Saturday, March 27, 2010

Technology drive human understanding

My writing goes too slow. I am still on the historical review on frameworks to describe humans. I can really just see the three intuitive ones: body-mind, biopsychosocial, and biobehaviouralcognitivesocial. They have been around for millenniums. The difference from the Ancient world to today is that we understand the details much better.
I also looked at why our last centuries have brought such progress. I was never aware of this, but new observational tools like telescope and microscope might all the difference. In the 17th century, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek pioneered the microscope as a scientific instrument and revolutionized the understanding on humans. Suddenly, he could look at the fine details of humans: see cells, blood cells, bacteria, sperms, and so on. I have a new hero that nobody has told me about! The Ancient people like the Greek and Roman medicine was unable to push ahead because they could not observed the micro world, and they could not observed the dead and living humans, but X-ray and other scanning technology now can.

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