Re: The scientific harvest (Re: Evidence for "Big Bang Theory")
Doug O'Neal (oneal@astro.psu.edu)
22 May 1995 18:14:32 GMT
In article <896@landmark.iinet.net.au> gil@landmark.iinet.net.au (Gil Hardwick) writes:
> Religion "improves the harvest" by establishing a common calendar for
> sowing and reaping, old fruits, and for binding the local community
> and establishing the rules for distributing the produce. Religious
> festivals mark the seasons, and bring people out to work together
> getting crops in to start with.
Without rudimentary science (i.e., observation of the natural world), you
wouldn't know when to have those festivals or how to predict the changing
of the seasons, therefore when to plant and when to harvest. Nor would
you be able to make a calendar bearing any relation to the real cycles of
the seasons.
Of course, I hasten to point out that in many early societies the
"scientists" (astronomers, who did these observations) were also the priests,
because their knowledge gave them the predictive power that people
respected.
> If you have no crop at all, how on earth can the harvest be improved?
If you have no one who tinkers around with naturally-occuring plants to
see which ones grow well under domestication, you won't have a crop to
improve. Simple scientific investigation there.
> Science added to traditional practice only marginally improves the
> harvest while at once extensively undermining farm terms of trade, as
> in Europe and North America. But where science refutes traditional
> practice as everywhere else on earth, disaster in wide spread famine
> has resulted because it throws the seasonal cycles out of kilter and
> makes people dependent on foreigners and their "aid programs", which
> do no more than dump cheap over-production that would otherwise go to
> waste.
Whatever your judgment is, traditional practice ain't gonna support six
billion people.
Doug
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