Exploring a science of history

Historians might be considered the butterfly collectors of the past. Both groups are famous for launching into detailed descriptions of the particular — the complex factors contributing to the Roman empire’s collapse, the camouflaging striations on a butterfly wing.

But butterfly collectors, and other naturalists, usually fit their findings into the overarching story of evolution. Meanwhile, historians tend to avoid making claims about larger patterns at work in historical human behavior.

“In history, we have scholars who are more interested in collecting and observing the particular than in creating models to fit the particular into bigger-picture explanations. We’re so afraid of reductionism that we avoid risk-taking and ignore really interesting hypotheses,” says SFI Fractal Faculty member Kyle Harper, a classical historian at the University of Oklahoma.

Inspired by conversations last year during an SFI working group on contingency and determinism, Harper co-organized a stand-alone meeting about the field of history.

This year's workshop on the “Science of History” was held at SFI June 16–18 and explored a series of provocative questions: How do laws and regularities in a domain like physics differ from those in human history? How might history be an evolutionary science? How does causation work in history? And finally, is it possible to define progress in human culture?

“This is a new version of a conversation that’s been going on for at least 20 years at SFI about the relationship between historical sciences, paleontology, evolution, archaeology, and history. How do you develop laws and generalities for historical disciplines writ large?” says co-organizer and SFI External Professor Doug Erwin, a paleobiologist.

A more scientific history would follow in the footsteps of many disciplines that worry about the complicated relationships between the particular and the general. “For 100-plus years, paleontology was a highly descriptive, almost narrative approach to science: What’s the fossil? Where did you find it? How is it preserved? It was almost as particularist as history is now,” says Erwin. “But in the 1980s and ‘90s, the paleobiological revolution started asking larger and much more quantitative questions.”

However, philosophers at the SFI workshop put pressure on the idea that a science of history could even exist. “If historians try to bring in too much science, it may squeeze out the question of human freedom,” says workshop co-organizer and SFI Research Fellow Tony Eagan. “That’s a problem, especially for historical inquiries that consider governance and how social life, culture, and the state are best organized. I appreciated that the meeting tried to define not just history but also science, and how big their Venn diagram really is.”

The workshop addressed how historians have turned away from the sciences and even the social sciences, says UCLA professor of modern European history Lynn Hunt, who spoke at the workshop about changes in the field of history over time and the place of the digital humanities. “Historians have been nervous about how supposedly scientific perspectives can be used to nefarious political ends. There’s an inbred suspicion that science will be used to justify inequalities, instead of being used to study how we get inequalities,” she explains.

Hunt found the SFI meeting a step in the right direction to foster more productive collaboration between scientific and humanistic researchers. “Existing digital humanities efforts usually focus on digitizing as opposed to analyzing. They have not fully encouraged humanists to apply other kinds of models to all this wonderful data that is being collected,” she says.

Philosophers like Michael Strevens of New York University found it useful at the workshop to explore the limits of a science of history.

“On a busy street in New York City, people don’t bump into each other because they adapt their movements to be regular and predictable. These regularities are common in human behavior,” Strevens says. “But what happens when people use their faculties not to make things regular, but to create something truly revolutionary or even catastrophic? Think about the panic that might occur in a financial crisis, or the enthusiasm for change that might lead to a political revolution. Human agency can make such things very hard to predict.”

The mix of historians, archaeologists, sociologists, biologists, philosophers of science, physicists, and complexity scientists at the workshop proved fruitful, provoking the kinds of conversations that can push history to move beyond merely collecting metaphorical butterflies, and actually integrate data into a wider view. Participants have already started arranging further collaborations.

“To get at foundational issues about what history is, you need perspectives from complex-systems science and from evolutionary biology,” says co-organizer Harper. “At the workshop, we tried to tackle a profound question: How do we think about our own past? We need to grapple with the question of culture and the uniqueness of the human chapter of evolutionary history — while at the same time seeking continuities with the long evolutionary past, as well as with deep principles of complexity that span various adaptive systems.”

This event is supported by the James S. McDonnell Foundation Grant Number 220020491, Adaptation, Aging, and the Arrow of Time. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the James S. McDonnell Foundation.