The beginning of Scientific Thought

Louis Liebenber holds up the art of tracking as possibly the beginning of science as we know it. It certainly has many of the elements. Many questions are asked and answered, data are collected, ecvidence gathered, and patterns are recognized and predicted. The amount of information gathered through looking at the signs left by the movement of life could fill more books than we have trees for. Everything that moves leaves a track of some sort, and even the action of moving is, in itself a track of sorts, or a sign. An animal steps, and the earth changes. A bird flies by and startles a deer. Everything that happens adds to one massive, interwoven story, made up entirely of tangents, never going off subject, but only because there is no subject. If you picked up one thread, and tried to follow it, keeping track of everything affected by the thread, you would spend eternity learning all there is to know in the world, and you would be one of hundreds trying to do so.

This curiosity leads humans to all ranges of thought, trying to discover the inner workings of a cell, or the dynamics that drive the weather around the globe. People dive into themselves to try to find the meaning of the universe, and others delve deep into lore, trying to find ancient spirits spoken of in legends. We are a multitude of monkeys, poking and prodding into everything. If something blows up in our faces, we do not simply leave it alone, we go back to find out why it blew up, and try to get it to do so again.

Some speak of tracking as a branch of science, but in a way, all science is a manner of tracking. Every little detail means something, the position of every letter, every print, ever leaf, every nucleotide, every person - everything has a meaning, and every person in the world spends their life learning those meanings, and using the meanings they learn to decifer new meanings. From voices, to language. Frome language to literature. From literature to experimentation. From light to seeing, from seeing to looking. It goes on forever, circling, weaving in and out, dividing, coming together - so extensive and all encompassing that we can never really comprehend it all. Instead we give it a name or two and try to comprehend it anyway.