On The Methodological Differences between Experimental-Predictive Sciences and Historical-Comparative Sciences; the Extreme Chanciness and Contingency of Lifes History & the Central Principle of All History: Contingency THE BURGESS SHALE AND THE NATURE OF HISTORY By Stephen Jay Gould “Our language is full of phrases that embody the worst and most restrictive stereotype about science. We exhort our frustrated friends to be ‘scientific’-- meaning unemotional and analytic--in approaching a vexatious problem. We talk about the ‘scientific method,’ and instruct schoolchildren in this supposedly monolithic and maximally effective path to natural knowledge, as if a single formula could unlock all the multifarious secrets of empirical reality. “Beyond a platitudinous appeal to open-mindedness, the ‘scientific method’ involves a set of concepts and procedures tailored to the image of a man in a white coat twirling dials in a laboratory-experiment, quantification, repetition, prediction, and restriction of complexity to a few variables that can be controlled and manipulated. These procedures are powerful, but they do not encompass all of natures variety. How should scientists operate when they must try to explain the results of history, those inordinately complex events that can occur but once in detailed glory? Many large domains of nature--cosmology, geology, and evolution among them--must be studied with the tools of history. The appropriate methods focus on narrative, not experiment as usually conceived. “The stereotype of the ‘scientific method’ has no place for irreducible history. Natures laws are defined by their invariance in space and time. The techniques of controlled experiment, and reduction of natural complexity to a minimal set of general causes, presuppose that all times can be treated alike and adequately simulated in a laboratory. Cambrian quartz is like modern quartz--tetrahedra of silicon and oxygen bound together at all corners.... “But suppose you want to know why dinosaurs died, or why mollusks flourished while Wiwaxia perished? The laboratory is not irrelevant, and may yield important insights by analogy. (We might, for example, learn something interesting about the Cretaceous extinction by testing the physiological tolerances of modern organisms, or even of dinosaur ‘models,’ under environmental changes proposed in various theories for this great dying.) But the restricted techniques of the ‘scientific method’ cannot get to the heart of this singular event involving creatures long dead on an earth with climates and continental positions markedly different from todays. The resolution of history must be rooted in the reconstruction of past events themselves--in their own terms--based on narrative evidence of their own unique phenomena. No law guaranteed the demise of Wiwaxia, but some complex set of events conspired to assure this result--and we may be able to recover the causes if, by good fortune, sufficient evidence lies recorded in our spotty geological record.... “Historical explanations are distinct from conventional experimental results in many ways. The issue of verification by repetition does not arise because we are trying to account for uniqueness of detail that cannot, both by laws of probability and times arrow of irreversibility, occur together again. We do not attempt to interpret the complex events of narrative by reducing them to simple consequences of natural law; historical events do not, of course, violate any general principles of matter and motion, but their occurrence lies in a realm of contingent detail.... And the issue of prediction, a central ingredient in the stereotype, does not enter into a historical narrative. We can explain an event after it occurs, but contingency precludes its repetition, even from an identical starting point.... “These differences place historical, or narrative, explanations in an unfavorable light when judged by restrictive stereotypes of the ‘scientific method.’... These distinctions have entered our language and our metaphors--the ‘hard’ versus the ‘soft’ sciences, the ‘rigorously experimental’ versus the ‘merely descriptive.’... ... “But historical science is not worse, more restricted, or less capable of achieving firm conclusions because experiment, prediction, and subsumption under invariant laws of nature do not represent its usual working methods. The sciences of history use a different mode of explanation, rooted in the comparative and observational richness of our data. We cannot see a past event directly, but science is usually based on inference, not unvarnished observation (you dont see electrons, gravity, or black holes either). ... A PLEA FOR THE HIGH STATUS OF NATURAL HISTORY “In no other way but this false ordering by status among the sciences can I understand the curious phenomenon that led me to write this book in the first place--namely, that the Burgess revision has been so little noticed by the public in general and also by scientists in other disciplines.... “An interesting contrast, hinting at a solution, might be drawn between the Burgess revision and the Alvarez theory linking the Cretaceous extinction to extraterrestrial impact. I regard these two as the most important paleontological discoveries of the past twenty years. I think that they are equal in significance and that they tell the same basic story (as illustrations of the extreme chanciness and contingency of lifes history decimate the Burgess differently and we never evolve; send those comets into harmless orbits and dinosaurs still rule the earth, precluding the rise of large mammals, including humans).... ... “We shall never be able to appreciate the full range and meaning of science until we shatter the stereotype of ordering by status and understand the different forms of historical explanation as activities equal in merit to anything done by physics or chemistry When we achieve this new taxonomic arrangement of plurality among the sciences, then, and only then, will the importance of the Burgess Shale leap out. We shall then finally understand that the answer to such questions as ‘Why can humans reason?’ lies as much (and as deeply) in the quirky pathways of contingent history as in the physiology of neurons. ----------------- “The firm requirement for all science--whether stereotypical or historical--lies in secure testability, not direct observation. We must be able to determine whether our hypotheses are definitely wrong or probably correct (we leave assertions of certainty to preachers and politicians). Historys richness drives us to different methods of testing, but testability is our criterion as well. We work with our strength of rich and diverse data recording the consequences of past events; we do not bewail our inability to see the past directly. We search for repeated pattern, shown by evidence so abundant and so diverse that no other coordinating interpretation could stand, even though any item, taken separately, would not provide conclusive proof. “The great nineteenth-century philosopher of science William Whewell devised the word consilience, meaning ‘jumping together,’ to designate the confidence gained when many independent sources ‘conspire’ to indicate a particular historical pattern. He called the strategy of coordinating disparate results from multifarious sources consilience of induction. ... “Historical explanations take the form of narrative: E, the phenomenon to be explained, arose because D came before, preceded by C, B, and A. If any of these earlier stages had not occurred, or had transpired in a different way, then E would not exist (or would be present in a substantially altered form, E, requiring a different explanation). Thus, E makes sense and can be explained rigorously as the outcome of A through D. But no law of nature enjoined E; any variant E arising from an altered set of antecedents, would have been equally explicable, though massively different in form and effect. “I am not speaking of randomness (for E had to arise, as a consequence of A through D), but of the central principle of all history-- contingency. A historical explanation does not rest on direct deductions from laws of nature, but on an unpredictable sequence of antecedent states, where any major change in any step of the sequence would have altered the final result. This final result is therefore dependent, or contingent, upon everything that came before--the unerasable and determining signature of history.” Stephen Jay Gould, “Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History” (New York: Norton, 1990), pp. 277-283.
Posted on: Sun, 16 Mar 2014 14:53:24 +0000
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