Scientists as historians

I'm supposed to be marking essays, but the reaction to Thony's recent guest articles has triggered in me a conditioned reflex: the uses and abuses of history by scientists.

Historians have a certain way to pursue their profession - it involves massive use of documentary evidence, a care taken to avoid naming heroes and villains, and in general a strong devotion to the minutae and detail of history, instead of the now-old-fashioned grand sweeps of a Toynbee or Marx. Sure, they disagree how to interpret things, including mindsets of agents in another time, but overall when a historian gives an account, you can be sure they at least tried to be even handed.

Scientists, however, are not historians, and they have a whole different set of interests and goals when they appeal to history. They tell a simplified narrative in which there are good guys (the scientists and their supporters whose ideas can be interpreted to support the modern consensus) and bad guys (their opponents, particularly if they are religious, social conservatives - or, if the author is a conservative, the radical left - or some demonic profession of waste and nonsense like philosophy). These simple narratives are often incorporated into textbooks, lectures and the general mythology. Kuhn called it, rightly, textbook history.

Even when you get a massive tome like The Growth of Biological Thought, full of facts, names, dates and apparent concern for detail, when one looks closely at the quotes and players, one sees that there has been a careful selection of favourable (to the narrative) information, and the quiet exclusion of unfavourable. Mayr even states that he is practising Whig History because in science it's actually all right, saying that he agreed with an older author who preferred to be subjective (p13).

Polly Winsor, a Canadian historian of science, has published on this. She writes that the use of history by scientists is subordinate to the scientific game itself. The ways in which prior work is characterised depends significantly on the hopes the scientists has for the future of their discipline. Historians notionally (more often honoured in the breach than the observance, one fears) do not. So what I'd like to do is suggest some reasons for the ways scientists use, and abuse, history.

1. It's easier to teach and discuss straightline history. Famously, Imré Lakatos (1970:120) argued that the reconstructed history was good enough - we can relegate the actual history to a footnote. If you are teaching your students, or arguing about the nature of science, such details are distracting and undercut the propaedeutic or polemic point you are trying to make.

2. It gives the scientists a warm fuzzy feeling about what they are doing. It's easier to devote your life to a task if you think that task is at the pinnacle of human endeavour, so heroic figures and quantum leaps are the stuff of spin.

3. It engages the public, thus assisting in the getting of funding and future scientists. Simple stories can be told in popular science magazines, or appealed to as the common view. These are often the views that find their way into museum exhibits, popular science books, science articles in the popular media, and of course the portrayal of science in film (which is, marginally, better than the "frankenscience" narrative that is their first choice).

But here's the major reason scientists use history, I think:

4. It is something one can use politically. Scientists are engaged in a political process of competition for resources, students, reputation and personal reward. Bu appealing to "forerunners", heroic and successful, one gives one's own school, program, project or lab kudos. History is, in effect, a rhetorical weapon against one's competitors, and a way to unify one's colleagues.

Mind, I don't think that politicking is somehow unworthy of science. In fact I think it is necessary, as I argued in my most recent paper. It actually acts to drive progress, not only by driving selection, but by preventing socially convenient solutions from being acquiesced in. However, it means that as history politically driven accounts are rarely accurate. Consider the following: "Lamarckism". Lamarck himself was not guilty of Lamarckism as currently defined. It was formulated as a sin (or as a virtue!) when contrasted with August Weismann's notion of the germ line. But for over a century since then, people who want to denigrate a view have called it "Lamarckian", and those who like Ted Steele want to highlight their "radicalness" have called their view "Lamarckian". It has gotten tied up with molecular notions like the so-called Central Dogma being called "Molecular Weismannism".

Why should history not subserve science? I think that there is a very simple reason - once you lose the empirical grounding in evidence, history can be made to play any role one requires. In short, it becomes PR and propaganda. And we lose some useful information: often the opposing schools that "lost" had ideas of great utility that need to be preserved. Losing in science is not a once and for all thing. But mostly I dislike textbook history because it just annoys the hell out of me. If someone in the past had something good to say, or even was wrong but not in a simplistic manner, then they should be remembered for saying it they way they actually did, and not the way it suits some modern scientists to put it.

Late note: Bob O'Hara also said something like this a while back. Sorry I forgot to link.

Back to marking...

Refs

Lakatos, Imre. 1970. Falsification and the methodology of scientific research programmes. In Criticism and the growth of knowledge, edited by I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave. London: Cambridge University Press: 91-196.

Wilkins, John S. 2008. The adaptive landscape of science. Biology and Philosophy. In Press...

Winsor, Mary Pickard. 2004. Setting up milestones: Sneath on Adanson and Mayr on Darwin. In Milestones in Systematics: Essays from a symposium held within the 3rd Systematics Association Biennial Meeting, September 2001, edited by D. M. Williams and P. L. Forey. London: Systematics Association: 1-17.

More like this

Good points. Question: as a scientist, am I ethically challenged if I use history in the way you describe instead of the way history is done by professionals?

I'm not a historian; but, like them, it gets my hackles up when somebody quotes a historical figure and then interprets the remarks to mean what somebody would have been getting at if they said that now. Maybe the tendency to flatten everything out comes from a reluctance to read anything that was written more than a few years ago. Since we never feel at home with the way people used to look at things, we don't get it that they had other priorities and perspectives than we do, that what they thought wasn't an error in our game, but something quite meaningful in theirs. And that makes our world rather poorer, I think.

Coturnix: yes. If you can't teach the science without mangling history, don't use history. Fables are not teaching facts...

Jim, completely agree. The shallowness of modern society with respect to history is almost as bad as the presentism of the older generations.

One of the interesting things about this course I'm teaching is that it has stimulated me to read people like Cuvier (in translation!) and Owen and Huxley and Gray. They're becoming human beings rather than caricatures, engaged in what was for them very important business, and they're waaaay smarter than the caricatures. Cuvier's explanation of his research plan -- why he was doing what he was doing with quadruped fossils -- is remarkable, and his beliefs about multiple catastrophes and the recent appearance of humans were not whimsical, nor were they ideologically (or religiously) driven: he had good empirical reasons for them that he lays out at exhaustive(ing) length.

Oh, and Cuvier's fun to read, too, because every once in a while he sneaks in a snarky remark directed at one or another rival. :)

Jim Harrison wrote:

I'm not a historian; but, like them, it gets my hackles up when somebody quotes a historical figure and then interprets the remarks to mean what somebody would have been getting at if they said that now.

As well as famously defining waggish history Herbert Butterfield also said that all historians interpret the past in the reflection of their own present. Doing this is almost unavoidable and it is, in my opinion the duty of the historian of science to try and reach an understanding of what something meant in the context in which it was uttered, created, discovered or whatever. I am by no means alone in this and the contextual approach is flavour of the month in the modern historiography of science. However as a historian one should also be aware that this approach can, at best, only be partially successful. There is no way, for example, that I as a sceptical, atheistical naive realist living in the 21st century can understand how Kepler. whilst successfully defending his mother against a charge of witchcraft, could at the same time actually believe that she was a witch! He most certainly did so and the best that I can do as a historian is to accept it as a fact and live with it, I will certainly never be able to put myself into his position.

John: excellent post and if I in anyway provoked it then I am very glad that my presence here has produced something positive ;) Provoked by the same post from Blake Stacey, that you link to, I was thinking of writing something on this theme but you have done so much more eruditely than I ever could. If I am allowed to keep squatting on your two square metres of cyberspace I shall post something soon on a couple of well-known cases of presentism that are regularly trotted out not just by scientists but also unfortunately by a large number of historians.

"1. It's easier to teach and discuss straightline history. Famously, Imré Lakatos (1970:120) argued that the reconstructed history was good enough - we can relegate the actual history to a footnote. If you are teaching your students, or arguing about the nature of science, such details are distracting and undercut the propaedeutic or polemic point you are trying to make."

Lakatos did not argue that rational reconstructions were "good enough." His stance was that when writing an historical case study of science, one should use a two step method. First, give the rational reconstruction. Second, compare that rational reconstruction with actual history in order to criticize both the rational reconstruction with respect to history and history with respect to the rational reconstruction.

I hope that ethnology as well as history will become increasingly involved in looking at the beliefs and fables which are discussed and confronted by the early empiricists. Science perhaps needs to grasp it's own ethnology alongside it's history. I have come to greatly admire figures like Sir Thomas Browne who in using comparative anatomy to dismiss a range of fabulous creatures is having to confront and question his own religious beliefs. In some of his writings his anxiety is clear to see and understandable as an accusation of heresy or traffic with Satan was a very real threat.

Coming to understand some of the 'mistakes' of the early empiricists throws light on contemporary concerns, most notable that of intelligent design. To understand better the history and ethnology of such belief systems may help a wider audience to identify exactly what species of canard such views are based on.

By Jeb McLeish (not verified) on 13 Sep 2008 #permalink

p.s I wrote the above remarks before reading (somewhat open mouthed) the debate between A.C Grayling and S. Fuller. I would agree with Fuller that I.D should be taught but alongside the creation myths which such non-empirical beliefs stem from. Such fairy stories are a matter for ethnology not science.

I thought Fullers views were knocked on the head at the close of the 17th century. But I am clearly mistaken.
Amazing.

By Jeb McLeish (not verified) on 13 Sep 2008 #permalink