The lecture will trace the evolution of mankind influenced by the development of science.
The function of science is to produce and systemize objective data about reality. Over time, it has armed the modern man with technology and opportunities previously totally inconceivable. However, science needed millennia of failures and mistakes to become like this. For centuries, humans, governed by mystical beliefs, have been attempting to extract gold from lead, grow a homunculus, and performed other absurd actions before starting looking for objective truth and realizing that in order to find it, man has to admit their own ignorance and acknowledge doubt as a key tool of cognition.
“Modern science is based on the Latin injunction ignoramus – 'we do not know'. It assumes that we don’t know everything. Even more critically, it accepts that the things that we think we know could be proven wrong as we gain more knowledge. No concept, idea or theory is sacred and beyond challenge. […] The Scientific Revolution has not been a revolution of knowledge. It has been above all a revolution of ignorance. The great discovery that launched the Scientific Revolution was the discovery that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions.”
(Yuval Noah Harari. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. 2011)