Well, we did it! The first episode of Rationally Speaking, the podcast, is out and available both directly from our New York City Skeptics-sponsored web site and from the iTunes store. The second episode will come out in time for Valentine’s Day, and it will focus on the science and philosophy of love. For our third podcast we will have our first live guest, Prof. Peter Turchin from the University of Connecticut. Peter is a biologist by training, with interests ranging from theoretical ecology to population biology to biostatistics. In particular, much of his work has focused on what determines population cycles, a problem to which he has applied an array of statistical and conceptual tools, including chaos theory.
More recently though, Peter has made headlines in Nature magazine for work at the borderlines between science and of all things, history. He has published three books on the topic: Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall (Princeton University Press, 2003), War and Peace and War: The Life Cycles of Imperial Nations (Pi Press, 2006), and Secular Cycles (co-authored with S.A. Nefedov, Princeton University Press, 2009).
In War and Peace and War Peter argues that empires (his examples include the Roman and Russian empires as well as the United States) form and collapse because of continuous cycles of cooperation and conflict. Initially, humans band together and cooperate in the face of common enemies or other challenges, but then increasing prosperity is not equally distributed, with rich people becoming disproportionately rich. This causes conflict, and the consequent breakdown of cooperation, which in turn leads to collapse.
Of course, Peter is not the only scientist to have turned to history in an attempt to make that field more scientific, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse immediately come to mind (interestingly, unlike Turchin, Diamond argues that the collapse of civilization is the result of environmental disasters, not of internally generated social disruptions). And naturally, many historians vehemently object to what they perceive as a crude scientistic attempt at interdisciplinary colonization.
Which raises the question of the podcast, and about which Julia and I would like to hear your opinion: can history be studied and understood in a scientific manner? Are there patterns and logic(s) to history, or is it, as the saying goes, just one damn thing after another? For that matter, how do we determine where the demarcation line — as Karl Popper famously called it — between science and non-science falls, and why?
Where good historical research bares similarity to “hard” sciences is in the collection and documentation of exhaustive facts, the facts collected in turn offer an opportunity to comment on a pattern that may emerge (if finding a pattern is the subject of the research, for instance in Robert Paxton excellent historical research -The anatomy of fascism, highly recommended for its careful use of language and the exhaustive research it presents)
However… in matters of opinion and definition some historical arguments can be contested, take for instance Peter Turchin’s assertions, It is not at all clear that the United States qualifies as an empire if we examine it in relation to other empires throughout history, this very assertion can be challenged from the outset, nor does it conflict with Jared diamond, maybe it complements it.
The desire for an impartial outlook on subject matter is much easier to achieve when we examine something akin to a comet trajectory then the course of human events. Points of view, language, gender biases and many other variables come into play when we engage in historical research.
The incredibly complex problems facing sciences like climate research are similar to what historical research faces everyday, the challenge of dealing with a massive amount of variables, not all of which are documented or known, while attempting to reach a holistic conclusion.
Ultimately one thing is true for both scientific and historical research, that being in the words of Einstein “sciences are to some extent debatable and in constant danger of being overthrown by newly discovered facts” Only Math is exempt to some degree form this predicament
In my opinion, historical research is without a doubt an inherently scientific endeavor. It follows a similar scientific process and its conclusions are peer reviewed. There’s the same demand for evidence and a clear list of criteria that historians look for when trying to determine the historicity of a particular figure or event such as archaeological artifacts, contemporaneous and corroborating accounts, enemy attestation to name a few.
Interestingly, while historians continue to debate the existence, for instance, of a historical Jesus, none of the evidence historians generally look for can be sufficiently presented while a figure like say Julius Caesar passes all the criteria historians would expect to find to authenticate his existence.
Like with evolution, historical research requires piecing together the events after the fact from the clues available and all claims are subject to revision upon the arrival of new evidence.
I’d say that history is like science in the way that it is a historian’s task to create propose hypotheses based on perceived trends, and then prove that hypotheses using data. It is, like science, about the application of critical thinking over a large body of data.
History is unscientific in at least two important ways. First off, the only test you can perform is “Well let’s wait another couple centuries and then we’ll see who was right!” Also, from my memory of when I used to study history fairly seriously, it is relatively accepted in history to start with a conclusion and then find evidence that backs it up, which is an inherently unscientific approach.
I look at it in the same way as I look at similarities between math and language. Math is a language, and the skills needed to learn it are similar to the skills needed to perfect your skills in say, your own language or to learn a new one. It’s all about learning syntax, recognizing what seems to come after what, figuring out how to express questions and be intelligible within the terms of mathematics. But math is also a far more logically built language than English. It doesn’t have all those moments where we suddenly say, “wait… why does that combination of letters sound like that? Oh! Because the Normans conquered the English a millenia and a half back and this filtered into the language.” Weird spellings, multiple language roots, it’s not built in the same logical progression. In the same way, history is a discipline of critical thinking. It’s more about the methodology that you employ than the conclusions that you come up with. However, I’m going to be far more inclined to trust the conclusions of a scientist studying some new genetic pattern than say, a Marxist historian’s reinterpretation of the economics of the past decade.