by Valerie Syverson

Created on: February 14, 2007   Last Updated: May 02, 2007

By far the most common mistake over the last hundred years in the teaching of the history of science and the evolution of scientific ideas frequently also made in the teaching of the processes of biological evolution is to falsely impart a clear-cut narrative with good guys, bad guys, winners, and losers. The story of the heroic emergence of chemistry out of the Middle Ages' supposedly silly and irrational approaches to natural science is an example of this problematic tendency. Certainly, to a modern reader, the physical theories of the Scholastics seem thoroughly absurd, but upon examination of the data actually available to would-be scientists of the day, the set of ideas is nearly as self-consistent as the modern scientific paradigm; it fails only in consideration of the real information not available until well into the modern period.

The idea of memes', transmissible patterns of thought or units of cultural information, is useful in the understanding of how profoundly researchers' approach to the physical world before the mid-1700s differed from that which prevailed in subsequent centuries. From the perspective given by memetic theory, that classic example of unscientific medieval foolishness, the idea of the transmutation of metals, is entirely consistent with the best information, theory, and accepted scientific philosophy of the day.

The first point to consider is that the analytic methods available to the medieval and early modern natural philosophers who believed in the reality of transmutation of metals can scarcely be compared to those presently available. Almost everything modern chemists take for granted consistent and clean instruments, constant heating elements, airtight seals, sometimes even transparent glass were either nonstandard or completely impossible to achieve. Small wonder, then, that things like escaping gas were not understood and incorporated into the physical model of the universe.

Secondly, the historical spectator must consider the period's different attitude toward the nature of the universe and of the possibilities of human endeavour. The period we call the Enlightenment bequeathed a meme to the Western world that mandated a strong separation between the realms of unverifiable theological and philosophical speculation on the one hand, and on the other hand concrete and testable scientific discovery. However, to the Medievals this was not the case. Instead, everything in the world was intimately intertwined with theology, in the

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