The great leap towards civilization, prosperity, increased life expectancy and other recent milestones is not due, at least not directly, to the scientific revolution of Galileo and Newton, since most of the life-changing innovations of people hardly relied on new scientific knowledge (at least in principle), and few innovators who brought about these changes had scientific training.
In the opinion of the specialist in economic history Deirdre McCloskey, which has given most of us a better life It is due to "innovationism". Sliced bread is a good example of this.
Precedents of science
According to McCloskey, innovationism would be the tendency or habit to apply new ideas to raise the standard of living. And many innovations preceded the science on which they were based (Newcomen, inventor of the steam engine, or Arkwright, promoter of the textile revolution, or Stepehenson, father of the railroad, were men with little academic training and humble origins).
![[Libros que nos inspiran] 'El optimista racional' de Matt Ridley: ¿tiene límites la capacidad de progreso de la especie humana?](https://i.blogs.es/933b0c/portada-optimista-racional_med/375_142.jpg)
Later, science would contribute to the increasing pace of invention, and the line between discovery and invention would become more blurred, but deductive thinking hardly had any impact in the early years of the industrial revolution, a time when philosophers of science were scarce. nature.
He bread is an interesting example in that sense: a way to cut bread automatically to make standardized sandwiches. This breakthrough took place in 1928, and in a small American town, Chillicothe, in Missouri, as explained Matt Ridley in his book The keys to innovation:
Many people tried to invent a machine to cut and package bread into slices, but it worked poorly or the bread became stale because it was not packaged well.
He got it Otto Frederick Rohwedder for one crucial detail: he had to invent both the electric bread slicing machine and automatic bread packaging to prevent the slices from becoming hard. The rest was a stroke of luck. Chance, in innovation, is crucial, but that type of chance only occurs in certain ecosystems.
Innovation arises when there is freedom to think, experiment and speculate. It happens when there is freedom to trade. It appears when people enjoy a certain prosperity and are not desperate. It's somewhat contagious. It needs investment. It usually occurs in cities.
A good series to understand all the implications about innovation, and also those who resist them, whether they are Luddites, postmoderns or Malthusians, is the manga and anime Dr.Stone: a whole hymn to the virtues of Illustration. One of the characters, in fact, is a shaman fond of magic who will finally discover that science is much more powerful, but that innovation is what really makes the world worthwhile because it helps heal the wounded, allows see the short-sighted or help... make cotton candy or a cola drink. You can see more about this series in the following video:
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The news
Sliced bread and "innovationism", not science, is what allows us to prosper as a civilization
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.