Yes, but it is not entirely the fault of the West. Mathematical traditions, for example, are so different in the East and the West, that discoveries made in the East could not diffuse to the West.

bias is part of human nature so one should not take every word of history interpreting it verbatim but taking it through aquantitative differential analysis of such history and seeking other means to validate your analysis

History is not an exact science and, yes, bias is an inherent part of human nature. Which suggests at a minimum that, as (more exacting) scientists used to apply rigorous testing, we ought perhaps to redress the record- at least in our academic teaching, writing, citing- when it comes to unfairly neglected giants in the history of science. But this is digressing somwhat from the heart of my question: is there a clear, continuing (?) bias in favor of 'western' scientists when attributing key discoveries?

I cannot say there is and generalize it all; however, fact is that "publicly" the contribution of the East is not enough appreciated. If we refer to Islamic Spain, Endelus... do anyone of you really think it was an accident that the very year when Spain was conquered enormous expeditions have started (there is much more needed for floating over the Ocean then huge ships) and the American continent was discovered, that suddenly a dark Europe has turned from the Middle Age fashion to a completely different continent.. I thing personally that Europe has learned a lo from the conquered piece of land

Another point here is that there are also a lot of well educated and well trained people from Eastern pars who have taken there experience and knowledge and made huge contributions. The fault of the East is that they do not appreciate and value themselves their own scientists, and mean especially the Islamic ones, while Western countries do know very well how to make advantages of those..

Nevertheless, in the Islamic world the contributions of Greek and Roman Philosophy are admired and well known, but I doubt that it is same vice versa..

Definitely, there is bias. And maybe more than bias in crediting scientific discoveries to the West. However, we cannot totally attribute the blame to the West.

First, nepotism and ethnocentrism is inherent in every individual. Hence, the first instinct is "this discovery should have been from my colour, race or country".

Secondly, the greedy nature of some westerners and easterners alike allow this trend to continue. This include scientific publications even in reputable journals.

Sure there are (always, everywhere) people eager to grab recognition and fortune by all means, and adept at climbing the ladder of power. I write ‘everywhere’ in the broadest sense- not only geographic- since the distibution of greed, nepotism, nationalism will follow the same familiar bell curve among scientists as among farmers, artists, or say television repairmen.

This distribution is certainly no more ‘virtuous’ in the south or east than in the west and cannot therefore explain the observed historical bias- in past two thousand years- in favour of western scientists. I did cite major but forgotten scientific discoveries from the Indian subcontinent as they are little known and often bypassed in the west. On the other hand,one will find broader recognition for major achievements in mathematics such as the development of algebra under Muhammad al-Khawarzmi around 820, the introduction of the Zero by Muhammad bin Ahmad in 967, or the foundation of non-Euclidian geometry by the Persian Nasir al Din al-Tusi in the 13th century. These are usually well acknowledged and cannot be considered as forgottten.

One needs to look more closely at the geopolitical importance of science primacy for certain Governments (for example in the sector of space science or for the ‘conquest’ of the deep sea) to get to the roots of the problem.

Guys,

you have a reason in saying that there is a form of bias in favour of the west. However this is not totally wrong.

Science is a different thing than the collection of information and knowledge. For example although making additions, subtractions and multiplications was known by the Babylonians before, it was the Greeks that turn Mathematics to a science. Similarly, although the basic knowledge of geometry was invented by the Egyptians in order to be able to find again their exact properties after each year Nile's flood, it was the Greeks that turn geometry to Science. The same with physics, astronomy etc etc.

Similarly, although the first 'states' and therefore kind of 'governance' were formed in Mesopotamia, it was in Greece and Rome that law and governance took an organised and scientific form.

So this is what is attributed to the West. The beginning of Science not the beginning of knowledge.

PS: (for example Baudhayana Sutra indeed knew the Pythagorean theorem 100 years before Pythagoras but he did nothing with that. It was Pythagoras who embedded that in proofs in geometrical problems. Actually the notion of 'proof' it was totally invented by the Greeks, it was unknown to all the others before them. And the historians believe that it was the democratic court system that led to the notion of proof: a citizen had to "prove" to the judge-citizens that he was innocent, and not pray to the emperor for his innocence).

Hurrah for the Greek, Emmanuel (Saridakis), but I hope that this thread will not turn into a rather bizarre Olympic competition- another (great) Greek invention ... You are not saying that the Ancient Greeks were like alchemists turning Egyptian lead into Greek gold, are you? Then, what do we make of the prior achievements of Egyptian (and Babylonian) astronomers? Did they just rely on 'basic' geometry? And what about the prior, entirely independent achievements of Chinese mathematicians and astronomers- see their accurate prediction of lunar eclipses since at least 2600 BC, long before Athens and Rome reached their respective peaks.

We all know far too little about the scientific achievements of remote (or not so remote) civilizations. It would be a good thing if their teaching was made compulsory in school curricula worldwide.

That's true from telephone to infinite cases East developed and West took the Credits.

It is interesting to discuss nowaday situation. More reach and developed countries collect researchers from developing countries. Western journals have restrictions on not speaking their mother languages. Reachest countries have bigger scientific funds and better possibilities for finances for applications. This is a real difference in favour to western countries too!

In any case I think the division East-West is meaningless, and we do not want bias from either side. We are all humans in the end of the day, and each civilisation has given its own things to humanity.

The correct division should be between rich and poor countries, and then it could be worthy to discuss.

Very good, but then why the "Eastern" countries, since they invented all these things, they could not exploit them?

In any case we have to be careful, since the economic rise of some eastern countries, mainly China and India, will push these countries to try to "establish" a glorious past, that they were number 1 and the bad West took the credits etc etc, in order to theoretically support their expansion. This is exactly what the Europeans did 3-4 centuries ago, in order to justify their expansion against the whole world.

So the point is not to exchange one Aryan Race with another, but to tell people that there are not Aryan Races, and that everybody is important.

Georgi is so right with his comment. The primary reason is that Westerns are much more aware of the fact that genius people live everywhere and that intellectuality does not see the colour of the skin, etc. Eastern countries are not so much interested in science and research as the West... or at least not in supporting those who need it and because of that I am much more angry on the East than the "credit taking" West-it's their own fault, let them fight over money and wealth, or other things while hard working people are conducting all the research on the other side of the globe..

One major problem in favor of the West is the lack of credible scientific journals in the East. This has lead to flood of publications by Eastern scientists in well known Western journals. Political factors, unfortunately, blocked this avenue in front of scientists of certain countries. Take the case of Iranian scientists being recently singled out from publishing their manuscripts in Canadian journals.

again.. I blame the East more.. In search for my own research I found so many articles written by both Eastern and Western scholars.. only one book on human rights was published I think in Kuwait, and one on humanitarian law in Qatar, but by the Red Cross...

Reviewing "timeline of technology" you will be struck by how the vast majority of the inventions/discoveries listed originated in Europe or North America.

Joseph Needham's massive magnum opus," the Science and Civilization in China series" might go some way towards redressing the balance of that western-biased timeline. Needham's work can more or less be summarized as "The Chinese invented it first".

Magnetic compass*, paper*, gunpowder, cast-iron forging*, mechanical looms*, China. Number system with zero*, India. Algebra*, Arabia.

*Vital to the industrial revolution.

1400 marks the general beginning of the colonial period in the west, when vast resources and eastern advances just happened to be available to Europe at the same time, especially in the Mediterranean maritime trading hegemony. It is very likely that any unfair claim of discovery would have happened from then onwards.

http://inventors.about.com/od/timelines/a/Nineteenth.htm

http://www.nri.org.uk/science.html

Issam is correct in pointing out that China independently developed many essential technologies long before the West. E. Saridakis’ comment – why could the East no exploit the inventions – points to a very fundamental difference in Western vs. Eastern ideologies: the isolationist policies of Eastern countries over the past few 100 years. See, for example, http://www.kinabaloo.com/h1.html.

During the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) “… state power was consolidated with the creation of an autocratic government. After the opening of China's doors to foreign influence during the Yuan dynasty, Ming China closed them tightly. Emperor Wu, claiming that nothing from the "barbarian" outside world was needed in China, instituted an isolationist policy…”

In short, they may have invented a bunch of stuff, but they didn’t care to tell anybody else about it. Some in this discussion group have “blamed” the East for their failure to step up and take the credit. But as I see it, the Eastern countries didn’t *care* about receiving credit (at least not in 1400).

In the present – and probably in future – the East and West are NOW quite competitive in terms of developing and promoting new science. In my own field of computational chemistry, I regularly find lots & lots of publications coming out of China, Japan, and Korea, for example.

George, you will have heard as well of the Kangnido Map realised in 1402 (on the basis of two Chinese maps dated 1330 and 1370, but lost since) which describes the totality of the Ancient World, including China, Japan, Africa and Europe ... one century ahead the Great Age of European maritime discoveries. Not forgetting the naval expeditions of the legendary Chinese Admiral Zheng He, who crossed the Strait of Magellan and precisely charted a good part of the Indo Pacific Ocean 70 years before the great Portuguese explorer. Who teaches that in schools?

Yet the evidence – backing this long list of discoveries wrongly attributed to ‘the West’– is detailed in books that will be found in any good university library by anyone who cares. So, independently of our different east/west cultures about crediting and promoting science, and given that scientists everywhere are (properly) formatted to place scientific testing and scientific truth above all, should science professors in ‘enlightened’ schools and universities of the West (who ought to know better and take the longer view) continue to perpetuate the myth of western scientific primacy ?

p.s. I just added "science education" among the tags, in case.

@Frederic

Thanks for starting this great discussion. I am in complete agreement with your point:"History, we know, tends to be written by the winners (at least on the military and economic battlefields)." to which may be added Saumendu''s terse comment," That's true from telephone to infinite cases East developed and West took the Credits." But, I appreciate highly views expressed by Christiane, Georgi and Samuel in that order. The fact is that centre of civilisation and wealth kept changing and with that changed the torch bearer of knowledge albeit science. Every civilisation that had a knowledge tradition contributed to the understanding of nature. People attribute origin of every scientific concept and theory to the Greeks and in the process forget Muslims especially Arabs who not only translated their treaties but also wrote exhaustive commentary to point out their merits and errors and rectified the errors committed by the Greeks be theoretical or factual.

1. In the context of modern science, Roger Bacon is presented as the European advocate of the modern scientific method and Alhazen (10th and 11th century) who has developed scientific method especially elaborate experimental method and contributed to physical science (optics) is forgotten while Bacon learnt scientific method from him. He was also first to propose existing Aswan Dam, being a great engineer, but left Egypt fled to Basra, Iraq as cost of the dam was too high to be afforded to realise the project and returned had to come in long run.

2. E. Saridakis has reasons to be a proud Greek as in the present division of the world, Greece is part of Europe. However, he should remember that Ancient Greeks were more in contact with near east than western and northern present European countries. To remind him I would like to point out that that Ancient Greeks had their learning and commercial centres throughout Asian and African part of Mediterranean Crescent. Thus, they learnt from and contributed to the East not from Europe.

3. It is an irony towards Georgi has referred. After Independence, a large number of aspiring Indian scientists were sent to the US in expectation that will return and contribute to R&D in the country. Instead, they were retained in the host country and to feed hungry Indians generous Uncle Sam gave food and monetary aid. Everybody knows this generous humanitarian aid but forget that patents developed by those Indian scientists earned to the US ten times of its humanitarian aid.

Mohammad I agree, I was ready to tell that too, i.e that ancient Greece had by far stronger relations with the East than the West. So that is why the whole discussion is a bit artificial. I am proud for every scientist of the past, independently of where he comes from.

Apologies for a typo in my post. I wrote that "the East and West are not quite competitive" but I meant to write that "the East and West are NOW quite competitive"

Frederick

Most of us know that the famous Greek mathematician Pythagoras did not actually discover the Pythagorean theorem. And like you I originally thought that it was first discovered by the Indian mathematician Baudhayana (fl. c. 800 BCE) and rediscovered 100 years later by the Greek Pythagoras.

However, a little digging suggests the formula (a^2 + b^2 = c^2, which describes the relationship between the three sides of a right triangle) was actually known even earlier. The Babylonians, for example, seem to have documented the basic idea in ancient mathematical tablets before Pythagoras came on the scene in 570 B.C.

The statement of the Theorem was discovered on a Babylonian tablet circa 1900-1600 B.C.!

Pythagoras's theorem in Babylonian mathematics

http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/HistTopics/Babylonian_Pythagoras.html

Thanks Issam - let us render to Cesar (in this case to the Babylonians) what belongs to them! I trust that in time our descendants will learn that many historic 'discoveries' are wrongly attributed and were in fact 'borrowed' from (much) more ancient times and cultures. A constant feature in human history is to forget our debt to prior civilizations.

I thank you Frederic for first raising this question which has made me very interested in history of science.

It is difficult to tell about the East-West bias in a general context (embracing all disciplines and all times); however, there are many cases and examples of such bias, as has been pointed out by several members of this community.

The case I have in mind is from historians in the beginning of the XX Century, and concerns giving full credit to European scholars of the Middle ages for efforts made (at least in great part) by Islamic scholars one or two centuries before. Thus, Jordanus de Nemore (who probably lived in the XIII Century) was given credit for most work on the Science of Weights (equilibrium of a balance) by French scientist Pierre Duhem (1), whereas the work done under Islamic cultures was treated as mere translation and transfer of information from the Greek masters. Other Western historians, on the other hand, gave more appropriate credit to the Islamic scholars, such as Al-Khazini, al-Birruni, al-Farabi, and al-Asfizari (2, 3). At present, there are Eastern historians engaged in reconstructing the Science of Weights (4), and this may lead to correcting some bias with time.

My personal optimist impression is that East-West discussion of topics of history of science may provide a more accurate vision of the contributions of individuals, schools, and cultures to science. The challenge is to carry out such studies without a rigid agenda in which a strong bias defines the framework of analysis.

(1) Duhem, P. (1905), Les Origines de la Statique, Librarie Scientifique A. Hermann, Paris. English translation as: The Origins of Statics, Kluwer, Dordrecht, 1991.

(2) Moody, E. A. and Clagett, M. (1952), The Medieval Science of Weights, University of Wisconsin Press.

(3) Grant, E. (Ed.) (1974), A Source Book in Medieval Science, Harvard University Press.

(4) Abattouy, M. (2006), A refoundation of Mechanics deeply rooted in the social context of the Islamic Civilization, Foundation for Science, Technology and Civilization, Manchester, UK.

I believe that for a long time, especially in the modern era, there was a sort of historiographical imperialism in History of Science. It was, above all, a strategy of colonization.

I have found, for example, a book that said that China had been discovered by Marco Polo. I believe that today much of our task is to review authorship of large and small discoveries.

Can you imagine the wealth of knowledge if the greatest libraries of the

world had not been Burned by invading forces.

Bonjour,

I agree with Luis one cannot speak of a unique bias there are several biases.

- One nobody speaks about is the language barrier. Culture always had difficulties communicating. It took to the people of the European Renaissance time to learn how to read Greek and then to discover again what the Greeks had achieved.

- Another bias is that both Newton and Einstein were both from Europe and I never heard of any gravitationnal theory in other cultures. Or may be this is not a bias ?

- Bias are found also in the west. Who still knows that Rosalind Elsie Franklin is the key discoverer of the structure of DNA? She never got the Nobel prize for it and this is a strong historical bias against female scientists.

The law of the strongest applies in Sciences as it applies in every other human activity. Why are we speaking English on this network?

@Stefan:

I am in agreement, overall, with your points.  As you noted yourself, they do pick up a quite narrower time frame and a different semantic definition than my original question. 

As you remarked, "modern science" was recently codified by Europeans with a welcome emphasis on rigorous experimental method. Boosted by the economic returns of the colonization process, the industrial revolution and the rich promises of capitalism, Europeans were encouraged to massively invest in science before others … and soon reaped the benefits.  European science primacy extended until the mid 20th century when the cross-Atlantic migration to the USA - in the wake of Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi - of hundreds of bright European researchers such as John von Neumann (born Janos Lajos in Budapest), father of the digital computer, or Werner von Braun, the so-called father of the Apollo Program (exfiltrated from nazi laboratories), paved the way for US current primacy in science *.  For how long?  umm... that's quite another story.

* Before 1950 American winners of the Nobel Prize represented a distinct minority. Since then, Americans have won about half of the Nobel Prizes awarded in the sciences.

My list would not be complete without Hasan Ibn Al-Haytham, also known as Alhazen (965-1040), a physicist and mathematician of Persian origin, whose name is still not broadly known in the West but who is generally considered as the father of modern optics. We owe him major achievements (summed up in his voluminous Treatise on Optics - made broadly accessible in 1270 under its Latin version 'De Aspectibus') regarding the laws of reflection and refraction, the decomposition of light into primary colours, his experimental finding that light travels along a straight line, the hypothesis that light is composed of energy particles, his view that our vision is created and processed in the brain. In addition he was a strong, early proponent of a scientific method based on rigorous mathematical reasoning coupled with experiments. A giant.