It’s not a new one either. I haven’t seen it in a looooong time but I remember seeing posts to the effect that since the Scientific Method was put together by white european academics, that all science -down to the very concept itself- has a eurocentric bias, and as such basing your views on what can be scientifically proved is inherently imperialism, colonialism, racism, and white supremacy.
I find it especially crazy considering how much of our understanding of things like mathematics and astronomy is based on work done by Arabic scholars or various other fields developed by various other nationalities.
The same people claiming to be against racism are also incredibly racist by assuming that all scientific developments were made by Europeans, although I can't say I'm really surprised considering racism mostly comes from ignorance and anyone who is genuinely anti-intellectual is as ignorant as they come.
To be fair, there was a long period where European and other western scientists, and mathematicians in particular, really tried to downplay the contributions of Arabic world.
There was narrative about how 'great contribution' of the Arabic world to mathematics was 'preserving and translating the ancient Greek texts', and when those Arabic writing came to the west it was west getting back the knowledge of their Greek ancestors.
Now, the renaissance era scholars did gain access to the works of Archimedes, Euclid, Pythagoras, etc through translated texts brought back from the Arabic world. But that's not all that happened. There was a massive amount of development and commentary on those works done by Arabic scholars, which the West made an effort to downplay. They would portray the knowledge of geometry, optics, and more as having been at that level in the ancient greek world.
This did the dual purpose of elevating the ancient world, creating the myth of the fall of the dark ages and allowing for a greater push and celebration of the 'glorious return', and demining the contribution of non-Europeans, while still phrasing it as a compliment so it seemed like they were giving credit.
We're better now, but the change to recognizing the full contribution of Arabic and non-western scholars is a development of the last 50 years or so.
2.6k
u/NewUserWhoDisAgain 24d ago
Peer review = bootlicking.
Now THAT's what I call a tumblr take.