Can Humans Ever Understand How Animals Think?

 

A flood of new research is overturning old assumptions about what animal minds are and aren’t capable of – and changing how we think about our own species

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Giraffes will eat courgettes if they have to, but they really prefer carrots. A team of researchers from Spain and Germany recently took advantage of this preference to investigate whether the animals are capable of statistical reasoning. In the experiment, a giraffe was shown two transparent containers holding a mixture of carrot and courgette slices. One container held mostly carrots, the other mostly courgettes. A researcher then took one slice from each container and offered them to the giraffe with closed hands, so it couldn’t see which vegetable had been selected.

In repeated trials, the four test giraffes reliably chose the hand that had reached into the container with more carrots, showing they understood that the more carrots were in the container, the more likely it was that a carrot had been picked. Monkeys have passed similar tests, and human babies can do it at 12 months old. But giraffes’ brains are much smaller than primates’ relative to body size, so it was notable to see how well they grasped the concept.

Such discoveries are becoming less surprising every year, however, as a flood of new research overturns longstanding assumptions about what animal minds are and aren’t capable of. A recent wave of popular books on animal cognition argue that skills long assumed to be humanity’s prerogative, from planning for the future to a sense of fairness, actually exist throughout the animal kingdom – and not just in primates or other mammals, but in birds, octopuses and beyond. In 2018, for instance, a team at the University of Buenos Aires found evidence that zebra finches, whose brains weigh half a gram, have dreams. Monitors attached to the birds’ throats found that when they were asleep, their muscles sometimes moved in exactly the same pattern as when they were singing out loud; in other words, they seemed to be dreaming about singing.

In the 21st century, findings such as these are helping to drive a major shift in the way human beings think about animals – and about ourselves. Humanity has traditionally justified its supremacy over all other animals – the fact that we breed them and keep them in cages, rather than vice versa – by our intellectual superiority. According to Aristotle, humans are distinguished from other living things because only we possess a rational soul. We know our species as Homo sapiens, “wise man”.

Yet at a time when humanity’s self-image is largely shaped by fears of environmental devastation and nuclear war, combined with memories of historical atrocity, it is no longer so easy to say, with Hamlet, that man is “the paragon of animals” – the ideal that other creatures would imitate, if only they could. Nature may be “red in tooth and claw”, but creatures whose weapons are teeth and claws can only kill each other one at a time. Only humans commit atrocities such as war, genocide and slavery – and what allows us to conceive and carry out such crimes is the very power of reason that we boast about.

In his 2022 book If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal, Justin Gregg, a specialist in dolphin communication, takes this mistrust of human reason to an extreme. The book’s title encapsulates Gregg’s argument: if Friedrich Nietzsche had been born a narwhal instead of a German philosopher, he would have been much better off, and given his intellectual influence on fascism, so would the world. By extension, the same is true of our whole species. “The planet does not love us as much as we love our intellect,” Gregg writes. “We have generated more death and destruction for life on this planet than any other animal, past and present. Our many intellectual accomplishments are currently on track to produce our own extinction.”

If human minds are incapable of solving the problems they create, then perhaps our salvation lies in encountering very different types of minds. The global popularity of the documentary My Octopus Teacher, released by Netflix in 2020, is just one example of the growing hunger for such encounters. In the film, the South African diver Craig Foster spends months filming a female octopus in an underwater kelp forest, observing most of her lifecycle. Foster presents himself as the anti-Jacques Cousteau; he doesn’t go underwater to study the non-human, but to learn from it.

Humility is a traditional religious discipline, and there is a spiritual dimension to Foster’s quest and to the film’s success. On YouTube, where the trailer has been viewed 3.7m times, thousands of people testify that My Octopus Teacher made them weep, changed their understanding of the world and made them resolve to lead better lives. It’s clear that, for modern people who seldom encounter animals except for pet cats and dogs, entering into a close relationship with a non-human mind can be a sacred experience.

The idea of the octopus as the nonhuman mind par excellence was popularised by the 2016 bestseller Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, by Peter Godfrey-Smith. A philosopher rather than a marine biologist, Godfrey-Smith got an opportunity to see the creatures in action at a site off eastern Australia known to researchers as Octopolis. There he discovered that octopuses are “smart in the sense of being curious and flexible; they are adventurous, opportunistic”, prone to making off with items such as tape measures and measuring stakes.

The fascination of the octopus is that while its behaviour seems recognisable in human terms as mischief or curiosity, its neural architecture is immensely different from ours. Since Darwin, humans have grown used to recognising ourselves in our fellow primates, whose brains and body plans are similar to our own. After all, humans and chimpanzees share a common ape ancestor that lived in Africa as recently as 6m years ago. Our most recent common ancestor with the octopus, by contrast, is a worm-like creature thought to have lived 500-600m years ago.

Because the mind of the octopus evolved in a completely different fashion from ours, it makes sense of the world in ways we can barely imagine. An octopus has 500m neurons, about as many as a dog, but most of these neurons are located not in the brain but in its eight arms, each of which can move, smell and perhaps even remember on its own. In Godfrey-Smith’s words, an octopus is “probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien”. When such a being encounters a human at the bottom of the ocean, what could it possibly make of us?

For most of the 20th century, animal researchers wouldn’t even have asked such a question, much less attempted to answer it. Under the influence of the American psychologist BF Skinner, scientific orthodoxy held that it was neither legitimate nor necessary to talk about what was going on in an animal’s mind. Science, he argued, only deals with things that can be observed and measured, and we can’t directly observe mental faculties even in ourselves, much less in animals. What we can observe is action and behaviour, and Skinner was able to modify the behaviour of rats using positive reinforcement, such as rewards of food, and negative reinforcement, such as electric shocks.

 When Jane Goodall first went to study chimpanzees in Tanzania in the 1960s, the very notion of animal subjectivity was taboo. Her practice of giving names to the individual chimps she observed – such as David Greybeard, who her studies made famous – was frowned on as unscientific, since it suggested that they might be humanlike in other ways. The standard practice was to number them. “You cannot share your life with a dog or a cat,” Goodall later observed, “and not know perfectly well that animals have personalities and minds and feelings. You know it and I think every single one of those scientists knew it, too, but because they couldn’t prove it, they didn’t talk about it.”

Today, the pendulum has swung in the other direction. Scientists speak without embarrassment about animal minds and consciousness. In popular writing on the subject, Skinner appears only as a villain. In his 2016 book Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, primatologist Frans de Waal discusses a mid-20th-century experiment in which researchers at a primate centre in Florida, educated in Skinner’s methods, tried to train chimps the way he had trained rats, by withholding food. “Expressing no interest in cognition – the existence of which they didn’t even acknowledge,” De Waal writes, the researchers “investigated reinforcement schedules and the punitive effect of time-outs.” The staff of the primate centre rebelled and started feeding the chimps in secret, causing Skinner to lament that “tender-hearted colleagues frustrated efforts to reduce chimpanzees to a satisfactory state of deprivation”. You could hardly ask for a better example of how the arrogance of reason leads to cruelty.

Meanwhile, animals without “rational souls” are capable of demonstrating admirable qualities such as patience and self-restraint. Among humans, the ability to sacrifice immediate pleasure for future gain is called resisting temptation, and is taken as a sign of maturity. But De Waal shows that even birds are capable of it. In one experiment, an African grey parrot named Griffin was taught that if he resisted the urge to eat a serving of cereal, he would be rewarded after an unpredictable interval with food he liked better, such as cashew nuts. The bird was able to hold out 90% of the time, devising ways to distract himself by talking, preening his feathers, or simply throwing the cup of cereal across the room. Such behaviours, De Waal notes, are quite similar to what human children do in the face of temptation.

More intriguing than the convergences between human and animal behaviour, however, are the profound differences in the way we perceive and experience the world. The reason why an encounter with an octopus can be awe-inspiring is that two species endowed with different senses and brains inhabit the same planet but very different realities.

Take the sense of smell. As humans, we learn about our surroundings primarily by seeing and hearing, while our ability to detect odours is fairly undeveloped. For many animals, the reverse is true. In his 2022 book An Immense World, the science journalist Ed Yong writes about an experiment by researcher Lucy Bates involving African elephants. Bates found that if she took urine from an elephant in the rear of a herd and spread it on the ground in front of the herd, the elephants reacted with bewilderment and curiosity, knowing that the individual’s distinctive odour was coming from the wrong place. For them, a smell out of place was as fundamental a violation of reality as a ghostly apparition would be for us.

  Animals that perceive the world through scent, such as dogs, even have a different sense of time. We often talk about the importance of “living in the moment”, but in fact we have no other choice; since visual information reaches us at the speed of light, what we see around us are things as they existed an infinitesimal fraction of a second ago. When a dog smells, however, “he is not merely assessing the present but also reading the past and divining the future”, Yong writes. Odour molecules from a person or another dog can linger in a room long after the source is gone, or waft ahead before it appears. When a dog perks up long before its owner walks through the front door, smell can seem like a psychic power.

If giraffes can do statistical reasoning and parrots understand the concept of the future, then where does the distinctiveness of the human mind really lie? One favourite candidate is what psychologists call “theory of mind” – the ability to infer that each person is their own “I”, with independent experiences and private mental states. In The Book of Minds, the science writer Philip Ball describes the classic experiment that tests the development of this ability in children. A child and an adult watch as an object is hidden under one of three cups. Then the adult leaves the room and the child sees a second adult come in and move the object so it’s under a different cup.

When the first adult returns, where does the child expect she will look for the object? Very young children assume that she will know its new location, just as they do. Starting around age four, however, children start to understand that the adult only knows what she has seen herself, so they expect her to look under the original, now empty cup. “Indeed,” Ball writes, “they will often delight in the deception: in their knowing what others don’t.”

Developing a theory of mind is necessary because we can never know what is going on inside other people in the same immediate way we know ourselves. Most adults take for granted that other people have the same kind of inner life they do, but this remains a kind of assumption. René Descartes was one of the first philosophers to wrestle with this problem, in the 17th century. “What do I see from the window but hats and coats which may cover automatic machines?” he asked. “Yet I judge these to be men.” But Descartes didn’t extend the same benefit of the doubt to animals. Even more than Skinner, he saw them as automata without any inner experience, “bêtes-machines”. Ball notes that Descartes dissected live animals to study the circulation of the blood, “and dismissed any cries of pain that procedure elicited as a mere mechanical response, not unlike the screech of a poorly oiled axle”.

Four centuries later, De Waal complains that science still hasn’t overcome the tendency to draw a dividing line between the inner lives of humans and those of other creatures. The reason that scientists have focused on theory of mind, De Waal believes, is because no animal has been shown to possess it. Such “interspecific bragging contests”, he writes, are designed to flatter our sense of superiority. In fact, it seems that even here we’re not clear winners. According to Ball, recent attempts to replicate the theory-of-mind experiment with chimps and bonobos suggest that the majority of them pass the test, though the evidence is ambiguous: since the subjects can’t talk, researchers gauge their expectations by tracking their eye movements.

 Even if other species were conclusively found to possess a theory of mind, of course, it would not challenge our monopoly on the kind of “rational soul” that produced the pyramids and monotheism, the theory of evolution and the intercontinental ballistic missile. As long as these quintessentially human accomplishments remain our standard for intellectual capacity, our place at the top of the mental ladder is assured.

But are we right to think of intelligence as a ladder in the first place? Maybe we should think, instead, in terms of what Ball calls “the space of possible minds” – the countless potential ways of understanding the world, some of which we may not even be able to imagine. In mapping this space, which could theoretically include computer and extraterrestrial minds as well as animal ones, “we are currently no better placed than the pre-Copernican astronomers who installed the Earth at the centre of the cosmos and arranged everything else in relation to it”, Ball observes. Until we know more about what kinds of minds are possible, it is sheer hubris to set up our own as the standard of excellence.

Xenophanes, a pre-Socratic philosopher, observed that if horses and oxen could draw pictures, they would make the gods look like horses and oxen. Similarly, if non-human beings could devise a test of intelligence, they might rank species according to, say, their ability to find their way home from a distance unaided. Bees do this by detecting magnetic fields, and dogs by following odours, while most modern humans would be helpless without a map or a GPS. “Earth is bursting with animal species that have hit on solutions for how to live a good life in ways that put the human species to shame,” Gregg says.

But if human and animal minds are so essentially different that we can never truly understand one another, then a troubling thought arises: we would be less like neighbours than inmates who occupy separate cells in the same prison. The kind of understanding Foster achieved with his octopus, or Goodall with her chimpanzees, would have to be written off as an anthropomorphising illusion, just as Skinner warned.

The possibility of true interspecies understanding is the subject of Thomas Nagel’s landmark 1974 essay What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, to which every writer on animal cognition pays their respects, sometimes wearily. Nagel, an American philosopher, concluded that humans can never really understand a bat’s inner experience. Even if I try to picture what it’s like to fly on webbed wings and spend most of my time hanging upside down, all I can imagine is what it would be like for me to be a bat, not what it’s like for a bat to be a bat.

For Nagel, this conclusion has implications beyond animal psychology. It proves that mental life can never be reduced to things we can observe from the outside, whether that means the way we behave or the pattern of electrical impulses in our neurons. Subjectivity, what it feels like to exist, is so profoundly different from what we can observe scientifically that the two realms can’t even be described in the same language.

Few people have ever taken the challenge of Nagel’s essay as literally as Charles Foster in his 2016 book Being a Beast. A barrister and academic by profession, Foster set himself the challenge of entering the mental worlds of five animal species by living as much like them as possible. To be a fox, he writes: “I lay in a back yard in Bow, foodless and drinkless, urinating and defecating where I was, waiting for the night and treating as hostile the humans in the row houses all around.” To be a badger, he dug a trench in the side of a hill and lived inside it with his young son Tom, eating earthworms and inhaling dust. “Tom was filling tissues with silica and blood for a week,” Foster notes.

Foster welcomes all this damage and discomfort, but not in the spirit of a scientist doing fieldwork. Rather, he evokes the medieval flagellants who covered their backs with welts to purge themselves of sin. That Foster defines sin as a transgression against nature rather than God doesn’t make the concept any less religious. “Evolutionary biology is a numinous statement of the interconnectedness of things,” he writes, and his preaching translates easily into Christian terms: “Say, with Saint Francis, ‘Hello, Brother Ox,’ and mean it,” he demands.

Foster’s way of seeking communion with the animals may be extreme, at times comically so, but his basic impulse is shared by many of today’s students of animal cognition, and an increasing number of laypeople as well. Encountering an animal mind can perform the same function as a great work of art or a religious experience: it makes the familiar strange, reminding us that reality encompasses far more than we ordinarily think.

The great difference is that while a traditional religious experience can awaken human beings to God, an animal epiphany can awakens us to the fullness of this world. “What she taught me was to feel that you’re part of this place, not a visitor,” Foster says in the closing lines of My Octopus Teacher, and by “this place” he doesn’t just mean a particular kelp forest, but the Earth itself. At first this might sound like an odd realisation: where else would human beings belong if not on our one and only planet?

But in the 21st century, it is clearly becoming harder for us to think of ourselves as genuinely belonging to the Earth. Whether we look back on our long history of driving other species to extinction, or forward to a future in which we extinguish ourselves through climate breakdown, many humans now see humanity as the greatest danger facing the Earth – a cancer that grows without limit, killing its host.

It is no coincidence that, at the same moment, tech visionaries have begun to think about our future in extraterrestrial terms. Earth may be where humanity happened to evolve, they say, but our destiny calls us to other worlds. Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 with the explicit goal of hastening humanity’s colonisation of Mars. Other “transhumanist” thinkers look forward to a fully virtual future, in which our minds leave our bodies behind and achieve immortality in the form of electromagnetic pulses.

These projects sound futuristic, but they are best understood as new expressions of a very old human anxiety. We have always suffered from metaphysical claustrophobia – the sense that a cosmos containing no minds but our own was intolerably narrow. That is why, since prehistoric times, humans have populated Earth with other kinds of intelligences – from gods and angels to fairies, forest-spirits and demons. All premodern cultures took the existence of such non-human minds for granted. In medieval Europe, Christian and Greek philosophical ideas gave rise to the doctrine of the “great chain of being”, which held that the universe is populated by an unbroken series of creatures, all the way from plants at the bottom to God at the apex. Humanity stood in the middle, more intelligent than the animals but less than the angels, who came in many species, with different powers and purviews.

 Filling the universe with hypothetical minds, superior to our own in wisdom and goodness, helps relieve our species’ loneliness, giving us beings we could talk to, think about, and strive to emulate. Our need for that kind of company in the universe hasn’t gone away, though today we prefer to fill the region “above” us in the space of possible minds with advanced extraterrestrials and superpowered AIs – beings that are just as hypothetical as seraphim and cherubim, at least so far.

Our rising interest in animal minds can be seen as a way of filling in the regions “below” us as well. If an octopus is like an intelligent alien, as Godfrey-Smith writes, then we don’t need to scan the skies so anxiously for an actual extraterrestrial. Yong quotes Elizabeth Jakob, an American spider expert, to the same effect: “We don’t have to look to aliens from other planets … We have animals that have a completely different interpretation of what the world is right next to us.” Perhaps simply knowing that these other minds exist can help us make peace with the limitations of our own.

 

Can humans ever understand how animals think? By Adam Kirsch. The Guardian, May 30, 2023.

Naturalist Charles Foster wanted to reconnect with his inner beast – so he tried living as a badger, a deer and a fox

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Charles Foster lifts a wriggling worm to his lips. “Cheers,” he says.
 
We clink worms.
 
He warns that it might try to escape, and that there will be a strange, stereo-squirmy sensation when the worm splits in two.
 
He grimaces and chews pedantically to make sure every last bit has gone. Foster’s right: there is a grittiness to them. Earthworms wouldn’t be my first choice on the à la carte.
 
Foster has been on all fours for much of the morning, reminiscing about the periods he spent living as a badger, an otter, an urban fox. He also spent time, less successfully, as a red deer and a swift. In one way or another, he says, he has spent most of his 53 years being an animal, or at least trying to.
 
As a toddler in Manchester, he would look out of his bedroom window, fascinated by the tawny owl perched on a lamp outside. The family moved to Sheffield, where it was the blackbird in the garden he couldn’t stop thinking about. The bird stared at him with its yellow eye-rings and black pupils, taunting him. It knew something, and Foster wanted to know what.
 
“I was tantalised and infuriated,” he says. “I went down to the local library and read everything I could about blackbirds. I got a blackbird brain and pickled it in formalin, and would sleep holding it, wondering whether its wisdom would diffuse into me. I stuffed a blackbird and it circled on a piece of thread above my head when I went to sleep at night. I mapped every blackbird nest in our area and put them down in charts. I made maps of their flight path, and took ladders and looked into their nests. And I failed utterly to work out what made a blackbird tick.”
 
Foster was an unusual boy who grew into an unusual man. He was born to high-achieving, working-class parents who both became head teachers of primary schools. He had even greater ambitions for himself. His parents sent him to the local comprehensive, but he went to the library and read up about public school scholarships. Without telling his parents, he applied for one and won it. He left the comp to go to public schools far away in Bristol and Shrewsbury, where he entered a new world of privilege and expectation. Part of him hated it, but he thrived.

 
He promised himself he would re-engage with the natural world after his O-levels. “As soon as the last paper was finished, I went home and spent a day and a night lying in the Mayfield Valley just above our home in Sheffield, at a hare’s eye level. This was a sort of redemptive process that would undo all the life-denying process of the exams. That was my first conscious attempt to live like an animal.”
 
Did he enjoy it? “Enjoy isn’t the word. But I could feel a lot of toxins were being washed out. That seeded in me something – that in living the life we normally live, we are living a life that isn’t natural. And in order to be properly human, we’ve got to be properly animal.” Foster pauses and looks at me. “Do you think I’m insane?”
 
Convention got the better of him again. Foster sacrificed his inner hare and went to Cambridge University, where he studied veterinary science and law. After he left, he worked as a vet and a barrister, as an academic teaching medical law and ethics, as a philosopher and as a magazine columnist. (He still dabbles in all of these, and currently teaches at Oxford University.) He couldn’t have moved further away from the little boy who worshipped the spontaneity of nature. Instead of empathising with wild animals, Foster started shooting them for pleasure. He ran ultramarathons, 150 miles in a week, over the deserts of Africa. He made good money as a barrister, hunted in tweeds and lived the good life.
 
He soon felt a fraud. “The secret of a good barrister is that they are an empty vessel into which the soul of the latest murderer or rapist can be poured. It’s a very spiritually debilitating job to do. The damage that did called me to consider: what on earth is this creature called Charles Foster who occasionally voices opinions, who says he is a moral agent, who says he has ethical positions?”
 
Who did he think the real Charles Foster was? “The real Charles Foster grew up in a little semi in Sheffield and had his mates up and down the road, whereas I had remade myself as something else.” He saw himself as the kind of swashbuckling hero that Rider Haggard might have created. “I was a very arrogant, presumptuous, fantastically self-confident barrister. Even by barristers’ standards.”
 
One day he had an epiphany – well, an anti-epiphany. He was on an expedition across the Sinai, sitting in the midday sun, and he started to weigh up his achievements. “I thought: I will spend my time looking at the enormously fascinating, kaleidoscopically colourful soul of the fantastic Charles Foster. And I couldn’t see anything at all. It was like looking into a well. There was a rising sense of panic, from which it took years to recover.”
 
How did the fallout express itself? “A lot of the pinstriped swaggering vanished overnight,” he says. “The pride haemorrhaged away. I was a pretty broken person. I mean, I continued at the bar, I carried on working. But I became increasingly introspective.”

 
In his mid-30s, Foster’s first marriage fell apart and he started spending more time trying to understand what made animals tick: what is it like to be an otter guided by the smell of shit? Was he as competent a city dweller as an urban fox?
 
We stop at a spot in the woods. See, this could make a nice little sett, he says. He points to a small hollow covered with branches. Foster is a big man – 6ft 3in and a good 15 stone – but he eases himself into the hollow with surprising dexterity. When he lived as a badger in Wales with his son, Tom, they would sleep by day and prowl by night. In Being A Beast, the book he has written about his experiences, Foster wonderfully conveys the sensuality of life where smell is everything, and sight virtually irrelevant. But the book is very funny about his many bestial failings. Yes, he and Tom can cope in the summer, when badger life is a form of extreme camping, but returning in midwinter is a different matter. As an otter, he had less success. Part of the problem was he didn’t like otters: nasty killers with little to recommend them. He enjoyed the sprainting (shit-sniffing, which he did with his children; before long, they could distinguish each other’s poo) and spent hours swimming the lakes on Exmoor. But no, otter life didn’t do much to enrich the soul.
 
As for being a red deer, he really struggled. Yes, he grew his toenails and hair long, but these felt like superficial gestures. He asked a friend to set his bloodhound on him, so he could know what it was like to be hunted. There was an initial surge of adrenaline as he ran, but ultimately the experience was humiliating: when the dog tracked him down, it just gave him a contemptuous glance and walked off. Foster admits he was a rubbish deer. “I found it impossible to come down the pyramid and become a victim.”
 
By contrast, there is something ecstatic in his hopeless attempts to be a swift. He adores these most ethereal of birds, and is in awe of their ability to find their way from the eaves of his study in Oxford to their ancestral home in Congo and back again, to fly 30,000 miles a year without perching (swifts sleep and mate in the air). Foster goes paragliding, follows their path to Africa, eats similar foods; but it serves only to remind him how lumpen he is.
 
It is freezing but gloriously sunny in the woods. Foster slips out of his sett, takes off the mask the Guardian has lent him for the photoshoot, lights his tiny Hexamine cooker and knocks up a few barbecued worms, which he serves with nettles and garlic. They taste better cooked: less slippery.
 
You know, I say, I think you were most at home as a badger. “Why do you say that?” he asks. He looks disappointed. “I think I got closer to foxes than anyone else.”
 
I feel bad. Of course he made a much better fox: he got to scavenge through rubbish bins, mooch around London, share their emotional intelligence. “I wasn’t able to be olfactory enough as a badger,” Foster explains. “Another reason I didn’t get so close to badgers is that they are much more naturally relational animals than I am. I’m actually quite a lonely, wretched animal – and badgers aren’t.”
 
Tom made a great badger, I say. He puffs up with pride. “Yes, Tom’s a fantastic badger.”
 
We head off home where Mary, Foster’s second wife, has made pumpkin soup for lunch. She is a lovely, grounded woman who runs the house and looks after their four young children (Foster has two more from his first marriage); Mary also works as a GP one day a week. You can’t move in the house without bumping into stuffed birds, badgers, foxes and otters. A zebra skin dominates one wall in the lounge. I thought Foster despised his shooting days? “But it’s so beautiful.” Isn’t there something masochistic in having it there? “Yes,” he says, “it’s a bit like Christian ascetics constantly reminding themselves of the sins of the past.”
 
We sit down to lunch. I ask Mary if it took him long to adapt whenever he came back to domestic life. “He re-engaged with the family quite quickly,” she says. “The hardest thing for him was probably using knives and forks. Sitting at a table. Basic social mores. He likes standing up to eat anyway, walking around and doing things.”
 
Could she tell the difference when he returned after being a badger from, say, when he returned from being an otter? “I don’t think I could, no,” Mary answers gently. “I’m usually preoccupied with children’s bottoms and putting food on the table.” She looks at Foster affectionately. “You don’t get the attention you deserve!”
 
Was Mary surprised when he announced he’d be living as a beast? “Oh, no,” she says. “None of it was alien to what he’s ever been. I mean, you were living as an urban fox in London before I met you. Skulking around in the park at night.”
 
“I wasn’t sleeping in parks back then,” Foster clarifies. “I was trying to get into the head of an urban fox, eating out of dustbins and sometimes sleeping under bushes. I was doing that on and off most of the time I lived in London.”

 
Mary smiles. “I domesticated you, didn’t I?”
 
She says he has always been an extremist. “You suck the marrow out of it and agonise over it, to feel you’ve got to grips with it.” What form does his agonising take? “Verbal and physical. Always obsessing over the meaning of life, and what it means to be fully human. Whereas I just think, well, we’ve got to feed the kids.”
 
In the end, Foster’s book is a beautiful and bonkers metaphysical quest, with a number of questions at the heart of it – some universal (what does it meant to be human?), but most tied up with his own identity (what does it mean to be Charles Foster?). “All of us, I guess, wonder how real our relationships are,” he explains. “We wonder whether we are talking at cross-purposes, whether we can know anything about our nearest and dearest – this was just another lens through which to view that question. I thought, if I can have a relationship with something that is as different from me as a fox or a badger, then there’s a possibility that I might be able to know my wife or my children or my best friend.”
 
The revelation occurred when he was living as a fox, and came face to face with another fox that had stolen his chicken leg. “I felt not just that I was looking and observing, but that I was being looked at and being observed. That was the reciprocity I had longed for. I don’t feel I got that anywhere else.” And he came off second best to the real fox? “Oh yes! It was a better Londoner, a better liver. It could run faster, it needed less sleep, its teeth were sharper, it nose and ears were better. It was just superior.”
 
It made the whole exercise worthwhile, he says. “I’m reassured that relationships aren’t impossible. I’m reassured that I know something about Mary. I’m reassured that there is some core identity called Charles Foster, who’s capable of making real choices.” The angst-ridden uberman relaxes into a smile. “It’s made me slightly less insecure.”
 
Going Underground : meet the man who lived like an animal.  By Simon Hattenstone. The Guardian, January  23, 2016

Modern Science Is A Global History

 

 “Modern science – we are told – is a product of Europe alone,” begins James Poskett in his new book Horizons: a Global History of Science. “This story is a myth.”

Across cultures and disciplines, how history has been recorded and taught is being reassessed. Bids to rename buildings, replace statues and repatriate artefacts looted by European Empires are gaining ever more traction. Yet science has lagged behind in the discussion of its own history, with many claiming that looking back is a distraction to the forward vision of discovery.

In Horizons, Poskett – a science and technology historian at the University of Warwick, UK – instead argues that the “future of science ultimately depends on a better understanding of its global past”. He outlines a framework for an international history of science that sheds light on the significant but overlooked contributions of individuals around the world. In doing so, he challenges the idea that international science is purely a thing of the 21st century.

Organized in four chronological parts, Horizons spans five centuries, from 1450 to the aftermath of the Cold War (1990s). Each part explains a different era of scientific history: scientific revolution (1450–1700), empire and enlightenment (1650–1800), capitalism and conflict (1790–1914), and ideology and aftermath (1914–2000).

Poskett begins in the vast botanical gardens of the Aztec city Tenochtitlan, built in 1467. These gardens not only “predated European examples by almost a century” but serve as proof of the detailed understanding the Aztec civilization had of the natural world. He goes on to guide us through to the development of natural history in the Spanish Empire, which conquered Tenochtitlan in 1521. But Poskett does not pull his punches when describing the exploitative nature of this cultural exchange: “Much of what we know about Tenochtitlan comes from accounts written by the people who destroyed it.”

It is in this same vein, straddling specific examples and broader political and historical context, that Poskett traverses the next five centuries. Through each section, he unravels a complex global and geopolitical landscape, highlighting stories of translation, collaboration and struggle against colonial aggression. Poskett’s account of history is in no way self-righteous – his understanding of history is balanced and honest, both challenging empires and understanding their role in cultural exchange.

In my opinion, Horizons’ scope is impressive and handled with deft precision. The book has no want of moments that taught me something new and surprising: from the remarkable fact that the first German-to-English translations of Einstein’s papers on relativity were written by physicists Meghnad Saha and Satyendra Nath Bose in India, under British colonial rule; to Polynesian navigator Tupaia’s beautifully rendered map of the Society Islands in 1769, which replaces traditional compass direction with timings such as sunrise and sunset. Indeed, any reader will come away with their perspective of history shifted.

In his commitment to interesting individuals and scientific detail, however, Poskett’s pace sometimes gets away from him. The volume of examples and fast pace of the narrative means that the facts sometimes feel detached from the greater message. At points I found myself unable to see the woods for the trees, taking away anecdotes more than trends. Yet Poskett does try to counter this, with clear introductions and summaries to each of his chapters. These at times feel slightly repetitive and over-explained, like reading an essay or a set of lecture notes, but they have the benefit of ensuring that the reader comes away with a total understanding of his message.

The moments where Poskett pauses to unfurl a single story in more detail were the ones that captured me the most. An example being the story of Graman Kwasi (born around 1690), a young man captured from what is now Ghana and sold as a slave to the Dutch. Kwasi’s knowledge of natural medicine led to an effective treatment of malarial fever from which other remedies have spawned. These are the moments that allow the reader to really sit with history and examine their own biases about the past. How much more, for example, would we value the knowledge of the natural world provided by Indigenous populations if we had correctly written it into our history of science?

Poskett must walk a very fine line between providing the reader with a rich series of examples, across a range of scientific disciplines and traditions, while also addressing a complicated and often contentious backdrop of geopolitical history

The rapid pace does not undermine the accomplishment and relevance of Horizons. Poskett must walk a very fine line, after all, between providing the reader with a rich series of examples, across a range of scientific disciplines and traditions, while also addressing a complicated and often contentious backdrop of geopolitical history spanning five centuries. That Horizons, which is in this sense hugely ambitious, achieves this in roughly 350 pages is remarkable.

At the end of the book, Poskett summarizes the contemporary crises that modern science faces: climate change, the resurgence of race science, and the “new cold war”. He draws from root to branch how we have arrived where we are today, at a standoff between nationalism and globalization.

“We need to begin by getting the history right,” Poskett concludes. And as he claims in his introduction, Horizons is simply an attempt to reframe our narrative of history in a way that really informs us of the structures of power, national identity and colonial history that have led us to where we are today. To this end, I think he has succeeded. Horizons is an excellent reference text and corrective, a solid kernel around which a new understanding of history can grow.

 

The uncharted territories of scientific history : Anita Chandran reviews Horizons: a Global History of Science by James Poskett. By Anita Chandran. Physics World, November 7,  2022

We are told that modern science was invented in Europe, the product of great minds like Nicolaus Copernicus, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein. But this is wrong. Science is not, and has never been, a uniquely European endeavour.

In this radical retelling of the history of science, Dr James Poskett challenges the Eurocentric narrative in conversation with Mary-Ann Ochota.

Copernicus relied on mathematical techniques borrowed from Arabic and Persian texts. When Newton set out the laws of motion, he relied on astronomical observations made in Asia and Africa. And when Darwin was writing On the Origin of Species, he consulted a 16th-century Chinese encyclopedia.

Histfest - Horizons: A Global History of Science. The British Library, May  13, 2022. 

In his new book, "Horizons: The Global Origins of Modern Science(opens in new tab)" (Mariner Books, 2022), James Poskett, a historian of science and technology at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, focuses on how science has always been a global endeavor and how that story was overshadowed by a biased Westernized version. Although the book spans several scientific fields, astronomy and physics play key roles in the story he tells, with cameos from key figures such as Ptolemy and Isaac Newton.

Space.com sat down with Poskett to discuss his new book and the insight it offers into the history of astronomy and physics. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Space.com: How did the book come about?

James Poskett: I trained as a historian of science and became very frustrated and slightly angry, I guess, at the version of the history of science that I'd been taught that was extremely Eurocentric. I was much more interested in thinking critically about globalization, and also thinking quite critically about things like anti-racism, the legacies of slavery, the legacies of empire. That led me to want to write a book that much more directly addresses those concerns and speaks to the concerns of present science and technology.

Space.com: Can you talk about how you decided to structure the book?

Poskett: The book is a celebration of scientists from around the world, for sure. You read the book, you learn lots about individuals, their lives. But I didn't just want it to be a laundry list of people who were forgotten; I wanted it to be this bigger narrative. And so the organization reflects that bigger argument that to understand the history of science and, indeed, to understand science today, we need to think in terms of world historical change. I think framing the organization of the book around that helps the reader follow along. When they're reading about an individual, they're also aware that that person is part of this bigger cultural and political shift that's happening at the time.

Space.com: How did you go about deciding which examples to include in the book?

Poskett: Partly, it was just a question of balance: I could have written every chapter about China quite easily. There are stories to be told about every period in China — and similarly, for many other places — so it was making sure that as you go through the book, there's this balance of examples.

The book presents science as part of world history, but also as the product of individual lives. I wanted to bring out the texture of these people's lives: what they did, how they felt, what kind of struggles they were dealing with. That often determined who I picked, because I needed the detail. It was all very well, knowing that someone made a scientific contribution and they had some fancy equation, but on its own, that's not too interesting for the general public.

Space.com: Any incidents you loved but ended up needing to cut?

 Poskett: I think the one thing that I didn't include, just because of structure and space, is the dispute between Galileo and the Jesuit astronomers who had gone to China. ... It's very easy when you write a book like this to be tempted to start with the people you know, but the whole point of the book is to get away from that. So Galileo basically isn't in the book. Lots of other famous people are, but I thought, "If I'm going to cut someone and I'm writing a book like this, I should cut Galileo, not the people you've not heard of."

Space.com: Are there any key examples that stand out to you from the chapters relating to astronomy and physics?

Poskett: There's two really important moments for the history of space — one earlier, one later.

The earlier one is the history of the understanding of the solar system in the Renaissance period. I show that the people who we usually associate with that important change — people like the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus — were really heavily reliant on, and quite happy to acknowledge, the fact that they were drawing on earlier, and also contemporary, ideas coming from the Islamic world.

How you put the sun at the center and model the planets — that's a history that you can't just tell from the perspective of Europe or indeed the Christian world. That's a story that stretches to places like Persia. In the same chapter, I talk about the advanced astronomical observations made by astronomers in the Ottoman Empire and Istanbul, astronomers in the Songhai Empire in what's today modern Mali and Timbuktu, and particularly the astronomers and mathematicians at the court of Jai Singh II in Mughal India, where there's these incredible observatories that you can still go to.

It's not saying that Copernicus wasn't important; of course he was. But there was this whole world of astronomical knowledge that was being blended together, in particularly the 16th and 17th centuries, that gave us what is really the basis of modern astronomy.

There's another key phase in the early 20th century, when you're getting the use of new ideas from special and general relativity and quantum mechanics. This isn't a story just of European and American astronomers and astrophysicists; this is very much a story that scientists from around the world are involved in.

One example is an Indian scientist called Meghnad Saha, who was born in what then was part of British India. He is particularly known today for something called the Saha ionization equation. This was an equation, effectively, to be able to determine the chemical composition of stars from their spectra. He doesn't feature much in the mainstream history of science, because he was marginalized at the time — partly because he was Indian, so there was a history of racism here, but also because he actually was actively opposing the colonial government.

In addition to his own research, he helped translate Einstein's works from German into English in India because he sees that as part of the new world, as a way to break the shackles of this old, imperial Victorian world in which he was born. He sees quantum mechanics and general relativity as a way to break with the past. So there's a kind of connecting up with his radical politics and his radical but extremely important scientific ideas.

 Space.com: Of the traveling you did to research the book, what experience stood out to you the most?

Poskett: I think the Jantar Mantar stood out the most to me, a series of observatories across north India that were built by this Indian ruler, Jai Singh II. The one in Jaipur is the most famous. It's the biggest; it's spectacular; it's built out of this red sandstone; it's the most impressive. They're stone instruments, mainly, with metal attachments for various things. The scale is incredible — this really was the big science of the 17th, 18th centuries. And the bigness allowed a level of precision that was not possible before, in terms of calculating the movement of the stars to create, particularly, calendars and the star catalogs.

The interesting thing about Jai Singh is, he was a Hindu, but he ruled within the Mughal Empire, which was an Islamic empire. So the combination of Islamic, Hindu and actually Christian European cultures that was brought together is literally, in some cases, inscribed on the instruments. You get both the Islamic and Latin numbers that we're familiar with in the West, but also you get the numbers written in Sanskrit on the instruments as well. It's really satisfying as a historian to see that combination of cultures literally inscribed on the scientific instrument that is still there that you can visit.

Space.com: How do you think our understanding of the history of science got so warped?

Poskett: It's a remarkably recent story — I call it a myth — and it wouldn't have really rang true to many people before the middle of the 20th century. In the 19th century, at the height of European imperialism, that's when scientists and historians in Europe start to articulate this idea that maybe Asia and the rest of the world had this ancient or medieval glorious past, but it's since decayed and these places need to be modern, like Europe. And then they kind of project this back onto the past and think that Europe had always been modern and the rest of the world had not.

Interestingly, this relates back to the Jantar Mantar. When the British first encounter the Jantar Mantar in the 18th century, they recognize it's amazing; they think, "Wow, these are incredible scientific instruments, amazing." And then they basically say, "These must have been built thousands of years ago, because there's no way the contemporary inhabitants of India could have built them." Yet they're looking at something that's like 50 years old at that time. When they find contemporary impressive science in other cultures, Europeans — particularly in the context of colonialism — often say that must be ancient, and in fact, they're wrong.

Space.com: What role does the Cold War play in all this?

Poskett: In the Cold War, it becomes really, really important politically for the West to present itself as the place which is the most advanced and has got history on its side. Science and technology are at the heart of the Cold War, particularly after the launch of Sputnik. In the '40s and '50s, the Soviet Union is actually way ahead, and this scares the hell out of the West, the Americans particularly. There's not, like, a propaganda department that sets this up as a plan, but it becomes increasingly important for scientists in the U.S., in Britain, to tell themselves, to teach their students and to tell the world that modern science was invented, in not just Europe but in Western Europe.

 All this adds up, basically, to create a much narrower sense of the history of science than even existed at the start of the 20th century. If you'd asked early professional historians of science in even the 1920s, in the aftermath of the first World War, when there was a hope that there would be a new international, cosmopolitan world, they would have presented a much more global, cosmopolitan version of the history of science to you.

You get this slightly unholy combination of political forces in the middle of the 20th century. The short version is the Cold War, decolonization and empire gave us a warped view of the history of science.

Space.com: Why is keeping that outdated view an issue?

Poskett: We live in a different political time — which is problematic in different ways — but we don't live in the Cold War of the 1960s and '70s anymore. Now, the Cold War is over; people are suddenly realizing the histories we were told in the Cold War aren't actually fit for purpose. They don't help us explain the world we live in. Maybe they were helpful for particular political purposes in the Cold War — fair enough — but it's 2022, not 1952.

I think it's quite hard to maintain this old history of science when we're seeing a scientific present where it's actually China, the UAE, as well as obviously the U.S., sending missions to Mars; where India and Turkey are investing in space programs. How do we make sense of that with a history of science that says science and astronomy are basically a European thing?

Space.com: How do you hope readers might rethink astronomy given what's in the book?

Poskett: A broader point of the book is to recognize that this Eurocentric narrative has had a negative effect on diversity in science, particularly in places like Europe and the United States. There's still a long way to go in terms of recognizing that astronomy and space science have always been diverse sciences.

The other aspect is, a lot of my book is actually a history of colonialism, empire, slavery, capitalism, decolonization. I'm of the view that the past really matters for tackling the present. So it's just not good enough to say, "OK, we're going to have a diversity initiative to increase diversity in astronomical sciences." To make science more diverse, we've got to recognize that there's a long history that has produced the structures that need to be undone. So, for instance, particularly in the U.S., but in different ways in places like Britain, recognizing that the history of slavery has marginalized particularly African Americans and Black British citizens from the sciences — actually recognizing that and working out how to actively address that legacy is part of how we should connect the history and the present.

There's another political side to this, which is, yes, other countries are investing in space science, but this isn't a happy, celebratory story, necessarily. These countries are investing in the context of growing polarization and of growing nationalism, often quite ethnic-focused nationalism. And so whilst it's certainly true that we should be celebrating a more inclusive and global space science, the furious investment in space science by states like China and India and Turkey is as much for defensive purposes, if not explicitly, then implicitly. In that way, it's very much like the Cold War.

 The future of space science, particularly space exploration, is globalized but also nationalist. I think keeping an eye on that is going to be really important if the world isn't going to become even more fractured than it is at the minute. Space has always been a place in which people and nations contest politics. Science happens in the world, so it's wrapped up with everything else that we do in the world, for better or worse.

 

In 'Horizons,' a discarded global view of science shines. By Meghan Bartels. Space, May 2, 2022

For some time, Anglo-American historians have been obsessed with the G word. The word is not ‘God’ but ‘global’. Using it, we have learned to tell a self-comforting story. Until recently, we begin, we were all narrow-minded Eurocentricists who thought that the history of the ‘West’ (best left undefined) was the only history there was to recall. Thankfully, the story goes on, our neo-imperialist eyes have been opened. Now we write ‘global history’, which takes into account the past of all of humanity. The triumphalism of the historians who tell this story has often been deafening. A decade ago, one head of a leading history department thundered, ‘If you are not doing an explicitly … global project, you now have to explain why you are not.’ (Pity the poor young scholar who wants to write a new history of witch-burnings in rural France.)

Who could possibly disagree with such an exultant narrative? After all, it is a priori obvious that the more we know about the whole world, the better our histories will be. Of course, there is the small problem that knowing about the whole world is rather difficult. First and foremost, one needs to learn a lot of languages. Then one needs to absorb the many rich national historiographical traditions of the places one studies, ideally in collaboration with historians from those places. One would therefore expect to find that the Anglo-American historians who have been most vocal about the need for global histories have been busy learning Akkadian, Mandarin and Swahili, or initiating collaborations with historians from Japan, Peru and Nigeria.

Alas, here is where the problems begin. Since doing all this takes a very long time – far longer than the most ambitious historians can wait before advancing in their academic careers – short cuts have had to be adopted. The most common is simply to pontificate about the need for global history without actually doing it. The second is to (re)write the history of the British Empire as ‘global history’. In this way, one can talk about a world outside of the ‘West’ without straying from the easily ploughed soil of English-language sources, often readily available in British and American libraries or online.

Accordingly, global history has often turned out to be more Anglophone than its supposedly ‘Eurocentric’ counterpart, where the expectation is that one knows at least some French, German and Italian, and is familiar with sources in those languages. No less worryingly, the practitioners of global history have been suspiciously clustered in elite Anglo-American universities. In response, some brave souls have dared to suggest that global history could do with a little more self-reflection lest it become ‘merely a buzzword among historians, more a label than a practice … more a fashion of the moment than a durable approach to the serious study of history’ (words written as early as 2006). Such legitimate concerns have often been met with howls of indignation, implied or open accusations of racism and everything else that we have come to expect in an age of social media and hyper-polarisation.

 

One might think that the history of science would be relatively immune to such polemics. After all, anyone with even a basic knowledge of the subject must be aware that science has never been solely a Western enterprise. An ancient Mesopotamian astronomer contributed more to ‘science’ (in its modern meaning) than twenty Greek philosophers. China had an Astronomical Bureau that lasted for two millennia (nothing comparable existed in Europe). Medieval Islamic mathematicians, astronomers and physicians were producing spectacularly advanced ideas at a time when the education of European elites often did not extend beyond basic literacy and horse riding. Of course, there has long been talk of a ‘Scientific Revolution’ that occurred in early modern Europe, often said to have culminated in the theories of Isaac Newton. Personally, I do not believe in such a revolution, but I do not consider those who do to be moral scoundrels.

James Poskett complains that ‘we are told’ that modern science ‘is a product of Europe alone’. He seeks here to combat this ‘myth’. As should be clear, he is himself indulging in a spot of myth-building. Thankfully, once this rhetoric is out of the way, Poskett settles down to tell a lively story of global collaboration in the study of nature from 1500 to the present day. Horizons shares the strengths and weaknesses of other global histories. His own primary area of expertise is British imperial history. Accordingly, many of his examples concern the contribution made by colonised peoples to European science rather than the history of non-Western science itself. As one would expect, those contributions varied depending on the levels of expertise that were required. The best sections are those that make no references to Europeans at all. For example, the discussion of Li Shizhen’s natural history The Compendium of Materia Medica (1596) not only demonstrates the richness of early modern Chinese medicine, botany and pharmacology but also explains, clearly and elegantly, how these were grounded in the ancient Chinese separation of the world into five phases, a separation that is no less interesting or sophisticated than the well-known Greek matter theories that were dominant in 16th-century Europe.

In fact, botany and natural history provide many of the most interesting of Poskett’s examples, since the Europeans on whom he focuses were very aware that their native plants were only a small proportion of those that existed in the world and sought to remedy the situation. For example, at the end of the 17th century the German naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian travelled to Surinam, where she learned about the medicinal properties of plants from enslaved women. Some of these plants were then depicted in Merian’s Metamorphosis of the Insects of Suriname (1705), a lavishly illustrated tome that was used by all the most important European naturalists, including Carl Linnaeus. In this case, Poskett is undoubtedly correct to conclude that ‘the growth of Atlantic slavery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had a profound effect on the development of European society’ – including in the realm of science.

In other cases, however, Poskett reaches similarly strong conclusions on the basis of far more slender evidence. The most egregious example comes in the discussion of Newton’s discovery of universal gravitation. Poskett rightly points out that Newton’s theory explained an observation made by Jean Richer in the French colony of Cayenne, where he found that a pendulum clock ran slower than in Paris. For Newton, here was another data point to add to the evidence that the Earth was not perfectly spherical – hence the varying force of gravity across its surface. But to conclude from this that ‘Newton was able to make a major scientific breakthrough only by virtue of his connections to the wider world of empire, slavery, and war’ is the kind of hyperbolic overstatement that gives global history a bad name. Newton discovered universal gravitation in his rooms in Cambridge, and his primary collaborators and interlocutors were English and European. Not everything has to be global.

None of this is to argue that Newton was completely disconnected from the atrocities of colonialism: late in his life he invested in the South Sea Company. But this had nothing to do with his earlier scientific work, and to call a whole chapter ‘Newton’s slaves’ is tendentious at best. The sad reality is that, as with many other spheres of activity, scientific flourishing often occurs in societies that have grown rich through empire, without that science necessarily being intrinsically connected to colonialism. Such societies have appropriated the knowledge and talent of those they have colonised, and their rulers and elites have used their riches to sponsor science and bask in the prestige of its achievements. This was as much the case in Athens in the fifth century BC, Han dynasty China, the medieval Islamic world and the Soviet Union in the mid-20th century as it was in Europe between the 16th and 20th centuries. All of these societies made huge contributions to the field that is today known as ‘science’. If the ideas that developed in Europe happen to look more ‘modern’, it is simply because many of them emerged nearer to the present than those that emerged elsewhere, and not because of any European or Western intellectual superiority (this is one of many reasons why ‘modern’ is a useless category of historical analysis).

I can warmly recommend Poskett’s rich and lucid book, with the caveat that it should be read with an awareness of the academic politics just discussed. When Poskett concludes that ‘there is no reason to think that the next big scientific discovery will come out of a laboratory in Europe or the United States’, he is certainly correct. Whether as many people would disagree with him as he thinks is another question. And when he hopes that global histories of science might encourage more international scientific collaboration, he – and we – might do better to look at our humanistic disciplines and our own practices. Poskett’s bibliography, consisting of several hundred items, contains only five works not written in English (and they are all in French). Perhaps all our talk of ‘going global’ is just another form of Anglo-American cultural imperialism after all.

The G Word. By Dmitri Levitin. Literary Review,  May 2022. 

If you worry  about the polarization of intellectual life, you’re certainly not the first. Consider Zera Ya’icob, the Ethiopian philosopher who defended a form of intellectual freedom in his Hatata (Inquiry) of 1667. Zera Ya’icob was torn between the religious sects that mingled in 17th-century East Africa. He engaged with Muslims, Coptic Christians, Jesuit missionaries, African Jews, and the local Oromo people, finding that they all said the same thing: “My faith is right and those who believe in another faith believe in falsehood, and are the enemies of God.” At once stimulated and bewildered, he wondered, “Who would be the judge for such kind of an argument?”

It is easy to sympathize with Zera Ya’icob when reading recent scholarship on the origins of modern science, which is riven by two orthodoxies in particular. One orthodoxy is that modern science was invented in early modern Europe. Important contributions came from other times and places, of course, but the decisive move toward modern science happened in Western Europe in the 17th century. The task of the historian of science is to understand how and why. If you disagree with this narrative, you may be accused of relativism, postmodernism, political correctness, or of not doing your job.

The second orthodoxy is that the first orthodoxy is wrong: science is global, not European. It took shape over many centuries, with the help of many cultures. To think otherwise is to buy into a myth about the inevitable rise of the West. The notion of “the West” is itself the product of recent geopolitics. The idea that science is Western is not just wrong, but wrong-headed. It is like a bad cold, or the Cold War. We just need to get over it.

 Who would be the judge of such an argument? The two schools not only make different claims but make them in starkly different ways. The first school is old but cohesive. The second is young but diffuse, made up of many stories rather than one story. It is easy to see why. Writing a history of European science is hard enough, with five centuries to cover and many scientific disciplines to master. Writing a history that takes in the rest of the world is a political and methodological minefield. Doing this in a way that appeals to the general reader looks like a fool’s game.

James Poskett, a historian of science and technology, is no fool. His new book, Horizons, is superb. It runs from 1400 to 2000, from the construction of the Samarkand Observatory to the completion of the Human Genome Project. It covers the human sciences as well as the natural sciences, taking in medicine and engineering along the way and covering a great range of people, places, and predicaments. We learn about an Ottoman astronomer captured by pirates in the 16th century; a Tahitian chief charting the Pacific Ocean in the 18th century; a geneticist working to save his life in communist China. Inevitably, there are gaps: Australia, the Holy Roman Empire, economics, most of the earth sciences, experimental science before 1800, Africa after 1800. The book is under 400 pages after all (without footnotes), and so it does not purport to be complete, which would indeed be foolish.

Horizons is global not only in its geographical scope but also in its narrative technique. Poskett uses concrete examples to reveal connections and similarities between parts of the world that are usually studied separately. The Ottoman astronomer Taqi al-Din spent much of his youth bouncing around the Mediterranean Sea, from Cairo to Rome to Istanbul. He bounced around intellectually as well, translating Arabic works into Latin while he was in Rome and introducing European clocks to a new observatory in Istanbul. Some scientists stayed put, including Isaac Newton, a global mathematician who never left England. There he sat, spider-like, at the center of a web of travelers that stretched from Senegal to Peru. Other scientists were more like flies than spiders, trapped in global webs. The physicist Lev Landau made one of his most important theoretical breakthroughs while spending a year in one of Stalin’s prisons. The physician Graman Kwasi was equally remarkable. Born in West Africa around 1690, Kwasi discovered a treatment for malarial fever while working as a slave on a sugar plantation in the Dutch colony of Suriname.

But Horizons is not just a collection of global biographies. These are embedded in a grand narrative about the last 600 years of world history. First comes the expansion of Islamic empires in the vicinity of the Silk Road. Next comes European imperialism: the colonization of the Americas, the transatlantic slave trade, and the exploration of the great expanses of Siberia and the Pacific Ocean. European empires became industrial in the 19th century, fueling nationalistic wars in the process. The 20th century was the age of ideology: fascists, communists, and anticolonialists staked their claims in the first half of the century; and decolonization and the Cold War dominated the second half. The book ends in the present, with the world in the grip of a new Cold War between China and the United States. The war in Ukraine, which broke out while I was writing this review, adds a tragic twist to the narrative.

Poskett links these geopolitical developments to intellectual ones, and much of his book’s originality lies in these linkages. The chapter on 19th-century biology, for example, is not simply a survey of the global reception of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. It is an argument for the connection between biology, war, and nationalism, a connection captured in the phrase “struggle for existence.” Biology was a battlefield, with naturalists using martial metaphors in their theories and gathering specimens in the course of military expeditions. This was true across the globe: in Napoleonic Egypt, in the newly independent Argentina, in a Japan wracked by civil war, and in modernizing China. The titles of other chapters hint at similar arguments: “Newton’s slaves,” “Industrial experiments,” “Genetic states,” and so on. This is not just a history of science. It is a history of the modern world seen through the lens of science.

At the same time, it is the story of “the scientists who have been written out of history,” in Poskett’s words. Their excision was a product of the imperial history that drove so much of modern science. Overcoming this history means many things. It means writing the East into the history of modern science rather than consigning it to an ancient or medieval past. It means closing the gap between Islamic astronomers such as Taqi al-Din and European ones such as Nicolaus Copernicus. It means seeing that Cold War science was about Japan, Mexico, and Israel, not just about the USA and the USSR. It means realizing that imperial science was often done by the victims of empire, such as the Peruvian Indians whose labor helped to prove Newton’s theory of universal gravitation. These people were “barely distinguishable from beasts,” according to the French astronomer Charles-Marie de la Condamine. Yet the Frenchman relied on the astronomical expertise of these “beasts” in some of the most precise measurements done in the 18th century.

Indigenous knowledge is a major part of the book, but Poskett is no relativist. He does not say that science is just one form of knowledge among many other forms of knowledge. By “science” he means canonical topics like universal gravitation, natural selection, botanical classification, and molecular biology. The point is that the canon itself is global. As a result, Poskett is not afraid to praise the canon. He writes in terms of discoveries, breakthroughs, ingenious instruments, and keen scientific minds. He does not shy away from comparative judgments. The Aztecs were “particularly advanced” among American peoples in precolonial times; Russia “seemed stuck in the past” in the 17th century. This is a celebration of science as well as a critique of empire.

All this makes for a good story. But is it true? Or is it just another myth? There is no simple answer to this question. Horizons has several lines of argument, some more convincing than others. Poskett certainly shows that modern science was made by many people outside Europe who are undervalued in existing histories. He also shows that world history and global exchange are an excellent framework for understanding past science.

But he sometimes goes further. He writes that the Eurocentric story told by past historians is “a myth.” He also charges these historians with “European exceptionalism.” This suggests that there was nothing exceptional about Europe in the history of modern science. A different thesis is that Europe was exceptional, but mainly because of the wealth and power brought about by empire. A third thesis is that science develops when cultures come together and not when they stay apart.

These are all comparative claims. They compare Europe with the rest of the world, empire with other historical phenomena, and cultural exchange with cultural separation. To evaluate these claims, we need to see both sides of the comparison. The problem is that Horizons only shows one side of each comparison.

 Take the two chapters on the Enlightenment. These open with the statement that we can “better understand” Enlightenment science by thinking about the rise of European empires. There is ample evidence for this in the ensuing pages, which link Newtonian physics to the slave trade, the colonization of the Americas, and the exploration of the Pacific Ocean. But there is no evidence for the much stronger claim a few pages later: that the rise of European empires “best explains” the science of the Enlightenment. To defend this claim, Poskett would need to review all the other explanations for the growth of 18th-century science, from coffee houses to cameralism. But the other explanations are barely mentioned here.

The same goes for cultural exchange. There are many illuminating examples of cultural exchange in Horizons, often centered on artifacts such as maps, books, and instruments. This creates the impression that science thrives on interactions between diverse cultures. On closer inspection, many of these exchanges hint at long periods of separation. European astronomy and Incan astronomy did meet in 1736, when La Condamine and his team took their measurements in Peru. But for all we know, that was the first and last meeting between these two astronomical cultures. Moreover, the periods of separation may help to explain why the exchange was so fruitful. Cultural exchange works because cultures are different, and they are different partly because they develop separately.

Another one-sided comparison involves 17th-century Europe. Yes, there is a section called “The Scientific Revolution, 1450–1700.” But as far as Europe is concerned, the narrative leaps from 1543, when Copernicus declared that the Earth goes around the sun, to 1687, when Newton explained why it does. The most talked-about decades in the history of European science are passed over in near-total silence. The chapter on Renaissance astronomy has nothing to say about the invention of the telescope or the discovery that planets move in elliptical orbits, two milestones that feature in any ordinary history of Renaissance astronomy. This makes sense if the aim is to valorize non-European scientists. But it makes no sense if the aim is to show that Europe was unexceptional. Arguments against exceptionalism can’t just ignore the alleged exceptions. And arguments for the link between science and empire can’t ignore 17th-century Europe. On the received view, Europe already led the world scientifically in 1700, a century before it led the world in political or economic terms. The received view may be false, but it deserves a better falsification.

On current evidence, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Europe was exceptional after all. Chapter one of Horizons helps to explain why European natural history was distinctive: it was transformed by the new knowledge generated by the colonization of the Americas. Chapter two is a global survey of astronomy that contains many surprises, but nothing quite as novel as telescopes and elliptical orbits. The material on China does little to disturb the conventional view that Europe raced ahead of China in terms of scientific achievement after 1500, and that China has only just caught up. The chapters on the 19th and 20th centuries cover an amazingly diverse group of scientists who had one thing in common: they all — or nearly all — learned much of their science from institutions that were either in Europe or were modeled on institutions in Europe. Europe is a black hole in Horizons. It is barely visible, but everything seems to gravitate around it.

Why does this matter? Why do we feel the need to show that modern science owes as much to Tokyo and Timbuktu as it does to Paris and London? After all, there is no rush to show that all cultures have made equally important contributions to slavery, for example. This is presumably because we value science but not slavery. We assume that science is a mark of rationality and a source of material progress, a sort of IQ test for world cultures.

Horizons doesn’t exactly support this assumption. It suggests that the main functions of science over the last 600 years have been to wage war, build empires, and rationalize racial prejudice. The book also suggests that any improvements that science has made to our understanding of the natural world are a historical accident. The narrative is driven by the interactions between individuals, nations, and empires. The narrative is not driven by the interactions between theory, experience, and mathematics. In the index there is a large entry on “empire,” but no entry on “empiricism.” Horizons has a lot to say about the politics of science, but little to say about the epistemology of science, and what it says about the former does not flatter science. This is a celebration of science that does not explain why science is worth celebrating.

Horizons shows the immense potential of global histories of science, but it also shows the continued need for other approaches. We need histories of science in Europe, because we need to know what happened inside the black hole. We need epistemic histories of science, because the value of science depends on its ability to understand the natural world. We also need relativist histories of science, because science is not the only way to be rational, and not always the best way. And we need national and regional histories, because cultural separation is as much a part of modern history as cultural exchange.

Let us remember Zera Ya’icob. We need to decolonize history, but we also need to depolarize history. Only then will we get over the Cold War.

 Arguing About the Origins of Science. By Michael Bycroft. Los Angeles Review of Books,  March 27, 2022  

Think of a  famous scientist from the past. What name did you come up with? Very likely, someone from Europe or the United States. That’s hardly surprising, because science is often taught in Western classrooms as though it’s a European-American endeavor.

James Poskett, a historian of science at the University of Warwick in England, believes this myth is not only misleading but dangerous — and it’s something he sets out to correct in his recent book, “Horizons: A Global History of Science.” Billed as “a major retelling of the history of science,” the book frames the last five centuries of the scientific enterprise as a truly globe-spanning project.

In a recent Zoom conversation, Poskett explained why he believes this retelling is needed. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Undark: You point out that the history of science, as it’s usually taught, focuses on figures like Galileo, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein. And I think we can agree that those people did actually make vital contributions. But what’s left out when we focus on those figures?

James Poskett: I agree, it’s really important to emphasize that those figures did make contributions that were significant. So my book isn’t about Newton and Darwin and Einstein not mattering. As you say, those people feature in the book. They’re all significant figures in their own right. But by focusing exclusively on them, we miss two global stories.

The first global story is that these famous figures we’ve heard of in fact relied on their global connections to do much of the work that they’re famous for. Newton is a good example, in terms of him relying on information he was collecting from around the world, often from East India Company officers in Asia, or astronomers on slave-trading ships in the Atlantic. So we miss the global dimension of these famous scientists — not just collecting information, but often actually relying on the culture and knowledge of other peoples too.

The other part is the people from outside of Europe who made their own really significant contributions in their own right. There were Chinese, Japanese, Indian, African astronomers, mathematicians, later evolutionary thinkers, geneticists, chemists, who made genuine important contributions to the development of modern science. It completely skews the story if we have this exclusive focus on White European pioneers.

UD: Another interesting point you make is that when textbooks or popular histories of science do mention the contributions of, say, Islamic science or Chinese science, it’s often framed as a historical episode. The reader gets the impression that this was something that happened in the past. In your book, you say this is not only misleading but it can have harmful consequences. How so?

JP: We’re quite actually familiar with the idea that civilizations in the Middle East and Asia, the Islamic world, Hindu civilizations, Chinese civilization — that these contributed in some way to science. But it’s always told as part of a narrative of an ancient or medieval golden age. And I always tell my students, you should be super suspicious, as soon as you hear the term “golden age,” because it’s massively loaded: It’s telling you that there was once this great achievement, there was this once-great civilization — but the emphasis is on “once,” because the “golden age” bit implies a fall from grace, or a dark age afterwards.

At face value, it sounds good — you know, Islamic mathematicians, chemists, astronomers made important contributions in the 10th century — but actually, that’s kind of pushing those achievements way back in the past. It has the rhetorical effect of saying that Islamic science isn’t modern, or Chinese science, or Hindu science, or Mesoamerican science are not part of modernity; there’s something kind of anti-modern about it.

Of course, the Islamic world made important contributions to science in the medieval period. But it didn’t suddenly stop. It continued throughout the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. And that’s really the message of the book.

UD: An obvious turning point, not just in the history of science, but in human history writ large, is when Europeans first made contact with the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. In your book, you say that these encounters were critical in terms of thinking of human beings as part of nature. You even write, “The discovery of the New World was also the discovery of humankind.” What do you mean by that?

JP: Broadly, for Europeans, the discovery that there was a “new world” was a major shock to the very foundations of how they thought about knowledge. Knowledge was supposed to be based on ancient texts; it was supposed to be on the authority of ancient Greek and Roman authors, people like Aristotle, or Pliny for geography. And also the Bible was kind of wrapped up with that as well, as a source of ancient authority.

 But of course, none of these ancient authors mentioned this enormous continent. And not only was this continent full of life, full of animals and vegetables and plants and minerals that in some cases had not been seen before and weren’t mentioned in the ancient texts — it was full of people!

So this then made thinkers in Europe start saying, well, maybe actually, knowledge isn’t best derived from ancient texts exclusively; maybe we need to go out into the world and look at things to make discoveries. And of course, that’s the metaphor we still use. We talk about scientific “discoveries.”

Humans were seen as separate from the natural world. They were created — in Christian Europe, and most of the major religions at that time — they’re created separately. Humans have a moral element that can be analyzed philosophically and morally, but they’re not meaningfully part of nature in the same way a horse is. But this idea of discovering nature also opened the opportunity that there were things that were to be discovered, not just about the outside world, but about the kind of internal world of the human – that if you could discover a tomato by looking out into the world, maybe you could discover something about humans by looking inside them.

UD: You point out that when we think of the structure of the atom, we tend to think of the New Zealand-born British scientist Ernest Rutherford, who’s often credited with figuring it out. In the book, you talk about an often overlooked figure, Hantaro Nagaoka. Who was he? What was his contribution?

JP: Hantaro Nagaoka was a Japanese physicist. He was born in the mid-19th century. He came from a Samurai family, like many 19th century Japanese scientists, and he was studying physics at a time that Japan was industrializing; where the Samurai were finding a new place for themselves in this modern industrial society. And in the very early 20th century, in 1904, he gave an account of the structure of the atom. He called it the “Saturnian” atom.

He’d worked this out theoretically, rather than by doing experiments. He worked out that, based on complex theoretical assumptions and following these through, that there must be a large, central, positively charged nucleus, surrounded by orbiting electrons. And he called it the Saturnian atom after the planet Saturn, with a big central thing with its rings around it. This is the basic structure of the atom that Rutherford later was famous for developing, for doing the experimental work for — but Rutherford published his paper seven years later, in 1911.

And in fact Rutherford would have acknowledged this. Rutherford cites Nagaoka’s paper at the end of his famous 1911 paper. And Rutherford actually corresponded with Nagaoka. Nagaoka wasn’t some unknown scientist nobody had ever heard of. He was attending conferences in Paris; he came to Britain and actually had a tour of Rutherford’s laboratory in Manchester, where Rutherford did the experiments. And actually, if you look at textbooks from the early 20th century, they mention Nagaoka — he’s kind of just fallen out of the history later on.

So he made this really serious contribution to atomic physics. But he’s one of the smoking gun examples of someone who really came up with a key theoretical piece of science, that was a major influence in the 20th century, but is almost completely forgotten outside of Japan.

 My point isn’t that Rutherford stole the idea. My point is that science is made through these processes of global cultural exchange, through these different people making different contributions.

UD: Turning to the present day: You describe the current relationship between the U.S. and China as being like a new Cold War. How does science fit in to this new “war”?

JP: Science fits into it in some ways like the original Cold War, in that science has a practical function. And that’s clearly how states like China, like the United States, like India, the United Arab Emirates —they see it as part of their economic strategy. Basically, that investment in sciences like artificial intelligence will allow a transformation of the economy, increased production — and this is really important for keeping citizens happy, and ultimately having the kind of economic clout to dominate the world economically and politically and through soft power.

Also, in more practical terms, space science has a really clear military element with respect to satellites, rocketry. I talk a lot about climate science being a science that fits with the new Cold War, in that it’s seen by states as a kind of security problem. For China, climate science is important to invest in because their coastal regions are major economic centers. They don’t want those going underwater.

So there are practical elements — but it’s also ideological. We’re seeing a return of a kind of nationalism — this weird combination of globalization and nationalism. Xi Jinping is a nationalist, much more so than some of the previous Chinese leaders. He’s just the most prominent example, and probably the person that’s most likely be able to to walk the walk as well as talk the talk. But nationalist leaders in India, in Turkey, in the UAE, in America, in Britain. Boris Johnson talked about making Britain a new “scientific superpower.” So science also becomes an ideological marker of national prestige.

UD: Throughout the book you sort of argue that it’s wrong to frame the history of science as a European endeavor or an Anglo-American endeavor. Why do you feel it’s so important to rewrite or update that framing?

JP: For overlapping reasons. A basic one is about representation and diversity in science; equity. Science, in Europe and Britain, certainly in America — United States and North America generally — is not equitable, particularly in terms of diversity with respect to minority ethnic groups, but other kinds of diversity as well, in terms of class and gender, disability, and the like.

So I think if the scientific profession is disproportionately people like me — White men who went to Cambridge — then part, but not the exclusive reason for that, is because we repeatedly present to the public, to school children, to university students, an image of the sciences which looks like me. It’s people like Newton or Einstein or Darwin — they’re these White men. And again, my point isn’t that they’re not part of the story. Absolutely they are. But that there are other people from around the world, from different cultural backgrounds, who are part of it.

We’re at a kind of crossroads in history, but also in science. And the narratives that scientists were taught and told themselves in the West was a narrative that was built for the Cold War. But the Cold War’s over — the original one. Yet we’re still telling these narratives about Western science, science being neutral. And I think a lot of public mistrust in the sciences generally is actually a function of this — that we need to present publicly a more realistic, political, diverse account of how science is done – how we got to now — in order to have the consent and engagement of the mass public in the sciences.

I really think that this kind of history of science shouldn’t be seen as a threat to scientists. I’m not doing it because I want to see the end of science, and for all of us become vaccine deniers. I’m doing it for the opposite reason: I think if you want to stem the tide of vaccine and climate denial, and xenophobic nationalism, then you need a history of science which really engages with these quite difficult histories.

In “Horizons,” a historian of science highlights the crucial achievements of non-Western scientists and thinkers. By Dan Falk. Undark , January 7, 2022. 

Penguin