ZerkonX X.net> wrote in news:pan.2008.09.09.13.54.01@X.net:

Modern science has some very deeps roots, to be sure --- roots which extend
back as far as ancient Greece and even prior. But the central organizing
theories which characterize modern science, with the exception of Newton's
mechanics (1687), all date from the late 18th, 19th, and early 20th
centuries: Dalton's model of the atom and the periodic table; the discovery
and theory of radioactivity; Darwin's theory of evolution; Mendel's
foundations of genetics; relativity and quantum theories; Charles Babbage
and Ada Lovelace's work on computers; Pasteur's and Jenner's discoveries in
microbiology; Adam Smith's foundations of economics; all the pioneering
work on electricity by Franklin, Galvani, Ampere, Faraday. Ohm, Maxwell, et
al; Marconi and Tesla's work on radio, etc.

Needless to say, virtually all the technologies built upon these
theoretical foundations were developed in free economies --- primarily the
US, the UK, and Germany (which through most of the 19th century had a free
economy): steam engines, telegraphy, radio broadcasting, photography,
electric power, rocket technology, radio astronomy, airplanes, vaccination
and aseptic procedures in medicine, television, antibiotics, internal
combustion engines, nuclear power, computer technology, and high-yield and
mechanized agriculture.

Monarchies are not incompatible with free economies; nor do democracies
guarantee them. The economies of the US and the UK during the 19th and
early 20th centuries were the freest in history, and the most productive,
by far, in science and technology.