The book of nature is a fine and large piece of tapestry rolled up, which we are not able to see all at once, but must be content to wait for the discovery of its beauty and symmetry little by little, as it gradually comes to be more and more
unfolded, or displayed.
—Robert Boyle
Robert Boyle (1627-1691), often referred to as the "father of chemistry," lived during one of the most exciting periods of scientific discovery in the history of the world. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, towering intellectual figures like Boyle, Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Keppler, and Sir Isaac Newton redefined our understanding of the natural world. The kind of science to which these thinkers devoted their lives—a science that draws conclusions based on observation and analysis—defined what we now call the Scientific Revolution.
Along with being excellent scientists, many of these great figures were also theologians. In their religious writings, they spoke often of God's "two books"—the Bible, which contained revealed truth, and "The Book of Nature," which contained deep mysteries and profound truths about the natural world. The idea of a "book of nature"—a natural world that can be read and understood like a written text—is traceable as far back as the ancient world and the works of such figures as Galen, Hypocrites, and Aristotle, who spent their lives observing the world and cataloguing the things that they found. The line from these thinkers to the Scientific Revolution is neither straight nor direct. But after a lot of fits and starts, and a long period in which religious belief often prevented scientific inquiry, the ideas of the ancients were revived and extended, producing an explosion of scientific knowledge that still persists today.
The selections in this chapter all, in one way or another, attempt to explain how to read the Book of Nature; that is, how to understand the natural world. The readings begin with the ancient Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius, who argued that the world was composed of extremely small particles whose constant motions and interactions with each other produced different forms of matter—a radical view in its own day that is now completely accepted in ours.
Following Lucretius are two very different selections from the time of the Scientific Revolution. The first of these comes from the work of the great Japanese poet, Matsuo Basho, who walked around much of the perimeter of Japan in the 1680s and composed brief haiku poems describing the natural world. For Bashes, it was poetry, rather than scientific experimentation, that best helped humans to "read" the natural world. The second selection is a famous painting from England, Joseph Wright of Derby's An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, which depicts a scientific experiment conducted in a dark room as a variety of spectators react to both the science and spectacle of the experiment.
The next two readings, which come from the eighteenth century, sum up one of the most important paradigm shifts in the history of science. William Paley's introduction to his book Natural Theology argues that the great work of creation can only be understood as the work of an equally great creator. Just as we would assume the existence of a watchmaker if we came upon a well-made watch in the forest, we must assume the existence of God when we study the intricate beauty of the world. This view held sway throughout Europe until the publication of the next selection, Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which laid out a completely natural process—evolution by natural selection—capable of creating all life on earth.
The remainder of the readings in this chapter come from the twentieth century. "The Obligation to Endure," a chapter from Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, is one of the foundational texts of the modern environmental movement. Carson uses the theory of evolution to explain how insects adapt to deadly pesticides, greatly diminishing the pesticide's value for insect control while poisoning many other parts of the environment. This selection is followed by Karl Popper's seminal essay, "Science as Falsification," which explains that the fundamental operation of the scientific method is not to prove things true, but to try to prove things false. Barry Commoner's selection in this chapter, "The Four Laws of Ecology," is drawn from his 1971 book The Closing Circle. Commoner was one of the first scientists in the world to identify as an "ecologist," one who studies the ways that different parts of our environment are connected. Following Commoner is Edward O. Wilson, a biologist and two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer. His essay, "The Fitness of Human Nature," attempts to understand the evolutionary foundations of human behavior.
The last two selections come from women in developing countries who have worked tirelessly to change the ways that their contemporaries view humans' relationship to nature. In "Foresters without Diplomas," Wangari Maathai, the founder of the Green Belt Movement in Kenya and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, describes the beginnings of her work organizing African women to plant trees and reverse deforestation in the region. And in "Soil, Not Oil," Indian scientist and activist Vandana Shiva argues that genuine justice in the world will require us all to cultivate a different understanding of our relationship to nature—and to each other.
The unifying theme of the selections in this chapter is the drive to understand the natural world on its own terms and to negotiate our relationship with that natural world in ways that can be sustained far into the future. The poets, artists, scientists, and activists gathered here all share this fundamental concern with how best to understand—and respect—nature. They have been asking questions about how we understand our world for a very long time, the answers to which are still being debated today.
lucretius
from De Rerum Natura
[first century bce]
WE KNOW VERY LITTLE about Titus Lucretius Carus except that he lived in the first century bce, that his works were well regarded by his contemporaries, and that he wrote one of the most important poems known to humankind. This poem, De Rerum Natura, was unheard of until 1417, when an Italian scholar named Poggio Bracciolini discovered the only surviving manuscript in a German monastery and brought it to the attention of the world.
De Rerum Natura—which has been translated into English variously as The Nature of Things, The Nature of the Universe, and The Way Things Are—is at once a great poem and a profound work of physics. Lucretius followed the ancient philosophy of Epicureanism, which held that the universe was controlled by natural laws, not divine whims, and that people produce unnecessary misery by trying to decipher and live by the rules of the various gods, objects of worship in the ancient world. The founder of this philosophy, Epicurus, believed that the greatest good in life was pleasure, by which he meant not the satisfaction of carnal appetites but the deep pleasure that comes with understanding how the natural world works.
In his long poem, Lucretius sets out to explain the workings of the natural world by using the important Epicurean concept of "atoms"—indescribably small bits of matter that compose everything in the universe. For twenty-first century students, the theory of atoms seems logical; for medieval European Christians, however, it was heresy. Explaining everything in material terms eliminated the need for divine intervention, and insisting on pleasure as the primary purpose of human beings cast doubt on all of the social institutions devoted to pleasing the gods. As the ideas found in De Rerum Natura began to circulate and take root, they contributed both to the Renaissance that marked the end of the medieval period in Europe, and to the Scientific Revolution that began in the seventeenth century and profoundly shaped the modern world.