The human mind comes ill-equipped to study scientific history. The historical imprint to be found in naturally occurring objects (e.g., population genetic samples) is not readily obvious. The limited perception of scientific history by the human mind is due to history representing a continuous process and comprising much chance. The human mind is designed, in contrast, to think in terms of absolutes and to be overly purposeful. This may be due, in part, to selection for reciprocal altruistic behaviors among social animals (see text pages 471-477 for a brief introduction – an overview will be given in class). The following concepts aid the handicapped human mind in the study of scientific history.

1. Genealogy (relationships among individuals) and phylogeny (relationships among alleles, genes, populations, species, and higher taxa) help counter overly purposeful thinking about evolutionary history. Orthogenesis, one of the components of Lamarckian evolution, is directed evolution from primitive to advanced forms (i.e., unperfected to perfected, inferior to superior, or lower to higher). The concepts of genealogy and phylogeny force us to consider the relationships of all living beings, from alleles to higher taxa, in the same way we consider our own family relationships.

2. Scientific and Folk History. Folk histories are the same as creation myths and give purpose to a particular people. The origin of American baseball is an excellent example of a folk history. Abner Doubleday, a civil war hero, invented American baseball during 1839 in Cooperstown, New York. The Baseball Hall of Fame and the Doubleday Field are both located in Cooperstown. Baseball, however, evolved over 200 years from stick-and-ball games played by the lower class in at least England. The myth of baseball, however, serves to distinguish American culture from other (e.g., British) cultures. In folk history, facts fit the purpose of distinguishing culture.

Scientific history (geology, cosmology, and evolutionary biology) provides no evidence of purpose for humans and exist without regard to particular peoples, places, and times. In the historical sciences, like all of science, theories explain the factual state of the world. For example, the theory of natural selection explains the balance of cooperation and selfishness in social animals, and why in human societies true communism is not predicted to endure whereas fascism and racism unfortunately are).

3. Chaos Theory. Chaos theory (e.g., J. Gleick, 1987. Chaos: making a new science. Viking, Penguin) best describes evolutionary history: the interaction of deterministic (purposeful) and stochastic (chance within bounds) processes. Genealogies are shaped by the interaction of a deterministic (adaptation via natural section) and stochastic processes (mutation and genetic drift). Scientific theories, in contrast to folk histories, are not strictly deterministic or purposeful. Fractal geometry is also part of chaos theory and relates to evolutionary biology in that the allele, gene, individual, population, and higher taxon are subject to the same processes.

4. Neutrality (selective equivalence). The watchful eye of natural selection assigns all neutral variants a fitness of one or nearly so. Neutral variation is most informative historically because it often comprises similarity not due to functional constraint (i.e., homology) and can be explained only by inheritance from a common ancestor. Neutral variation is analogous to surname variation – it is arbitrary and needs no purposeful explanation.

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