Why History isn't Scientific

[timoneill]

After some comments on a previous post there, I was invited to guest post on the atheist blog "Deity Schmeity". I think I'll repost this to Armarium Magnum as well to make up for my woeful neglect in the last ten months:

Why History isn't Scientific (And Why It Can Still Tell Us About the Past)

[unkleE]

Thanks for that Tim. I have seen you say many of those things before, but there was significant material I hadn't read before and I found it very informative to read it in one consolidated document.

I think it is also worth noting that some science is not all that different to history. I have quoted this before, but it is worth repeating:

How We Know What We Do Know about the Origin and Early Evolution of Life

Questions about how the living world presently works can often be answered directly. We can confirm that gene X performs a certain function for organism Y by mutating that gene, or that organism Y plays a certain role in ecosystem Z by temporarily removing it from the scene. Questions about the past—whether in cosmology, geology, paleontology, archaeology, or human cultural and political history—are different. We cannot do experiments in the past, so any attempt to reconstruct it must be based on indirect and inferential methods.

Evolutionary biologists who seek to reconstruct life’s history have three such inferential methods: (1) comparisons of the properties of living species; (2) study of relics, such as biological and chemical fossils, or apparently primitive features retained by modern cells; and (3) feasibility experiments. The comparative approach can in principle take us back to the last common ancestor of all currently living things, and the fossil record (biological and chemical) may go a bit further, to something close to the first cells. For the origin of earthly life itself, and perhaps even up through the appearance of the earliest true cells, we must rely on feasibility experiments. In these experiments, hypotheses about what might have happened in the past are shown to be plausible by demonstration that similar events can be made to happen today, in the lab.

Certainty and completeness in reconstructing life’s ancient history will never be possible, nor indeed are they possible even in reconstructing the very recent history of a nation or society. But it would be foolish to deny that we already know a tremendous amount, or that what we do know provides a compelling story of how past became present. This knowledge enriches our understanding of the biology of all contemporary living things.

(W. Ford Doolittle Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Dalhousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, The Origin and Early Evolution of Life, p 35, in Evolutionary Science and Society: Educating a New Generation, Revised Proceedings of the BSCS, AIBS Symposium November 2004, Chicago, IL)

[timoneill]

Nov 2, 2013 22:54:17 GMT unkleE said:

Thanks for that Tim. I have seen you say many of those things before, but there was significant material I hadn't read before and I found it very informative to read it in one consolidated document.

I think it is also worth noting that some science is not all that different to history. I have quoted this before, but it is worth repeating:

I'm currently reading John Lewis Gaddis The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past, where he says much the same thing. He particularly makes a distinction between different types of science, noting that "those sciences that rely on virtual rather than actual replicability as the means of verification" (p. 61) are actually very close to the way history works. Here he's referring to sciences like geology, palaeontology, some astrophysics and much evolutionary biology, where the phenomena studied are actually in the past and so can only be surmised from traces in the present. His book has convinced me that history is actually much closer to the sciences than I've previously thought.

[wraggy]

These may sound like dumb questions, but when you studied History at Uni do you learn a "method" of Historical Analysis? Are there standard text books for it? Or are you assigned certain reading and are expected to catch on to how it is done by gleaning from the material that is read?

[timoneill]

Nov 3, 2013 4:14:07 GMT wraggy said:

These may sound like dumb questions, but when you studied History at Uni do you learn a "method" of Historical Analysis? Are there standard text books for it? Or are you assigned certain reading and are expected to catch on to how it is done by gleaning from the material that is read?

For me, pretty much the latter. I only studied the theory behind it later.

[wraggy]

O.K. Thanks. I remember when I studied a bit of Theol that a lecturer told me that he was never taught an Exegetical Method but just taught to work through commentaries. This horrified the younger lecturer, who was taught the theory as a student, and who did teach the theory to his students. He felt that you should learn the theory and apply it to the text and only after having done that work, do you then turn to the commentaries.

Edit: By the way Tim, nice, clear article. Thanks.

[timoneill]

Someone posted a link to my article on the James Randi forum for discussion. Be warned - the resulting thread is painful to read.

[merkavah12]

Come on now, Tim. It can't be that....*click*

....bad?

Oh.

Oh dear.

[wraggy]

I remember reading one of Thony C's posts and he described himself as a Narrative Historian. My question is, what other forms of writing history are there than Narrative History?

[himself]

wraggy
There are analytical historians, who try to compare statistics (such as they are) across cultures and time periods rather than construct a narrative of events.