Adrian Currie

In defence of story-telling

We argue that narratives are central to the success of historical reconstruction. Narrative explanation involves tracing causal trajectories across time. The construction of narrative, then, often involves postulating relatively speculative causal connections between comparatively well-established events. But speculation is not always idle or harmful: it also aids in overcoming local underdetermination by forming scaffolds from which new evidence becomes relevant. Moreover, as our understanding of the pasts causal milieus become richer, the constraints on narrative plausibility become increasingly strict: a narratives admissibility does not turn on mere logical consistency with background data. Finally, narrative explanation and explanation generated by simple, formal models complement one another. Where models often achieve isolation and precision at the cost of simplification and abstraction, narratives can track complex changes in a trajectory over time at the cost of simplicity and precision. In combination both allow us to understand and explain highly complex historical sequences.

Introduction: Scientific knowledge of the deep past.

Historical scientists, from cosmologists to archaeologists, tackle important but difficult tasks: reconstructing the events and entities which populate the deep past, understanding their formation and development, and learning how to see our contemporary world in terms of its long history. Of late, philosophers have paid increasing attention to these epistemic challenges and the nature of such sciences (see Turner 2014). The papers collected here offer both a (by no means exhaustive) look at the variety of epistemic practices and targets found in the historical sciences and illustrate new directions in the philosophy of historical science. We take ‘historical scientists’ to be those involved in the scientific investigation of the deep past. Maureen O’Malley focuses on how molecular data has revolutionized phylogenetic reconstruction – and the epistemic challenges bred by that very success. Lindell Bromham uses a series of case studies to demonstrate the comparative method’s (see below) power in investigations of macroevolution. Both discuss how our incapacity to experiment directly on past subjects can be mitigated—mitigated in ways highly reminiscent of experimental method. Adrian Currie identifies a connection between the use of comparative data in biology and archaeology, which underwrites a re-evaluation of evidence in the latter. Derek Turner revisits inferences about extinct lineages based on fossilized remains, using a mistaken prediction of his own to discuss the difficulty, but necessity, of making predictions about future scientific success or otherwise. Somewhat serendipitously, each paper explores past targets at different scales. Currie looks at the archaeological challenge of interpreting rock art and the use of the ‘comparative method’ in paleoanthropology. Such methods involve comparing different cases, and using those comparisons to make empirical inferences. For instance, Currie discusses the use of island dwarfism in elephants and hippopotami to test theories of the same in hominids. He covers the shallow end of the deep past: a few thousand years for archaeology, a little over ten thousand for paleoanthropology. Wading deeper, Turner looks at recent efforts to extract information about dinosaur coloration from the fossil record—on a scale of tens of millions of years. Bromham discusses larger-scale questions, for instance the frequent evolution, but short lifetime, of salt-tolerant plant lineages. Such investigations not only expand our temporal scale to many millions of years, but our scope of concern: as opposed to considering the color of a few lineages, salt-tolerance is examined across the plant kingdom. Finally, O’Malley is interested in the use of molecular data to tackle questions about phylogenetic relationships among the earliest eukaryotes: the deep oceans of time, hundreds of millions of years ago (still

Beyond Brain Size

Despite prolonged interest in comparing brain size and behavioral proxies of ‘intelligence’ across taxa, the adaptive and cognitive significance of brain size variation remains elusive. Central to this problem is the continued focus on hominid cognition as a benchmark, and the assumption that behavioral complexity has a simple relationship with brain size. Although comparative studies of brain size have been criticized for not reflecting how evolution actually operates, and for producing spurious, inconsistent results, the causes of these limitations have received little discussion. We show how these issues arise from implicit assumptions about what brain size measures and how it correlates with behavioral and cognitive traits. We explore how inconsistencies can arise through heterogeneity in evolutionary trajectories and selection pressures on neuroanatomy or neurophysiology across taxa. We examine how interference from ecological and life history variables complicates interpretations of brain-behavior correlations, and point out how this problem is exacerbated by the limitations of brain and cognitive measures. These considerations, and the diversity of brain morphologies and behavioral capacities, suggest that comparative brain-behavior research can make greater progress by focusing on specific neuroanatomical and behavioral traits within relevant ecological and evolutionary contexts. We suggest that a synergistic combination of the ‘bottom up’ approach of classical neuroethology and the ‘top down’ approach of comparative biology/psychology within closely related but behaviorally diverse clades can limit the effects of heterogeneity, interference, and noise. We argue this shift away from broad-scale analyses of superficial phenotypes will provide deeper, more robust insights into brain evolution.

Accelerating the carbon cycle: the ethics of enhanced weathering

Enhanced weathering, in comparison to other geoengineering measures, creates the possibility of a reduced cost, reduced impact way of decreasing atmospheric carbon, with positive knock-on effects such as decreased oceanic acidity. We argue that ethical concerns have a place alongside empirical, political and social factors as we consider how to best respond to the critical challenge that anthropogenic climate change poses. We review these concerns, considering the ethical issues that arise (or would arise) in the large-scale deployment of enhanced weathering. We discuss post-implementation scenarios, failures of collective action, the distribution of risk and externalities and redress for damage. We also discuss issues surrounding ‘dirty hands’ (taking conventionally immoral action to avoid having to take action that is even worse), whether enhanced weathering research might present a moral hazard, the importance of international governance and the notion that the implementation of large-scale enhanced weathering would reveal problematic hubris. Ethics and scientific research interrelate in complex ways: some ethical considerations caution against research and implementation, while others encourage them. Indeed, the ethical perspective encourages us to think more carefully about how, and what types of, geoengineering should be researched and implemented.

Hot-Blooded Gluttons: Dependency, Coherence, and Method in the Historical Sciences

Our epistemic access to the past is infamously patchy: historical information degrades and disappears and bygone eras are often beyond the reach of repeatable experiments. However, historical scientists have been remarkably successful at uncovering and explaining the past. I argue that part of this success is explained by the exploitation of dependencies between historical events, entities, and processes. For instance, if sauropod dinosaurs were hot blooded, they must have been gluttons; the high-energy demands of endothermy restrict sauropod grazing strategies. Understanding such dependencies extends our reach into the past in spite of incomplete data. In addition, this serves as a counterexample to two accounts of method in the historical sciences. By one, historical science proceeds by identifying ‘smoking guns’: traces that discriminate between live hypotheses. By the other, historical hypotheses are supported by consilience: the convergence of independent lines of evidence. However, testing for ‘coherency’ between past hypotheses also plays a critical role in historical confirmation. Just as historical scientists exploit dependencies between past entities and present entities to infer what the past was like, they also exploit dependencies between past entities themselves. I do not suggest that archetypical historical science proceeds in this manner. Rather, the lesson I draw is that historical methodology cannot be characterized as archetypically relying on one method or another. Historical science is at base opportunistic, and is resistant to unitary analyses. 1. Introduction2. Snowballs and Explosions: The Basic Idea3. Were Sauropods Endothermic?4. Dependent Entities and Interdependent Explanations5. Smoking Guns and Consilience Introduction Snowballs and Explosions: The Basic Idea Were Sauropods Endothermic? Dependent Entities and Interdependent Explanations Smoking Guns and Consilience

Frameworks for Historians and Philosophers

The past can be a stubborn subject: it is complex, heterogeneous, and opaque. To understand it, one must decide which aspects of the past to emphasize and which to minimize. Enter frameworks. Frameworks foreground certain aspects of the historical record while backgrounding others. As such, they are both necessary for, and conducive to, good history as well as good philosophy. We examine the role of frameworks in the history and philosophy of science and argue that they are necessary for both forms of inquiry. We then suggest that the right attitude toward frameworks is pluralism rather than monism: there is no single correct framework to be applied to a given scientific episode. Rather, a multitude of different frameworks are more or less appropriate given various contexts and aims. From this perspective, good frameworks generate and further, rather than frustrate, historical and philosophical inquiry. Our view sheds light on historical disagreement and on the relationship between philosophy and history of science.

Forces, friction and fractionation: Denis Walsh’s Organisms, agency, and evolution

In Denis Walsh’s Organisms, Agency, and Evolution, he argues that new developments in the science of biology motivate a radical change to our metaphysical picture of life: what he calls ‘Situated Darwinism’. The central claim is that we should take the biological world to be at base about organisms, and organisms in a fundamentally teleological sense. We critically examine Walsh’s arguments and suggest further developments.