Category: Psychology

Where Are You on the Timeline of Knowledge?

This post is meant as a lark, a playful foray into recapitulation theory. The idea that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” is wrong but intriguing. The idea was that the early fetus was like our ancient, fishy ancestors and the developing fetus follows a path that mimics the evolution of the species.

Herbert Spencer (who coined “survival of the fittest” and dated George Eliot but didn’t end up with her) thought that education followed a parallel path to knowledge’s path, that people learned things in roughly the same order that humanity learned things. Also not true, but fun to consider the possibility of “diagnosing” an individual with a label—the year in which their current belief system roughly resembled science’s. This will not be uniformly reliable, by any means, since some people think the earth is flat who also accept the germ theory of illness. Still, for most people there will be some “best date” that most closely approximates the state of their belief system. Make up your own key items in the history of science, but here are some of mine. What’s your score?

500 BCE Moonlight is reflected sunlight.

460 BCE Things expand as they warm.

150 The moon is much smaller than the sun and much closer.

1521 The earth is (close to) a sphere.

1543 The earth revolves around the sun.

1564 If there’s a 25% chance of rain, it means that 25% of similar days will see rain.

1580 Comets are objects that appear periodically.

1604 When you see an object, something goes into your eye but nothing comes out of your eye.

1610 Venus has phases like the moon for the same reason (reflected sunlight).

1628 Blood circulates in the body.

1676 Light has a finite speed.

1687 All objects attract each other (gravity).

1751 Lightning is electrical.

1796 Vaccination prevents disease.

1843 You can’t create energy out of nothing.

1859 All animals and plants, including people, have an ancestor in common.

1861 Illnesses like the flu and the common cold are caused by germs.

1862 The earth is really old.

1900 People are not experts on themselves because they’re biased.

1897 Electricity is the flow of electrons.

1905 Nothing can go faster than light, not even light shining from a fast-moving source.

1912 Continents are drifting.

1924 The Milky Way is only one of many, many galaxies.

1953 Behavior is selected by environments.

1988 The earth is definitely getting warmer as a result of human activity.

A regressive, least-squares method would identify the year that minimizes the sum of the squares between the identified-year and the years of all the items the individual does not believe. If that sentence reminds you in any way of the Scarecrow’s erroneous insight about isosceles triangles after conferral of a diploma by the Wizard of Oz, then I’m happy.

Please suggest further dates and facts to expand the “test.”