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So does the persistence of religion, our prescientific panacea for the human condition.

So did the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Scott Olesen and Eric Alm in 2016, calling the idea of balance in the microbiome “a holdover from prescientific thought,” akin to balancing the humors.

But Kandel’s Freudian affinity was formed in his prescientific Viennese youth, and his brilliant work on the molecular basis of memory owed nothing to psychoanalysis.

If we were a prescientific society, we would assume that polio is a disease caused by human disagreements and cured by public-spiritedness.

In dismissing philosophy as an antiquated relic of our prescientific past, the scientist is making a very large and dubious assumption: that the abstract methods of philosophy, despite the discipline’s string of successes over recent centuries, have nothing more to contribute to our developing understanding of the world.