"To many educated minds," the cultural anthropologist Edward Burnett Tyler wrote in PRIMITIVE CULTURE, "there seems something presumptuous and repulsive in the view that the history of mankind is part and parcel of the history of nature, that our thoughts, wills, and actions accord with laws as definite as those which govern the motion of waves, the combination of acids, and the growth of plants and animals."
Rob, any good scientist will tell you that science does not have all the answers, or even most of them -- as H.G. Wells put it, science is a match which we have just got lighted -- and, in fact, there are no final truths in science. But as a learning method, it is unparalleled, and I personally believe that it is our best tool for coping with the vast, cold, indifferent cosmos we inhabit.
Permit me to recommend an excellent book by Daniel J. Boorstein, THE DISCOVERERS, being the history of human learning
And, yes, rufusTfirefly is a wise man. Without him, we'd be up to our armpits in JGoldman10.
