Module 1

• Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Practices (IKSP)

  Traditional knowledge passed on through traditional means for many generations
• IKSPs have been tested and re-tested for thousands of years in the most rigorous real-life laboratories for survival and well-being
• Biocultural knowledge


  Knowledge that is rooted both in the natural environment and what is readily available, at the same time grounded on the culture—values and norms—of the people who hold it
• Sumerians' knowledge


  • Faithful recording of medical lore, particularly in the treatment of disease, the use of herbs and animal material as materia medica, dentistry, endocrinology, histology, health, and sanitation
• Sumerian belief system encompassed both empirical and the magical, for example, in the treatment of disease
• Historians of Science argue that the Sumerian "demon" idea was scientifically sound as it was an attempt to explain the transmission of illness in the absence of a scientific canon
• Greek Philosophers


  • Noted for the treatises that eloquently explain not only their observations, hypotheses, and conclusions about the world and Man's place in it, their works also show in detail the methods by which they obtained these insights
• Aristotle's distinction between specialist and generalist

  Specialist has a considerable body of experience in practical fieldwork, while the generalist knows many different areas of study
• Aristotle defined a species as a breeding group of particular animals or plants that can breed and produce offspring that eventually could reproduce
• Aristotle concluded that species were fixed, immutable, and that they have always existed
• In Medieval European society, knowledge and its interpretation were prescribed by a ruling class; the Monarchies and the Church were very powerful
• The exposure of Europe to Near Eastern culture led to the transmission of the combined knowledge from the Arabic, Byzantine, Persian and Indian cultural traditions from the Golden Age of the Islamic Civilization in the 12th century onwards
• The Crusades and then the colonial expansion led to the transmission of the combined knowledge from the Arabic, Byzantine, Persian and Indian cultural traditions from the Golden Age of the Islamic Civilization in the 12th century onwards
• European scholars and scribes were exposed to very different ways that the history of the Earth, natural sciences, and philosophy were understood outside of the constraints of the Catholic Church
• Students in the 12th century: 'They were eager for knowledge and sought it out with enthusiasm. They read the Latin classics, analyzed the texts of Roman law, they read and commented on the works of the Church Fathers. The most advanced scholars knew that the Muslims of Islamic civilization had great storehouses of knowledge, so they traveled to Spain to tap these new sources of information. Others went to Constantinople to obtain translations of Greek manuscripts. In the end, these scholars renewed western knowledge of Greek science and philosophy and to this added the treasures of Arabic mathematics and medicine'
• Islamic scientists and mathematicians developed criticisms of Greek assertions, refined the theories of the classical philosophers to conform to current empirical information, significantly modified Aristotelian ideas, invented Algebra and Trigonometry as new fields of mathematics, and improved on Indian numeral system to include the zero, in what we now know as the Arabic number system
• The resurgence of interest in gaining knowledge in Europe helped in advancing the creation of centers of learning outside the monasteries: the University
• These early European institutions of learning were open to scholars, mainly male feudal lords those who can afford the high fees, but who are neither clerics nor monks
• The level of democratization of education came with a challenge: throughout Europe, traditional authority was questioned, and the new scholars embraced the notion that humanity could be improved not only through prayer and good works, but through rational change
• Aristotelian thought


  The dominant view for a millennium in the West
• Aristotle's "Great Chain of Being"


  The major organizing principle and foundation of the emerging science of biology until the 18th century
• Only the Aristotelian worldview was taught in all the leading universities of the time until the mid-17th century
• Cartesian metaphysics, the mechanistic worldview, the duality between matter and mind, and the Cartesian hypothetico-deductive methodology became accepted by the community of scholars at the time
• The beginnings of the current agnostic, materialistic epistemology in science was a train of reasoning deeply grounded in seemingly disparate threads of methodological skepticism and an inherent assumption of the existence of God
• The 18th century brought about a spate of different, divergent, and conflicting theories on the origins and purposes of living systems
• Questions on the age of the earth, a subject broached by the exposure to non-Christian doctrine as well as archeological discoveries, were debated
• Evolution of living things were considered with the increasing tolerance for questioning long-established dogma and the discovery of fossils, as well as an openness to test theories by experimentation
• The Experiments on the Generation of Insects, written by Francesco Redi in the late 17th century, served to disprove a once-held notion of spontaneous generation of living things
• The theory on the Transmutation of Life was raised by Lamarck in the early 1800s, arguing for the evolution of species as individuals relate to their environment
• Advances in optics allowed for the visualization and discovery of microscopic entities and paving the way for the study of anatomy in greater detail
• Advances in chemistry eventually allowed for analytical studies of phlogiston (thenceforth purified to what we know now as oxygen gas) and to look into what was once thought of as a metaphysical vital substance that animated living organisms, now conceptualized as proteins called enzymes
• The understanding of mechanisms of living systems—very much independent of the need for spiritual and magical causes—unfolded into the one we accept today
• Hypothetico-deductive method


  The Scientific Method, with its materialist, mechanistic, and reductionist philosophy which analyses a larger system by breaking it down into pieces and determining the connections between the parts
• The elegance of classical experiments of the time, with the method of controlling conditions to minimize variables, brings into focus the definitive relationships among two variables, highlighting a direct relationship between a given cause and a given effect
• The capacity to put forward and test various new theories allowed for the growth of the field of Biology, and its benefits spread greatly through medicine, food, and agriculture, among others
• Biology, not quite a field of study until the 18th century (for before, it was called natural history), branched into sub disciplines including Anatomy, Microbiology, Genetics, Taxonomy, Cell Biology, Embryology, Biochemistry, Physiology, and Molecular Biology
• Following the development of chemistry, and the increase in analytical power of the X-ray crystallography, the chemical composition of cells became an object of study, a feat anticipated since the age of Alchemy
• With increasing analytical power, the unit of analysis moved from organism to organ to tissue to cell, and even further within the cell, to its organelles, and later to the macromolecules and smaller molecules that have physiological effects
• The increase in exposure of the Europeans to the knowledge and the vastly different environments of their colonies in the 16th to 17th centuries led to the increase in interest in collecting, cataloguing, and studying different kinds of organisms in the different kinds of environments
• During this period, Darwin published his theory of evolution