I don’t know exactly what touched off this train of thought, but I want to address what I view as a common misconception. There is a tendency to look at all of the technology and knowledge which we access at our fingertips today and think of ourselves as smarter than the generations which came before us. It is easy to look at the beliefs about our ancestors as the product of stupidity rather than limited knowledge and observational tools.

I want to preface this by saying that one can hardly look at the accumulated knowledge of the Greeks or engineering feats of the Romans and consider this to hold true. Certainly, some have excused this as a kind of historical anomaly, but I don’t think that is really the case. Rather it is what might better be viewed as being in the right place at the right time.

Now, one should point out that it is difficult to sort out just how common a given belief might be, even today. Modern discussions are hardly short of misconceptions about mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology, among other things. So, I’m always prone to caution when it comes to commenting on how widespread accurate knowledge is or is not. In many fields, a few experts will have more complete knowledge of current models, while most people will, at best, have access only to a simplified understanding learned in school.

Let’s start with a simple thought exercise or two.

Imagine that you are a caveman standing in a relatively level field. Surrounding that field are trees, hills, and perhaps some mountains in the distance. Bear in mind that you are limited to what you can perceive through your base senses. Your tools are made of wood and stone. Your most advanced form of land transportation is your feet, and your most advanced form of the maritime sort is a small fishing boat capable of seating one or two people and either made of reeds or in the form of a dugout canoe. I want you to consider the following questions, and be brutally honest with yourself:

• What shape might you imagine the world to have?
• How big might you think it is?

Genuinely consider these questions. Would it not be unreasonable to conclude that the world must be flat? That its borders are the increasingly dense forests or mountains surrounding your tribe’s hunting grounds?

Of course, all of this assumes that you even have the time to consider such things in any great depth, but I digress.

Now, fast forward a few millennia. You are a student living in a coastal city. The exact location doesn’t matter, only that there are, perhaps, a few hundred yards of coastline before the mountains rise sharply behind you as you walk down the dock toward your ship. The ship is a marvel of the technology of your time. She is no mere canoe or coastal cutter. She is a merchant vessel built to trade with a different people on the other side of some great sea. You board your ship and the captain soon sets sail. You watch behind the vessel as she slips across the water, and you see your home receding behind her. Everything slips below the horizon, starting with the coastline before the mountains gradually seem to sink below the water. Of course, you know your hometown isn’t sinking. This isn’t your first time making this trip. It’s still there, obviously. Now, consider this and, again, be honest with yourself. What different conclusions might you reach about the shape and size of your world?

Do you see the difference? Was the caveman less intelligent than the classical scholar? Or, did he lack the tools needed to observe the world?

There’s a tendency to look back and think that people must have been stupid to hold many historical beliefs, but I don’t think that’s entirely true. Yes, we did observe increases in general intelligence through much of the twentieth century; but, I will point out that (1) this may have been driven by that portion of measurements which is not entirely genetic, (2) that this could be the effect of expanded or more accurate measurement efforts, and (3) this data cannot, necessarily, be extended out indefinitely through history. I will point out that we enjoy a very wide array of measurement tools and techniques which are recent developments.

Consider the following: a tenth-century physician could not have envisioned a microscope, let alone a scanning electron microscope. The techniques needed to produce glass with the clarity and precise shape needed to make even the simplest microscope simply did not exist. Today, we can use both of the aforementioned tools to see bacteria and viruses. To a tenth-century physician, those same bacteria and viruses are completely invisible. He is cut completely adrift, unable to discern the underlying causes of disease, let alone be able to scientifically determine any sort of cure or mechanism for communicability. Given these facts, what do you think he may envision as the cause of disease? Perhaps, he will observe that people who are sick have a particular odor and conclude that it is foul smells or bad air which carry disease. Perhaps, he will observe that disease seems to spread faster during hard times when people worry about their future and conclude that it is an imbalance of the humors which causes disease. (Of course, now, he has to explain the cause of such an imbalance to begin with.)

The specifics don’t necessarily matter. What matters is this simple question: do you see how, perhaps, these conclusions might be reasonable given what the physician, the student, or the caveman might observe?

We are limited by what we can observe, which is in turn limited by the tools we have available to make observations.

Prior to the 20th century, it was generally accepted science that the entirety of the universe was contained in the Milky Way Galaxy. By the end of the 20th century, the Hubble Space Telescope had peered into an apparently empty region of sky which was roughly the angular equivalent of a grain of sand held at arm’s length and detected thousands more to add to the millions, if not billions, of galaxies which we had cataloged prior to that.

Each new tool we develop adds to our ability to expand our understanding of the universe and how it works. So, rather than critiquing those who came before us, I think it wiser to ask ourselves what things we take as scientific fact today which might be viewed as laughable to our descendants, causing them to wonder if we were the stupid ones, of little more intellectual capabilities that the caveman.

Were our ancestors wrong? Yes, they were wrong about many scientific matters, though I should point out that they were often on the right path. But, were they stupid? No, I don’t think so.

In a letter written in 1675, Sir Isaac Newton penned the words, “if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Sir Isaac Newton was a genuine pioneer in the fields of physics and mathematics. If Newton could look at the philosophers, astronomers, and other great minds of history and refer to them as giants, even when they were wrong, then I think that we should view them more through the same light. We have come a long way…too long, I think, to kid ourselves into thinking ourselves better than those who’ve come before us. We are no less flawed, even if we have better tools. Defaulting to a position where we consider ourselves better than our ancestors leads more readily to hubris than honesty.

So, it’s not that our ancestors were stupid. It’s simply that they were mistaken due to the limits of what they could observe in their time. Rather than looking down on them, we should take a moment to learn from these mistakes of the past, take the time to look at what we’ve done, and ask ourselves if we, too, are on the wrong path.