A friend passes along this passage from St. Thomas Aquinas on why humans have a worse sense of smell than other animals:
If the human brain were not as big as it is, it would not be able to cool off as efficiently as it does, and would thus divert heat from the heart. But if a human heart becomes too cold, humans cannot stand erect. Therefore, humans need a weak sense of smell to stand erect.
My friend added, “The things I find trying to figure out what Aquinas thought about moral psychology. He then goes on to list four reasons why good posture is more appropriate for humans than a good sense of smell.”
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It is as easy as breathing for moderns to read this and conclude “Medievals were stoopid! Now we know all about physiology and anatomy!”
By which 99,9% of them mean, “Somebody else knows about physiology and anatomy and I parrot what they boil down and present to me on National Geographic specials I remember from ten years ago.” And about a third of those people also mean, “Oh, and I also believe vaccines kill you.”
Nate Bargatze understands this in his dry way and lampoons the idea that merely living when we happen to live confers on us knowledge of modern science:
Here’s reality. What “we” know is vanishingly small and predicated in huge measure on social bonds of trust that conspiracy-minded, MAGA ignoramus culture is rapidly eroding. Chances are that you could not, right now, prove that geocentrism is false or that radio waves exist. What you really have to do is point me to high priests in special holy garments called lab coats and tell me I’m a fool not to believe them–which is, in fact, true.
The real lesson this passage teaches is that Thomas, like most sane people, paid attention to “accepted science” and that was the accepted science of his time. (Aristotle thought the brain’s primary function was to cool the blood). Thomas did not believe accepted science was infallible any more than you think your doctor is infallible. But he also understood that listening to people who had thought about and studied their field of expertise was smarter than listening to randos who had never thought about anything but the sound of their own voice. He understood that the real way knowledge is built up by the human race was to submit your thought to heads smarter than yours for peer review and slowly build up a picture of the world that is always subject to further improvement and correction.
He also accepted the view that meat spontaneously generated maggots because neither he nor anyone else had ever seen microscopic insect eggs because nobody had invented microscopes yet. That did not make him an idiot. It made him somebody willing to work with the best info he had until he got better info. Remarkably, he incorporated this bad data into a perfectly good argument that God worked through natural causes to achieve most of his ends in creation.
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5 Responses
The anti Vax and anti medical research of MAGA is curious. Vaccines and medical science benefits us all. In colonial times, life expectancy was half of what it is today. Why are they opposed to this?
MAGA seems to glorify ignorance. Morons like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert and others are lionized. I suppose that the appeal of MAGA is that it provides an opportunity for ignorant nobodies to pretend that they are smart somebodies.
> He also accepted the view that meat spontaneously generated maggots because neither he nor anyone else had ever seen microscopic insect eggs because nobody had invented microscopes yet.
On that note, it’s fascinating that when in 1677, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek first looked at sperm cells under the microscope that he invented, it fully confirmed and validated to him the theory of preformationism. It took 150 years to even discover the first mammalian ovum (egg), and 199 years (1876) to observe fertilization, thus finally disproving preformationism.
And yet, preformationism informed the whole “Age of Enlightenment”. This is possibly the most egregious example of pinning blame on religion by anti-religious fanatics. “Every sperm is sacred” stems from an incorrect belief that Christians were somehow under the mistaken impression that preformationism is true and that enlightenment proved it was not so.
In reality, Christians only followed the accepted science of the day. Once preformationism was disproved, everyone corrected their assumptions and all would be well, but apparently, some folks were so embarrassed about this that they needed a scapegoat to turn attention away from their errors. Christianity was an easy target since they still considered masturbation a sin, but since the primary argument was gone, it was thought that all arguments are equally invalid (the same thing happens over and over to all pelvic issues once some discovery is made that would somehow make prostitution, adultery, contraception, abortion or whatever not a sin).
Curiously, science fanaticism is rife with examples of defending incorrect theories. Various atomic theories were disproved* one after another, leaving adherents to older theories abandoned and their research useless. “Disproved” means more than just one thing. Some theories were outright made obsolete (“plum pudding model”), some theories received more detailed explanations (“planetary model” was refined into a quantum model with electrons confined to orbits with associated energetic states, which was further refined to the current electron cloud model), but every such discovery closed off a lot of research.
Were scientists who made these obsoleted models idiots? Certainly not. They worked with imperfect tools making discoveries and explaining their observations as best as they could.
These discoveries are from the 19th century and the first three decades of the 20th century, so they predate a more recent paradigm shift in science. When plate tectonics were presented as a theory in 1940s, it was immediately disregarded. The previously accepted model of cyclically shrinking and expanding Earth was considered to be state of the art, bulletproof and fitting all observational and experimental data. But research continued and plate tectonics prevailed. A lot of geologists had to retract their statements and redo their research in light of the findings. But the leading figures were HAPPY TO DO SO because it meant that scientific progress was being done, even if it meant their research and their specialization was no longer relevant and they had to resign to the fact that they might not make any significant discovery in their remaining career.
The only people sour about this were fans, side observers, who put their FAITH in unerring science and believed the older theories to be true and shunned the proponents of plate tectonics. If Internet discussion boards were available then, there would be a record of massive personal attacks against them.
“Various atomic theories were disproved*”- I can’t find the other asterisk that this one leads to. Would you please let me know where it is?
I originally intended to make a footnote saying that the models were refined, but I realized that 1) it wasn’t really true except for the planetary model (refined into quantum [state] model (refined to electron cloud model)); 2) it didn’t convey the point I was making (and the plum pudding model is especially, pardon the pun, ripe for picking apart as simply incorrect), so I rewrote it.
You can almost climb inside the logic. And you can even *almost* map it to something correct-adjacent. People need a strong vital heart to stand upright (the muscles are expensive, and so is the balance-calculating brain circuitry). The brain might not be the heatsink the medievals thought it was, but it does regulate heart rate and, by extension, the amount of heat the heart produces. The heart, in turn, has to pump blood, which draws heat off the brain. If we had the same number of neurons packed into a smaller space, lower surface area would mean the heat they generated would be harder to dissipate. the heart would have to work harder to pump more blood, we’d sweat more; the brain would be more expensive. It’s largeness is helpful here. But because the brain is a large organ which dictates a lot of things about our cranial structure, its size does, in fact, impede our sense of smell. So, okay this isn’t exactly Aquinas’ thinking, but his thought isn’t entirely unlinked from reality, either. He’s got a sort of design-constraint style of reasoning that just needed better information. While I’m not sure how much it effects things, there’s another factor in play as well: bipedalism is more efficient than quadrupedalism for walking, but quadrupedalism is often more efficient at rest and while running at high speeds.