Joey wrote:
> So, when the inevitable question first popped in the
> mind of Early man "why are we here?" Is
> it really suprising that man's answer involved a
> story, rather than a desire to catalogue and
> analyze the physical world?

I agree with all of what Joey wrote and I think it addresses Todd's questions quite nicely:

Todd wrote:
> Something else to ponder is *why* our mental processes and the
> way nature works are such that the scientific method is such
> a struggle for us. I mean, since we are made of stuff that is
> operating according to principles we discover through science,
> why aren't we just directly tuned into those principles? Why
> do most of our ideas turn out to be wrong, so that we need
> the scientific method to zero in on the principles that work
> in describing what happens in nature?

If you are happy with the theory of evolution, then our brains evolved to solve certain problems of getting through life, exactly what Joey described. In fact our brains are well-suited to handle pre-civilization life, we probably haven't done much evolving in the time civilization has been around (although certainly it's had a large effect on how our brains are taught as we grow up). In any event our brains are not optimized to understand the principles of science, or to handle the scientific method easily, because neither of these would serve any evolutionary purpose.

The moral of this:
Let's face it, science is not a career you enter to attract lots of members of the opposite sex and pass on your genes! :-)

--Eric