It's like sword making in Japan. The process was ritualized and copied, long before there was understanding of the underlying chemistry and why it worked.
Most of what we know how to do, like cooking, is learned by copying, not by understanding.
Despite bow and arrow being refined for millenia, the compound bow wasn't invented until 1966, when the inventor realized that nobody had applied modern engineering principles to bow design.
Err.. doesn't the Mongol bow count? I distinctly recall reading how the fact that it was made of multiple materials made it a lot more lightweight and efficient than bows made out of one piece.
EDIT: NVM, I confused "compound" for "composite"
EDIT2: And this passage on Wikipedia explains my confusion
> In literature of the early 20th century, before the invention of compound bows, composite bows were described as "compound".[2] This usage is now outdated.
I think with the success of systematic scientific understandings, we look past other, previous ways of knowing things. Medicines (eg antibiotic containing "witches brews," pain & fever relieving tree bark, etc.) existed prior to scientific medicine.
People arrived at this knowledge somehow. Ritualized copying is how knowledge was transferred, not attained. A lot of knowledge of complex processes to utile nutritional and medicinal resources probably predates our species... The knoweldge was possibly attained by means that we don't understand anymore.
In any case, compound bows are bows. Bows were invented, reinvented and refined, & spread many times. The composite bow (made of wood, horn & sinew) is a complex design using ancient materials, each with different properties. Even the simplest wooden bows, if important, usually embed quite a lot of knowledge about material selection, treatment, and construction. High powered crossbows and such utilizing spring steel were the last "prescientific" burst of innovation, taking advantage of newly abundant materials.
It's not really all that different from the modern incarnation of that particular type of machine. When that guy was doing it in the 1960s, we know how he invented. He used knowledge of physics to calculate force, stored energy and designed for specific optimization. What was the Scythian bowmaker doing as he selected glue to attache sinew to his radical new bow design?
I don't think there was any special "way of attaining knowledge" prior to science; it's always been, and still is, trial and error. Science is just the formalized and most advanced version of the same thing humans have always done to discover new things.
I think there is a special aspect to science, and the vast majority of the specialness is actually "Look for the reasons why you're wrong, instead of looking for why you're right." That is the major pre-science flub-up that was made. If I were thrust back in time to a receptive culture, that is the point I would make, not specific ones about p-values or peer review or an attempt to institute our exact journal process.
We're really good at figuring out why we're right, even when we are patently wrong. It takes training to overcome that even partially, and before people take too many Science Triumphalism laps, I wouldn't rate us as being all that great at it today, either. Fortunately, you don't have to be perfect at it to obtain advantage.
(This also merges well with the general Chesterton's Fence idea; instead of assuming that you're right in the act of tearing down the fence and finding all kinds of reasons why you're right, you need to seek the reason why you are wrong. No amount of piling up the reasons why it's OK to tear down the fence matters, because it only takes one solid reason why you shouldn't to tip the balance. This is mostly because, alas, benefit in general is often bounded and at a not-that-large value, but harm is not well-bounded. It's a lopsided distribution of value.)
There is indeed a special aspect to science - it's the scientific method, a systematic means to separate fact from baloney.
A companion to that is the idea that the universe can be modeled. Rules that work for the model work for the universe. As obvious as that sounds to us, it is a revolutionary concept.
it's a process, and thus far the only one that seems to work. It can't be very special (in the sense of "extraordinary") if it's what everyone who succeeds is doing.
I usually see the phrase "ways to attain knowledge" in the context on anti-scientific woo, so it makes me a bit wary. Thus far I haven't seen a single "alternative" that holds water, but I've seen some that lead people to wrong conclusions, sometimes with dire consequences.
The difference is that you can make lots of swords in different ways over the years and compare. The mystery with food, especially food that kills you slowly, is how to do that without killing your whole village.
It's a really funny thing, tradition: people tend to believe it represents something that has existed for ages without changing, even though we often have no real proof of that (none of us have been around for more than one lifetime after all).
I suspect most traditions are more about the collective belief that a shared social ritual is rock-solid and unchanging, and people taking comfort in that, than whether or not it really is.
And yet, if all you do is wash + cook Cassava, you'll die in relatively short order - since there's a good amount of cyanide in there. Wikipedia has a small section [0] on how it's prepared 'in the wild':
> A safe processing method known as the "wetting method" is to mix the cassava flour with water into a thick paste and then let it stand in the shade for five hours in a thin layer spread over a basket. In that time, about 83% of the cyanogenic glycosides are broken down by the linamarase; the resulting hydrogen cyanide escapes to the atmosphere, making the flour safe for consumption the same evening.
> . The traditional method used in West Africa is to peel the roots and put them into water for three days to ferment. The roots then are dried or cooked.
How easy are either of those to discover? Especially since low levels of cyanide consumption doesn't have immediate health effects.
Across a thousand years, it starts becoming likely.
Biff: "Didn't you know you're not supposed to eat Cassava?"
Awk: "No. What's the problem? I did a couple weeks ago, and I'm fine."
Biff: "It's deadly. What did you do?"
Awk: "I mixed the paste with water to make dumplings, then Thag came by wanting to show me his new club. So I let it sit in the shade for the afternoon."
Biff: "Interesting. Let's try that again and feed it to Grep and see what happens."
Ah, but you miss the point - whether you leave it to sit for an afternoon or not, as long as it's cooked you'll be fine. Unless you do it for a significant portion of your food - and Cavassa's pretty easy to grow, so it'd make for a nice staple crop - in which case you'll die after a few years.
So the feedback loop isn't "weeks" it's "years" or "decades".
"Fine" given that you eat such foods rarely and/or your time horizon is months not years. No immediately apparent health effects, but long term ones - sort of like eating fish high in mercury.
Yes, assuming you have all the required elements (ingredients, time, tools, etc).
There's plenty of people who are okay at following basic directions for cooking - but the moment anything goes astray or they want to do something that's not exactly in the recipe (say, substitute one ingredient for another), they don't understand what is happening and how to fix it.
A lot of cooking is about knowing general rules and how to apply them, but if you've never learned them, you can end up with inedible messes. This is where those who arn't terribly confident can decide that it's all too difficult and give up.
Knowing the heuristics of what flavors pair and balance one another isn't really understanding what is going on in our tastebuds or brains any more than music theory understands the ear and auditory processing. The individual that invented the trebuchet didn't know about gravity, calculus or unified theory but the rocks still brought down walls. There is something between copying and true understanding. I call it engineering and its my favorite part of the maturation of any technology because when you dont know why something you are using works there is still deep magic and wonder left. Once we figure it all out, the book is over, i know who dunnit and all the wonder is explained away.
I was thinking more of the physics/chemistry aspects of cooking. Flavour combinations are very much a personal and cultural thing.
For instance, knowing that certain ingredients release a lot of liquid when cooked, or that fresh ingredients often behave quite different to dried, canned or preserved variants.
I know I'm not the only one to have used fresh pineapple with meat, and come back to find that the pineapple's enzymes have started to digest the meat and all you have left is some meat paste.
Those things mean you either need to know what's going on, or be willing to experiment (and suffer the failures).
Also, on the subject of wonder/deep magic aspect - I think you can still know precisely how something works and still be amazed at it. Knowing that it's billions of microorganisms eating sugars and farting CO2 causing your bread to rise is still incredibly cool.
I was talking about airplanes with a woman once, and it became apparent she didn't know how they flew. I offered to explain it, and she declined, saying she wouldn't feel safe if she knew the mechanics of it.
For me, it was different. Knowing all about airplanes made me feel safer in them.
I didn't learn how to use my switch by reading or by science, I just pressed buttons till I got what I wanted. Same for my old digital watches. Sadly this doesn't work well for IoT devices with one button and a led.
Probbably part of why it took so long for the scientific method to take hold, you can just poke at a lot of things and try a lot of things and get a lot of success.
> The process was ritualized and copied, long before there was understanding of the underlying chemistry
Even chemistry itself is derived from alchemy and observations made during decades/centuries of experimentation and reporting. There are still some reactions that we do not fully understand while we know they actually work.
For example, we still don't know a lot about how wine aging works. Like, we really don't know exactly what chemical reactions the tannins go through as wine ages in the bottle.
There still has to be a reason to keep experimenting with a plant that keeps killing your patrons. There has to be a belief that in the end it will yield a tasty, non-lethal dish that would be worth the trail of dead bodies the recipe demanded.
I guess for many places it was simply that food supplies were never that plentiful, so it's worth the risk to try and make safe something that looks like it could be edible.
If your food supply is plentiful there probably wouldn't be the same incentive. But for most people, for most of human history food has not been that plentiful, so any extra source would have been welcome.
This is probably also true of all the ways we've found to preserve food. When you know the winter is going to be lean it's worth experimenting with things to see if you can eek out out supplies of that little bit longer.
Apart from scarcity, I wonder what it was about dishes like Fugu[1]. Maybe every fish didn't kill everyone all the time, so the element of danger added to the intrigue, etc.
Slight off topic, but I wonder how accurate the references in novel/series "The Clan of the Cave Bear" where medicine man/woman skills are mainly handed down from one generation to next. However also handed down is the skill to take tiny amounts of unknown herbs or potential foodstuffs and observe effects on their own body before working out what to do/how to use to treat ailments etc and add to common body of knowledge.
> There has to be a belief that in the end it will yield a tasty, non-lethal dish that would be worth the trail of dead bodies the recipe demanded.
Experience with other foods where proper prep can make them safe suggests that it can be done. And if a plant is in plentiful supply, that provides motivation.
And you can experiment on animals and captives, it's not necessary to kill your family.
Most of what we know how to do, like cooking, is learned by copying, not by understanding.
Despite bow and arrow being refined for millenia, the compound bow wasn't invented until 1966, when the inventor realized that nobody had applied modern engineering principles to bow design.