SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY

LESSON 3

INTELLECTUAL REVOLUTIONS THAT DEFINED SOCIETY

Activity 1 Think about it!

REFLECTION PAPER OF NICOLAUS COPERNICUS, CHARLES DARWIN AND

SIGMUND FREUD

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) was a mathematician and astronomer who

proposed that the sun was stationary in the center of the universe and the earth
revolved around it. Disturbed by the failure of Ptolemy’s geocentric model of the
universe to follow Aristotle’s requirement for the uniform circular motion of all celestial
bodies and determined to eliminate Ptolemy’s equant, an imaginary point around which
the bodies seemed to follow that requirement, Copernicus decided that he could
achieve his goal only through a heliocentric model. He was a Polish astronomer known
as the father of modern astronomy. He was the first modern European scientist to
propose that Earth and other planets revolve around the sun, or the Heliocentric Theory
of the universe. Prior to the publication of his major astronomical work, “Six Books
Concerning the Revolutions of the Heavenly Orbs,” in 1543, European astronomers
argued that Earth lay at the center of the universe, the view also held by most ancient
philosophers and biblical writers. In addition to correctly postulating the order of the
known planets, including Earth, from the sun, and estimating their orbital periods
relatively accurately, Copernicus argued that Earth turned daily on its axis and that
gradual shifts of this axis accounted for the changing seasons.

Nicolaus Copernicus was born on 19 February 1473, the youngest of four children of
Nicolaus Copernicus, Sr., a well-to-do merchant who had moved to Torun from Cracow,
and Barbara Watzenrode, the daughter of a leading merchant family in Torun. The city,
on the Vistula River, had been an important inland port in the Hanseatic League.
However, fighting between the Order of the Teutonic Knights and the Prussian Union in
alliance with the Kingdom of Poland ended in 1466, and West Prussia, which included
Torun, was ceded to Poland, and Torun was declared a free city of the Polish kingdom.
Thus the child of a German family was a subject of the Polish crown. He thereby
created a concept of a universe in which the distances of the planets from the sun bore
a direct relationship to the size of their orbits. At the time Copernicus’s heliocentric idea
was very controversial; nevertheless, it was the start of a change in the way the world
was viewed, and Copernicus came to be seen as the initiator of the Scientific
Revolution. Astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus was instrumental in establishing the
concept of a heliocentric solar system, in which the sun, rather than the earth, is the
center of the solar system.. Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) was a Renaissance
polymath responsible for what some have called the “Copernican Revolution.” One of
the most important contributions of Copernicus was to the field of
astronomy. Copernicus placed the sun at the center of the universe, rather than the
earth.

The Complete work of Copernicus in 1972 the Polish Academy of Sciences under the
direction of J. Dobrzycki published critical editions of the Complete Works of Copernicus
in six languages: Latin, English, French, German, Polish, and Russian. The first volume
was a facsimile edition. The annotations in the English translations are more
comprehensive than the others. Minor Works, 1992, trans. E. Rosen, Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press (originally published as volume 3 of Nicholas
Copernicus: Complete Works, Warsaw: Polish Scientific Publishers, 1985). Referred to
herein as MW. On the Revolutions, 1992, trans. E. Rosen, Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press (originally published as volume 2 of Nicholas. But the most
relevant work of Copernicus is the first manuscript of his book, "De Revolutionibus
Orbium Coelestium" ("On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres") in 1532. In it,
Copernicus established that the planets orbited the sun rather than the Earth.
Copernicus was widely credited with having a major influence on the scientific
revolution, which placed scientific inquiry first before all other presuppositions.
Copernicus helped to trigger the belief system that would embrace rational thought and
inquiry before belief systems and zealous hope. Today, Copernicus is one of the most
familiar names among Renaissance scientists, but his role in the Scientific Revolution is
misunderstood. He is commonly known as the man who introduced the idea of a
heliocentric universe, but is not his theory itself that was transformational. In truth, he
did very little to advance the proof of his claim. His value is not in what he said, but what
it caused later scientists like Brahe, Kepler, Galileo and later Newton, to develop as a
result of what he proposed. Copernicus’ work was ultimately most significant because it
changed the way people used physics and astronomy to understand the universe.
Despite its lack of scientific rigor, Copernicus’ heliocentric model presented a
harmonious solution to the increasingly complex Ptolemaic model that, when studied by
16th through 18th century scientists, led to important developments in the fields of
astronomy and physics. In order to understand the effect of Copernicus’ theory.

The heliocentric model was generally rejected by the ancient philosophers for three
main reasons: If the Earth is rotating about its axis, and orbiting around the Sun, then
the Earth must be in motion. ... Nor does this motion give rise to any obvious
observational consequences. Hence, the Earth must be stationary. It is important to
understand two aspects of astronomy leading up to the time of Copernicus. First, until
Copernicus’ theory gained acceptance, astrology was the primary motivation for
astronomical research. Astrology served as a guide to the rulers and their people, and
even through part of the Renaissance, the most well supported astronomers were those
who could give the best astrological predictions. Kepler and Brahe, who I discuss later,
were supported because they were believed to cast the best horoscopes, and Ptolemy,
who was considered the astronomical authority up to the Renaissance, was just as well
known for his astrological contributions in Tetrabiblos as his astrological ones in
Almagest (The Copernican Revolution 93-94). Copernicus affect society
when Copernicus replaced the Earth with the Sun at the center of the universe, it
changed the role of astronomy in society. ... Secondly, space under Ptolemaic and
Aristotelian astronomy was understood in terms of relations between different objects
and areas, rather than through concrete laws of physics.

Charles Darwin, in full Charles Robert Darwin, (born February 12, 1809, Shrewsbury,
Shropshire, England—died April 19, 1882, Downe, Kent), English naturalist
whose scientific theory of evolution by natural selection became the foundation of
modern evolutionary studies. Darwin was one of the most influential figures of the 19th
century. His work remains a central subject of study in the history of ideas, the history of
science, zoology, botany, geology and evolution. He is a British naturalist credited
for the theory of natural selection. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution states that
evolution happens by natural selection. Individuals in a species show variation in
physical characteristics. The work that Darwin did was just an added bonus. Darwin's
most famous work, and one of the most important ever written. It revolutionized our
understanding of life on earth. Darwin brings together many convincing kinds of
evidence and arguments to show that living things change over time and that they are
related to one another genealogically. Charles Darwin Discovered Rare Plants, Birds,
Reptiles In The Galapagos Islands. Darwin's Finches, Giant Tortoises And The Beagle
Darwin spent much of the trip on land collecting samples of plants, animals, rocks, and
fossils. He explored regions in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and remote islands such as the
Galápagos. Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection has been hailed as one of the
most innovative contributions to modern science. When first proposed in 1859, however,
it was widely rejected by his contemporaries, even by those who accepted the general
idea of evolution. He is celebrated as one the greatest British scientists who ever lived,
but in his time his radical theories brought him into conflict with members of the Church
of England. Darwin's greatest contribution to science is that he completed the
Copernican Revolution by drawing out for biology the notion of nature as a system of
matter in motion governed by natural laws. With Darwin's discovery of natural selection,
the origin and adaptations of organisms were brought into the realm of science. In 1859,
Darwin published his thoughts about evolution and natural selection in On the Origin of
Species. It was as popular as it was controversial. The book convinced many people
that species change over time—a lot of time—suggesting that the planet was much
older than what was commonly believed at the time: six thousand years. Charles Darwin
died in 1882 at the age of seventy-three. He is buried in Westminster Abbey in London,
England.

Darwin founded a new branch of life science, evolutionary biology. Four of his
contributions to evolutionary biology are especially important, as they held considerable
sway beyond that discipline. The first is the nonconstancy of species, or the modern
conception of evolution itself. The second is the notion of branching evolution, implying
the common descent of all species of living things on earth from a single unique origin.
Up until 1859, all evolutionary proposals, such as that of naturalist Jean- Baptiste
Lamarck, instead endorsed linear evolution, a teleological march toward greater
perfection that had been in vogue since Aristotle’s concept of Scala Naturae, the chain
of being. Darwin further noted that evolution must be gradual, with no major breaks or
discontinuities. Finally, he reasoned that the mechanism of evolution was natural
selection. These four insights served as the foundation for Darwin’s founding of a new
branch of the philosophy of science, a philosophy of biology. Despite the passing of a
century before this new branch of philosophy fully developed, its eventual form is based
on Darwinian concepts. For example, Darwin introduced historicity into science.
Evolutionary biology, in contrast with physics and chemistry, is a historical science—the
evolutionist attempts to explain events and processes that have already taken place.
Laws and experiments are inappropriate techniques for the explication of such events
and processes. Instead one constructs a historical narrative, consisting of a tentative
reconstruction of the particular scenario that led to the events one is trying to explain.

On this day, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural
Selection, or The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life, which
immediately sold out its initial print run. By 1872, the book had run through six editions,
and it became one of the most influential books of modern times. Darwin, the privileged
and well-connected son of a successful English doctor, had been interested in botany
and natural sciences since his boyhood, despite the discouragement of his early
teachers. At Cambridge, he found professors and scientists with similar interests and
with their help began participating in scientific voyages. He traveled around South
America for five years as an unpaid botanist on the HMS Beagle. By the time Darwin
returned, he had developed an outstanding reputation as a field researcher and
scientific writer, based on his many papers and letters dispatched from South America
and the Galapagos Islands, which were read at meetings of prominent scientific
societies in London. Darwin began publishing studies of zoology and geology as soon
as he returned from his voyage. Fearing the fate of other scientists, like Copernicus and
Galileo, who had published radical scientific theories, Darwin held off publishing his
theory of natural selection for years. He secretly developed his theory during two
decades of surreptitious research following his trip on the Beagle. Darwin’s
revolutionary theory was that new species arise naturally, by a process of evolution,
rather than having been created—forever immutable—by God. According to the well-
established creationist theory of Darwin’s day, the exquisite adaptations of many
species—such as the hinges of the bivalve shell and the wings and plumes on seeds
dispersed by air—were compelling evidence that a “designer” had created each species
for its intended place in the economy of nature. Darwin had wholeheartedly accepted
this theory, which was bolstered by the biblical account in Genesis, until his experiences
in the Galápagos Islands began to undermine this way of thinking about the biological
world.

Darwin spent the rest of his life working on more specialized monographs that
supported his theory and answering his critics with successive editions of the Origin of
Species. On April 19, 1882 death, the great creative force of evolution, finally came to
call on Charles Darwin. Hooker, Huxley, and Wallace were among the pallbearers to his
final resting place in Westminster Abbey next to Sir John Herschel, the famed
astronomer who rejected Darwinism, near the eminent Charles Lyell who would only
accept a modified form of it, and close to Sir Isaac Newton whom it would have
horrified. His most famous work, On the Origin of Species, explains the theory of
evolution by natural selection, providing numerous supporting examples. Charles
Darwin's theory of evolution states that evolution happens by natural selection. Darwin
believed that all of life on earth had descended from a common ancestor, whose
offspring could vary slightly from the previous generation. Charles Darwin affects society
because Darwinism allowed us to gain a better understanding of our world, which in turn
allowed us to change the way that we think. ... By being able to apply this to other
animals, it changed the way that people thought about life on earth and opened new
doors for science in the future. The development of Darwinism changed the general
thinking of the world, while unlocking the truth behind both Earth and life. Beforehand
the western world had a general consensus that God was the creator of life and that we
were made in his image.

Sigmund Freud (1856 to 1939) was the founding father of psychoanalysis, a method
for treating mental illness and also a theory which explains human behavior. Sigmund
Freud was an Austrian neurologist who developed psychoanalysis, a method through
which an analyst unpacks unconscious conflicts based on the free associations, dreams
and fantasies of the patient. His theories on child sexuality, libido and the ego, among
other topics, were some of the most influential academic concepts of the 20th century.

Through the development of a novel observational method, Sigmund Freud

made possible the collection of reliable data about man's inner life. The scientific
hypotheses he formulated about these formed the initial version of psychoanalysis.
Freud believed that events in our childhood have a great influence on our adult lives,
shaping our personality. Freud may justly be called the most
influential intellectual legislator of his age. His creation of psychoanalysis was at once a
theory of the human psyche, a therapy for the relief of its ills, and an optic for the
interpretation of culture and society. Freud (1900, 1905) developed a topographical
model of the mind, whereby he described the features of the mind’s structure and
function. Freud used the analogy of an iceberg to describe the three levels of the mind.
On the surface is consciousness, which consists of those thoughts that are the focus of
our attention now, and this is seen as the tip of the iceberg. The preconscious consists
of all which can be retrieved from memory.

Despite repeated criticisms, attempted refutations, and qualifications of Freud’s work, its
spell remained powerful well after his death and in fields far removed
from psychology as it is narrowly defined. If, as the American sociologist Philip Rieff
once contended, “psychological man” replaced such earlier notions as political,
religious, or economic man as the 20th century’s dominant self-image, it is in no small
measure due to the power of Freud’s vision and the seeming inexhaustibility of the
intellectual legacy he left behind. Freud (1923) later developed a more structural model
of the mind comprising the entities id, ego, and superego (what Freud called “the
psychic apparatus”). These are not physical areas within the brain, but rather
hypothetical conceptualizations of important mental functions. The id, ego, and
superego have most commonly been conceptualized as three essential parts of the
human personality. Freud assumed the id operated at an unconscious level according to
the pleasure principle (gratification from satisfying basic instincts). The id comprises two
kinds of biological instincts (or drives) which Freud called Eros and Thanatos. Eros, or
life instinct, helps the individual to survive; it directs life-sustaining activities such as
respiration, eating, and sex (Freud, 1925). The energy created by the life instincts is
known as libido. In contrast, Thanatos or death instinct, is viewed as a set of destructive
forces present in all human beings (Freud, 1920).

Freud’s theories were no doubt influenced by other scientific discoveries of his

day. Charles Darwin's understanding of humankind as a progressive element of the
animal kingdom certainly informed Freud's investigation of human behavior. Additionally,
the formulation of a new principle by scientist Hermann von Helmholtz, stating that
energy in any given physical system is always constant, informed Freud's scientific
inquiries into the human mind. Freud's work has been both rapturously praised and
hotly critiqued, but no one has influenced the science of psychology as intensely as
Sigmund Freud. The great reverence that was later given to Freud's theories was not in
evidence for some years. Most of his contemporaries felt that his emphasis on sexuality
was either scandalous or overplayed.

Freud also believed that much of human behavior was motivated by two driving
instincts: the life instincts and death instincts. The life instincts are those that relate to a
basic need for survival, reproduction, and pleasure. They include such things as the
need for food, shelter, love, and sex. He also suggested that all humans have an
unconscious wish for death, which he referred to as the death instincts. Self-destructive
behavior, he believed, was one expression of the death drive. However, he believed that
these death instincts were largely tempered by life instincts. Freud compared the mind
to an iceberg. The tip of the iceberg that is actually visible above the water represents
just a tiny portion of the mind, while the huge expanse of ice hidden underneath the
water represents the much larger unconscious. Sigmund Freud was the first
psychoanalyst and a true pioneer in the recognition of the importance of unconscious
mental activity. His theories on the inner workings of the human mind, which seemed so
revolutionary at the turn of the century, are now widely accepted by most schools of
psychological thought. One of Freud's most important contributions to the field of
psychology was the development of the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. Some of
the major tenets of psychoanalysis include the significance of the unconscious, early
sexual development, repression, dreams, death and life drives, and transference.
Because of his genius for structural thought, Freud was able to respond satisfactorily
to a challenge that all the sciences were facing. It is that common challenge rather than
a popular exemplary model, such as mechanics or hydraulics, that shaped Freud's
theory.

The unconscious mind played a critical role in all of Freud's theories, and he considered
dreams to be one of the key ways to take a peek into what lies outside of our conscious
awareness. He dubbed dreams "the royal road to the unconscious" and believed that by
examining dreams, he could see not only how the unconscious mind works but also
what it is trying to hide from conscious awareness. Freud believed the content of
dreams could be broken down into two different types. The manifest content of a dream
included all of the actual content of the dream—the events, images, and thoughts
contained within the dream. The manifest content is essentially what the dreamer
remembers upon waking. The latent content, on the other hand, is all the hidden and
symbolic meanings within the dream. Freud believed that dreams were essentially a
form of wish-fulfillment. By taking unconscious thoughts, feelings, and desires and
transforming them into less threatening forms, people are able to reduce the ego's
anxiety. He often utilized the analysis of dreams as a starting point in his free
association technique. The analyst would focus on a particular dream symbol and then
use free association to see what other thoughts and images immediately came to a
client's mind. Freud sought to understand the nature and variety of these illnesses by
retracing the sexual history of his patients. This was not primarily an investigation of
sexual experiences as such. Far more important were the patient’s wishes and desires,
their experience of love, hate, shame, guilt and fear – and how they handled these
powerful emotions. It was this that led to the most controversial part of Freud’s work –
his theory of psychosexual development and the Oedipus complex. Freud believed that
children are born with a libido – a sexual (pleasure) urge. There are a number of stages
of childhood, during which the child seeks pleasure from a different ‘object.’

Freud (1900) considered dreams to be the royal road to the unconscious as it is in

dreams that the ego's defenses are lowered so that some of the repressed material
comes through to awareness, albeit in distorted form. Dreams perform important
functions for the unconscious mind and serve as valuable clues to how the unconscious
mind operates. On 24 July 1895, Freud had his own dream that was to form the basis of
his theory. He had been worried about a patient, Irma, who was not doing as well in
treatment as he had hoped. Freud, in fact, blamed himself for this, and was feeling
guilty. Freud dreamed that he met Irma at a party and examined her. He then saw a
chemical formula for a drug that another doctor had given Irma flash before his eyes
and realized that her condition was caused by a dirty syringe used by the other doctor.
Freud's guilt was thus relieved. Freud interpreted this dream as wish-fulfillment. He had
wished that Irma's poor condition was not his fault and the dream had fulfilled this wish
by informing him that another doctor was at fault. Based on this dream, Freud (1900)
went on to propose that a major function of dreams was the fulfillment of wishes.
Freud distinguished between the manifest content of a dream (what the dreamer
remembers) and the latent content, the symbolic meaning of the dream (i.e., the
underlying wish). The manifest content is often based on the events of the day. The
process whereby the underlying wish is translated into the manifest content is called
dreamwork. The purpose of dreamwork is to transform the forbidden wish into a non-
threatening form, thus reducing anxiety and allowing us to continue sleeping.
Dreamwork involves the process of condensation, displacement, and secondary
elaboration.

According to Freud psychoanalytic theory, all psychic energy is generated by the libido.
Freud suggested that our mental states were influenced by two competing
forces: cathexis and anticathexis. Cathexis was described as an investment of mental
energy in a person, an idea or an object. If you are hungry, for example, you might
create a mental image of a delicious meal that you have been craving. In other cases,
the ego might harness some of the id's energy to seek out activities that are related to
the desire in order to disperse some of the excess energy from the id. If you can't
actually seek out food to appease your hunger, you might instead thumb through a
cookbook or browse through your favorite recipe blog. Anticathexis involves the ego
blocking the socially unacceptable needs of the id. Repressing urges and desires is one
common form of anticathexis, but it involves a significant investment of energy. Freud's
most obvious impact was to change the way society thought about and dealt with
mental illness. ... Research on treating mental illness was primarily concerned–at least
theoretically–with discovering exactly which kinds of changes in the brain led to insanity.
Freud saw that society creates mechanisms to ensure social control of human instincts.
At the root of these controlling mechanisms, he thought, is the prohibition against incest.