Terence Kealey - Sex, Science & Profits: How People Evolved to Make Money

TERENCE KEALEY

How People Evolved to Make Money

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Copyright Terence Kealey 2008

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SEX, SCIENCE AND PROFITS

Terence Kealey is a clinical biochemist and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham. He is author of The Economic Laws of Scientific Research and writes regularly for The Times and the Sunday Telegraph.

ALSO BY TERENCE KEALEY

The Economic Laws of Scientific Research

Knowledge is power. Francis Bacon, Religious Meditatations, Of
Heresies, 1597

The concept of progress is surprisingly recent. The idea is only 400 years old. It was formulated in 1605 by an Englishman, Sir Francis Bacon (15611626), in his book The Advancement of Learning. Before Bacon, people had supposed history to be circular, not directional, and both Plato and Aristotle had asserted that history was cyclical, with republics and kingdoms replacing each other to no outcome. As Ecclesiastes 1:9 says, there is no new thing under the sun.

In his 1920 book The Idea of Progress J. B. Bury, the Cambridge historian, noted that an ancient expression of improvement had in fact been made in Daniel 12:4: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased but that verse was overlooked for millennia by people who did not understand it: how could knowledge be increased when it had already been revealed by God? Democritus had hinted at the notion of progress during the fourth century BC , as had the Oxford scientist Roger Bacon during the fourteenth century AD, but only with Sir Francis Bacon was the concept described. He called it progression, the addition of new knowledge to old.

Bacon came to the idea of progress in 1588, when the Spanish launched the Armada against England. Though England, helped by the weather and the Dutch, beat off the Armada, Bacon never forgot the fear. Indeed, Bacons future secretary, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, was born prematurely after his mother was shocked into labour on learning of the sighting of the Armada. And Mrs Hobbes was right to have been shocked: by 1588 the king of Spain was a man of vast power, who not only ruled significant parts of Europe (Portugal, the Low Countries, much of Italy, parts of Burgundy and so on) but who also straddled the globe, from Macau and the Philippines in the east to Mexico and Peru in the west. Indeed, he so girdled the world that the Philippines in the east were administered from Mexico in the west. He might easily have added England to Spains list of conquests.

Bacon wanted to know how Spain had become so powerful. So he read the histories, including Gomes Eannes de Azuraras The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea (1450), Joo de Barross Dcadas da sia (155263) and Antonio Galvanos Summary of the Discoveries of the World (1555), and he concluded that Spain had created its empire by technology: and like as the West Indies had never been discovered if the use of the mariners needle had not been first discovered. In 1620 Bacon wrote: Printing, gunpowder and the magnet [compass]... have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world. In his most famous quote, he said: Knowledge is power.

But who had created Spains technology, knowledge and power? From his readings of the chroniclers Bacon concluded that the hero of the story was not a Spaniard but a Portuguese, Prince Henry the Navigator. It was Henry who had launched the modern world of progress. How?

He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. Ecclesiastes 1:18

There are two major reasons for doing science: to discover something new for its own sake or to discover something new for the sake of making money. On either score Henry the Navigator (13941460) can claim to have been one of the worlds greatest scientists. Before him, people subscribed to a false cosmography and Portugal, his country, was poor. By the time his work was complete the Europeans had transformed world geography and Portugal was one of the richest countries on earth.

Henry was the third son of Joo (John) I, king of Portugal, and of Philippa, his queen. Philippa was the daughter of John of Gaunt, so Henry was half-Portuguese and half-English. But Portugal, when Henry was born, was a precarious little nation. For hundreds of years it had been ruled by Muslims from North Africa, and they had been expelled by the native Christians only the century before Henry was born.

Portugal was poor because it was excluded from the centres of international trade. The rich states of Europe were then the trading city-states, like Bruges, and the wealthy states were the ports of the Italian peninsula, including Venice and Genoa, which traded the spices, silks and gems of India, China and the islands of the East. Those trades were as old as European civilization itself: and, behold, a company of Ishmealites [Arabs] came from Gilead with their camels bearing spicery and balm and myrrh, going to carry it down to Egypt. (Genesis 37: 25).

The spices would be re-exported from Egypt to Europe, whose people have always salivated over the peppers and gingers and cinnamons and saffrons and asafoetida and cardamoms and cloves of Persia, India, Malaysia and Indonesia (pepper and ginger are Indian loan words). The spice trade was, therefore, one of the most lucrative trades of the day, and the people who controlled it grew rich. Yet those lucky people were not the consumers in Europe, nor the producers in Africa and Asia, but the intermediaries, who were primarily the Muslim merchants of North Africa and the Middle East.