[Mainan_Tagonist]

Here in France, we were taught from fairly early on about Averroes and Avicenne (Ibn Sinna) for instance. There may geographical and societal reasons for these differences, but all in all that's besides the point i was trying to make, which is : The average person may have heard of Newton, Darwin and others, but how many could really explain the theory of gravity or that of evolution without getting at least some of it wrong?

("Gravity... ha yes, the guy with the apple","evolution... sure, we all are descended from apes, right?")

...Therefore, relying on what the average person may know to discuss whether something is publicly acknowledged and understood is perhaps the wrong way to go about this.

[h2zizzle]

You're missing the point. There's value in even simply knowing the names. I may not know the details of a given historical scientist's accomplishments, but if their name floats around the cultural ether, I can pluck it from the air and type it into Wikipedia. Most Americans - likely most Westerners - cannot do that with even a dozen or so non-European historical scientists, because we don't even know their names.

This massive gap in the common understanding of the way the modern world came to be is concerning; undermines most people's model of the development of civilization is, for example, one of the things that makes it easy to drop bombs on historical sites (and the descendants of those who built them), or to ignore when other parties do the same. "Ignore what the peasants think, only elite thought matters," has never preceded an era of sustainable peace and prosperity.