Comment 16 by Ignorant Amos

@ SaganTheCat

I think science is as old as human ingenuity....it's the application that was questionable. Unscrupulous folk have always exploited the ignorant and gullible for their own ends. To be able to notice, say, a celestial pattern and apply it to woo woo proved to be very profitable in many ways.

For example, knowledge about the working of natural things was gathered long before recorded history and led to the development of complex abstract thinking, as shown by the construction of complex calendars, techniques for making poisonous plants edible, and buildings such as the pyramids.>>

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The Pyramids are not ancient, probably less than 6,000 years old. There are ruins of Churches older than that (18-24,000 years).

As for the unscrupulous people. They invented religion (between 300 and 150 thousand years ago) and have been evolving it ever since into the 9,000 plus versions of the power and control mechanism that exist today.

Humans go back millions of years and us, 400,000 or so. We havn't changed much genetically since then with improvements in nutrition having the most significant visible effect. Organisationally we are typically settled now, rather than just hunter gatherers. In terms of memory, the evolution of speech and then painting, writing and printing have enabled more memory available to more for generations. In terms of communication we have much fewer limits and in terms of intelligence, we are pretty much the same.

The memory and communiaction advances have enabled better leveraging of our intelligence (not to mention, standing on the shoulders of giants)..

As for Science (the Scientific Method). We could be tens if not hundreds of millennia further ahead than we are now if we had invented the Scientific Method before we invented Religion (Neandrathals had religion as well, look what happened to them (actually that was probably us with our newer gods - better power and control mechanism or just more unscrupulousness).