What about the role of Christianity? After all, the first universities were Roman Catholic. Weren't the first researchers and experimenters using the knowledge of God's creative order as their motive?

Surprising that in this discussion there is no mention of Max Weber who addressed the same question.

It always seems to me that saying "...the belief in progress...makes progress possible" is the modern equivalent of saying the belief in God makes religion c.q. God possible.

Professor Mokyr can be assured that I read every single word of his book, as I always do when reviewing. (I mean this quite literally as to introduction, text, footnotes, but of course I only sampled the bibliography and index.) His book deserves extended discussion, but the space Standpoint made available to me was limited (indeed I slightly overran my allowance) so I did not have room to make my points by detailed citations and extended quotations. Nevertheless I stand by my criticisms. Let us take, for example, chapter 15, which he thinks I didn't read: read for yourself the first paragraph (you can find it by "looking inside" on Amazon) and you will see that there is no reference to specific intellectual tools or practices, but only to competition, entrepreneurs, a belief in progress and useful knowledge, and institutional conditions which made possible freedom of speech. Of course, for example, Joel Mokyr discusses the printing press -- but he places greater emphasis on the postal service, which seems to me obviously wrong. And of course he mentions experiments -- but when he comes to compare China and Europe what he says is that China lacked a republic of letters, not that China lacked experimentation or key intellectual tools. On p. 315 I find what I take to be a summary of the core argument of the book: the difference between Europe and China was that Europe had a fragmented political system (unlike China) and a transnational Republic of Letters (again, unlike China -- though China had an intellectual community, so a fundamental precondition for a republic of letters appears to be political fragmentation) -- no mention here of Gutenberg printing, experimentation, or concepts such as "fact", "theory", and "hypothesis." My contention is that if the republic of letters was all that was needed there would have been an eighteenth-century Pasteur -- but there wasn't. Let me stress that Joel Mokyr and I are on the same side on a number of central intellectual issues. Anyone who sits down with his book and my Invention of Science side by side will see that over and over again we make identical arguments, often using the same quotations and the same citations (we were, I would stress, working independently, but working on the same problems with the same resources -- Mokyr read my book, but only when his own was on its way to press) -- which makes the points at which we differ of particular interest to me, while other readers may find the points on which we agree much more significant. Perhaps Professor Mokyr thinks that if I had read his book more carefully I would have realised that we don't really differ, in which case I can only say, regretfully, that I think he hasn't read my book as carefully as he might have and doesn't understand the role I assign to intellectual tools -- which has something to do with the fact that I am by trade an historian of ideas, which carries with it its own professional (de)formations. I, for example, stress that the scientific revolution was primarily carried out by mathematicians -- Joel Mokyr knows this and understands this, in a fashion (just as he knows and understands that experimentation is important), but every time he summarises his position he forgets it, and when he turns to comparing China and Europe instead of contrasting the role and character of mathematical knowledge in the two societies he treats them as being in this respect similar not different (p. 326). Where Professor Mokyr stresses the role of individual intellectual entrepreneurs such as Bacon, I stress the importance of cultural shifts for which no one individual was responsible -- the culture of the fact, for example. And Professor Mokyr and I agree that a key feature of European society was that, unlike China, it shook itself loose from "the iron grip of the past" -- but I think we need a quite specific, contingent account of how this came about, which is what I try to provide. Don Phillipson makes an interesting point: eighteenth- and nineteenth century improvements in hygiene were based on miasma theories which date back to Hippocrates but which were reinterpreted and applied in new ways well before the germ theory of disease. But I wouldn't overstress their signficance in the absence of a germ theory -- it was, for example, piped water which spread cholera in London; improved nutrition is probably more important for increased life expectancy. On this see my book Bad Medicine. As for Ash's comment, I don't have problems with an evolutionary epistemology; the question is whether we are to understand intellectual evolution in terms of specifically Darwinian selection. In Darwinian selection the fittest survive, but no creature survives because somebody knows it to be fit. In intellectual selection there is a positive feedback loop: x worked, so I will do x again and also x' and x'' and see if they also work. That's evolution, but its not Darwinian selection but rather learning from experience.

"The intellectual tools required for scientific progress turned out, by happy chance, to be the very same ones required for technological progress." Indeed, and the secret of scientific progress is the subordination of the human intellect to the verdict of evidence. Paradigmatic example: The "experimentum crusis" in Newton's Opticks, arguably the most elegant interplay between theory and experiment ever staged. And corresponding to the experimenters in science are the tinkerers in technology...

The story that David Wooton thinks is "much more plausible" than mine happens to be incorporated in the book in great detail. Either the copy he was sent by the publisher mysteriously missed chapters 14 and 15, in which I carry out in great detail the tasks he feels would make my story "much more plausible," or he read these chapters with a broad brush, and somehow missed the long discussions about the interaction between books and authors. Wootton's complaint that the book lacks "a culture of discovery and of facticity to make sustained progress. You need, in addition, an understanding of the power of experimentation. You need a step change in the exchange of information which printing made possible. And you need luck or contingency: the conceptual foundations of the steam" --- yet in contrast to what he writes, these issues are all addressed in detail in the book. Could it be that somehow Prof Wooton simply missed all this material? Or perhaps forgot that he had? One concrete example: Wootton claims that I do not seem to grasped the power of experimentation, yet I write (p.212-13) that "the rise of the concept of experiment, so ardently advocated by the Baconians, was a major breakthrough. The commitment to experimentation as a tool to settle disputes ...emerged in full bloom in the seventeenth century. In England the work of Harvey and Gilbert, in Italy that of Galileo and Torricelli, and in France in a variety of circles and groups, all exchanged notes and results. To repeat, experiments were not an entirely new phenomenon, and experiments were conducted in antiquity and in the Middle Ages. But, as Wootton (2015, p. 346) has stressed, what was new was a scientific community that recognized the experimental method and the replication of experimental results as a powerful means of persuasion." Wooton's claim that in book I "fall down" in a third world, one of books and journals, of facts and theories... and miss out on the intellectual tools that made progress possible. This is simply incorrect, as I list in detail the tools that did exactly that. Perhaps, Prof. Wooton feels, that he could afford to skip large parts of the book because he knew in advance “that any economist or Darwinist must fail” --- so why then bother with the small print and get bogged down with details? Even a learned and wise man such as Wootton should be expected to read the books of others he is asked to review with the care he doubtlessly expects from the readers of his own books. Once we allow in the materials missing in the mutilated version that Wootton read, his conclusion of “failure” should be redirected at his review, based as it was on such very light reading.

The 2015 article "The answer to the Needham Question?" may be of interest: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/CHIN-02-180215.html

The counterexample of medical knowledge (practically stagnant before the second half of the 19th century, Wooton writes) seems insufficient without data on its "output," i.e. morbidity and mortality. These began to decline earlier, in the 18th century, and likely contributory reasons are abundant: lemons for scurvy, piped water supply, street paving and sanitary sewers, and so on. There seem two common characteristics. Improvements were nonuniform and local in particular places and times (and often ignored elsewhere for 50 years or more); and each seems more probably prompted by common sense in concrete situations than by any reference to medical knowledge.

Strange last paragraph. Popper himself developed an evolutionary epistemology in his later work.