Custom was that every high priest set up a statue of himself there during his lifetime. Pointing to these and counting, the priests showed me that each high priest succeeded his father.

Anaximander’s greatness lies in the fact that on the basis of so little, in order to better account for his observations, he redesigns the universe.

For Kuhn, a scientific theory is a conceptual framework, a “paradigm,” for describing a series of phenomena.

Hecataeus had traced his descent and claimed that his sixteenth forefather was a god, but the priests traced a line of descent by counting the statues, and these were three hundred and forty-five.

Notice that before the creation of light, the seas were already there. The Iliad, too, calls Oceanus the father of the gods. The idea may be even older and may have originated prior to the separation of Eurasian and American peoples. Consider the first verse of the Navajo creation myth: “The One is called ‘Water Everywhere.’

But in science it is not difficult to come up with ideas; it is difficult to come up with workable ideas, to find a way to compose and articulate new ideas as part of a whole that is consistent with the rest of our knowledge, and to convince others that the entire process is reasonable.

Science’s leaps forward are most often not solutions to well-established problems. They come from discovering that the problem was ill posed. This is why it is so hard to make sense of scientific evolution as a well-defined problem.

Considered in this light, the process delineated by Thales is nothing else than the process of scientific thinking.

The ancient cosmogonies that shaped foundational myths, from the Babylonian Enuma Elish to Hesiod’s Theogony, mentioned in chapter 1, tell of a world in which the order is established by a great god, Marduk or Zeus, who takes power. Following a long period of battles and confusion, a deity triumphs and establishes an order that is at once cosmic,