded in London in 1660, adopted his experimental philosophy as its guiding principle and it has remained so till today. Bacon provided science with more than a manifesto, he provided a methodology, step by step instructions about how to find out if something is true. This is known as inductive reasoning.
Since the time of Francis Bacon we have refined this system as we have learnt more. In fact, one of the incredible things about the scientific method is it works on itself giving us more and more accurate ways to test our knowledge. As the methodology was refined we learnt about isolating variables, using control groups, statistical analysis, blind and double blind testing and created networks of people and institutions that introduced qualified and anonymous peer review processes. And the system continues to grow and modify itself by applying its criteria to itself and continually, testing, checking and improving itself.
Key characteristics of Skeptical & Scientific Thinking
So what is the scientific methodology or ‘science’? At its core, science is defined by the following key characteristics:
Empiricism: Science relies on evidence gathered through observation and experimentation rather than pure reasoning, tradition, or authority. If you can’t observe it or test it in some way, science can’t make definitive claims about it.
Falsifiability: Scientific claims must be structured in a way that they could be proven wrong. This might sound like a weakness, but it’s actually science’s greatest strength. A claim that can’t possibly be disproven can’t be tested, and if it can’t be tested, we have no way to determine if it’s true.
Reproducibility: Scientific findings must be replicable by other researchers. If an experiment works only when one specific person performs it, something is wrong—either with the experiment or with the claim it’s testing.
Provisional certainty: Science doesn’t claim absolute truth. Instead, it offers the best current explanation based on available evidence. This means scientific understanding can and does change when new evidence emerges—which is a feature, not a bug.
Peer review and self-correction: Scientists subject their work to scrutiny by other experts in the field. This collective critical examination helps catch errors, biases, and flawed reasoning before ideas become accepted.
