ABSTRACT

There has been increasing attention in science education to how in/corporeal human experience previously ignored or omitted, such as those related to the body, Romanticism and affect, influence scientific understanding. At the beginning of Western science, in approximately 3000 BCE, there was little distinction between what we would now think of as scientific, causal understanding and magic. Mesopotamians and Egyptians during this time had various creation myths, usually involving gods and the moving of waters and land, with the sun and moon having special significance. The machine metaphor takes on its most eloquent and powerful form in the writings and evolutionary theory typically attributed to Charles Darwin. The world as machine metaphor appears to have remained the dominant way of shaping scientific understanding in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, although it is showing some cracks. The organism metaphor has regained some credibility among philosophers and in certain disciplines of science and been rebranded organicism.