Cultural Knowledge versus Science

Quite a whlie ago people figured out how to build stick frame homes and use wattle and daub and limewash for walls. They did all that way before the scientific method was invented or before chemistry was understood. They arrived at recipes for doing things via trial and error and intuitive guesses rather than via first princples and math based engineering.

Cultural knowledge such as methods of home constructions has some advantages versus the scientific method approach. For one--it's really slow. It's on pace with natural changes in the environment, so it's also regulated by the environment (more or less) and in theory could allow for the co-evolution of the plants and animals in a given region. (In practice that didn't happen.)

Maybe science could be remodulated to work at that pace. Science is at least as likely to kill off the human race as nature--maybe much more so. Also, since science made men much more dependent on the 10 kilowatt lifestyle, it also made us much more vulnerable to large stochastic events--like plagues or large natural disasters.