ancestors had lived as wild animals. Consequently, they fi tted well into the teleological system of the Stoics. Oxen have strong necks and shoulders that are obviously intended to wear yokes attached to plows and wagons. Sheep have fl eeces of wool from which cloth can be woven and they provide milk. Clearly, that is their purpose. Every domesticated animal has a purpose, so to the Stoics it followed that each animal had been made specifi cally for that purpose.
Th ey carried the idea further. Th e Stoics believed that the purpose of rain is to provide drinking water and irrigate crops. Wide rivers exist to be navigated. Ultimately, everything that exists has a purpose that is in some way related to humans and meant to serve them.
It is easy to see how the Greeks might suppose that domesticated animals were made specifi cally to serve humans. Domestication com- mences when people adopt animals they have managed to reassure suffi ciently for them to be handled. Children often adopt as pets young animals such as puppies, kittens, and lambs. When they grow up, they are accustomed to human company and are not frightened of the people whose homes they share. Larger animals such as cattle would have been corralled at night to protect them from predators, and farm- ers would have brought into the coral those individuals that allowed themselves to be handled and even milked. With each generation the farmers selected for breeding the animals with the most desirable qualities—those that grew biggest or produced the most milk or wool and that were easy and safe to manage. Off spring inherited their par- ents’ desirable characteristics and over many generations these became more pronounced. Farm animals grew more docile and more produc- tive. Selective breeding can lead to extremes of diff erence: Every breed of domestic dog, from the Chihuahua to the Great Dane, from the toy poodle to the Rottweiler, is descended from the wolf that was the ancestor of all domestic dogs. After thousands of years of domestica- tion and selective breeding, farm animals were indeed the servants of humans, but only because humans had made them so.
Th e Stoics were not alone in believing that domestic animals were made to be servants. Th is belief also occurs in the Judaic and Christian tradition that God has given people dominion over nature.
In Genesis (:–), God instructed the fi rst man and woman to:
“Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fi sh of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”
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The farmers who domesticated animals did not set out with a plan. Th ere was no genius who one day proposed that they should establish a captive breeding program with the aim of devel- oping beasts that would fulfi l particular functions. It just happened that when farmers sought to protect cattle and sheep from wolves and other predators they inadvertently began a selective breeding program that led in time to full domestication.
Nor did the pre-Socratic philosophers base their understanding of the world on close observation and experimentation. Th eir view was not scientifi c, and neither were the views of the Epicureans or the Stoics. Empedocles (see “Epicurus and Animals Th at Emerge from the Ground” on pages –) did not discover the evolution of species some , years ahead of the biologists of the th century, despite the superfi cial similarity between his theory and the scientifi c one. Democritus and the atomists who followed him believed the universe to be composed of indivisible particles they called atoms.
Similar theories were propounded in India in the sixth century ...
Th e atomists and their Indian counterparts are often said to have stumbled on a correct view of the nature of matter that was not con- fi rmed until the discoveries made by the English chemist, physicist, and meteorologist John Dalton (–) early in the th century.
But the Greek and Indian scholars understood their atoms and the properties of those atoms very diff erently. Th e only feature they share with Dalton’s theory is that they describe an ultimate component of
The Beginning of Science
2
matter than cannot be subdivided into smaller parts—and even that similarity evaporated with the discovery of subatomic particles.
A diff erent way of exploring the world began to emerge in the fourth century ... Th is chapter briefl y outlines that emergence into what would, many centuries later, become the scientifi c approach.
Th e chapter begins with two schools of Athenian philosophers, con- tinues with one of the most famous encyclopedias of natural history ever published, and ends with one of the most famous of all volcanic eruptions.