Chapter 16: Religion and Science part II

This portion of the chapter focused on how science helped the evolution of societies such as Europe and China. Europe held universities where students could go to further their education and studies. The development of science in the West was the autonomy of its emerging universities. In the Islamic world science was a variety of local authorities but occurred largely outside the formal system of higher education. Chinese education basically focused on their students taking exams that expressed how much they had learned over their academic career. Modern science was more of a "self-critical enterprise," this where people such as Darwin and Marx come with their humanitarian theories of how human beings are and evolve as humans. Darwin claimed that humans were the work of evolution operating through natural selection. Marx claimed that a view of human history emphasized change and struggle. The coming of socialism was in the laws of historical development. Towards the end of it all humans were viewed as systems of biological, economic, and social conflict. European thinkers and theories were an influence on Asian scientific theories and vice versa.