Nepali Wanderer

We all love food. At times, food does feel like the most important thing in life, which then makes cooking an art. Take pizza, for example; just the recipe alone is a work of art. But have you ever wondered how humans came up with something as amazing as pizza? Or even deeper than that, how humans came up with (or probably stumbled upon) the art of cooking?

Our human story is the most fascinating story of all. It’s a tale of an otherwise average mammal that has somehow escaped from caves to outer space, creating wonders like language, writing, pyramids and pizza on the way. And guess what, just reflecting on how we came up with pizza reveals a lot about our human story.

Sure enough, our ancestors must have discovered most things early on by chance. Take the discovery of fire, a pivotal moment in history. Or the discovery of wild crops, and the fact that some of these crops were edible. Eventually, the experiments and countless interactions between these crops must have led to the making of pizza. Therefore, we can all agree that random observations, chance, experiments, and continuous iterations are important ingredients for the making of pizza (and our journey from caves to space).

Yet, there is one missing ingredient, and importantly, the most crucial of all. That is our human ability to extract insights from observations, and make stories out of these insights. Gosh, we love making stories of whatever observations we have. Call it our inquisitive nature — curiosity to know why and how things are — we just love linking observations with causations, whether making stories about “Sun God” and “Moon God” to explain the working of the universe, or stories about just Sun and Moon to explain simple phenomena like day and night.

If you notice the pattern, in most of our stories, we are trying to look for patterns. For once we know the pattern, we don’t need to dwell our time on chance encounters and experiments. Like once we know the pattern about the Sun and Moon, daylight, and seasons, we can plant our crops accordingly. And after that, everything comes easy peasy: light a fire, pick the edible crops, and satisfy our hunger. And that way, our human story progresses, one pattern at a time.

As we progressed further down the road, we were able to create robust methods for the creation and validation of knowledge, with Science being the ultimate epitome. But even in Science, the story remains the same. The story of making stories out of observations, validating the stories with further observations, with experiments and iterations popping in and out.

Take alcohol as another example. We were able to develop the knowledge of making alcohol thousands of years before we had any organised field of Organic Chemistry or Chemistry itself. Sure, we didn’t know the chemical formula of ethanol, but we still had a pattern or a general formula on how to create alcohol, that too long before the days of the Pyramids. 

As you might have noticed by now, the whole story starts from observations. And what are observations but simply data? Be it the position of the Sun, its corresponding effect on daylight, the list of crops that are edible, or the ingredients that make up pizza; everything, end of the day, is data. And extracting patterns or knowledge from this data is Data Science. The best part is we don’t even have to perfectly know everything to get value from our insights, as we can strive with a flexible approach of updating, rejecting, or creating new patterns with more data in the future.

In that sense, our story on Earth is a Data Science story.