Professor of rhetoric, Thomas Lessl, has a very good piece in the latest issue of the New Oxford Review concerning The Galileo Legend. Lessl points out that the story of the suppression of Galileo’s findings by the Catholic Church, often told in introductory science texts and elsewhere, has a number of components that are simply erroneous. Not a surprising view considering New Oxford Review bills itself as “An Orthodox Catholic Magazine,” but Lessl is correct about the almost urban legend-like errors that have crept into the Galileo story.
While certainly part of the reason for the errors is the general over-simplified view of the Catholic Church as anti-science, more broadly a bigger problem science history in general. Most people would be surprised if a general introductory course on American society covered only events of the last 10 years — surely events that happened in the 1780s, not to mentioned the 1880s and 1980s, are necessary to understand current American culture.
With science, though, almost all that is ever taught to students is the latest theory about how the world works with little background on how we arrived at the current state of knowledge about the world. Just like American culture, however, it is very difficult to understand and put science into context without the historical background.
An interesting example I see of this is among animal rights activists who claim that experiments on animals have never yielded any knowledge about disease applicable to human beings. They can get away with saying this in part because very few people alive today know about how the fundamental theories of disease were first formed and tested in the 19th century. Most people might know that Louis Pasteur has something to do with bacteria thanks to the widespread pasteurization of milk today, but I’d be surprised if more than 5 tenths of a percent of laymen know about the critical importance of his experiments with rabies and dogs that first demonstrated not only that rabies was a communicable disease but also resulted in the first treatment regimen for humans bitten by rabid animals.
And biology is just one small area. You would no doubt find similar ignorance for key discoveries in other areas of the sciences. It is a shame that the history of science gets so little attention.