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Evidence and the Instability of Biology

THERE IS AN IMPORTANT DIFFERENCE BETWEEN history and the past, and it powers both the evident force of the thought-provoking essays in this roundtable, and the skepticism and general discomfort of those who would prefer not to intertwine biology with historical work. Historians do not, cannot, have direct access to the past; neither can biologists, or anyone else for that matter. What we all have are collections of traces—manuscripts, rocks, phonemes, fossils, genetic sequences, built structures— that we interpret today to create a narrative about what happened before. In this, biologists and historians have a good deal in common: both groups (not to mention the historians and biologists who learn from each other or collaborate) want to answer current questions about the past, using what the past has left us to work with. Without recognizing this shared aspiration, we are unable to speak coherently about the very real distinctions that shape each domain of inquiry. Those contrasts inflect the very core of historical practice, and we need to be careful about when and how we choose to blur them. The essays, both individually and as a whole, summon many reactions; I will confine myself to two general clusters. First, we must account for the straightforward complaint by the authors about historians’ tremendous resistance to incorporating findings and methods from biology in their research. I certainly do not dispute the observation—the resistance is there—and it behooves us, as historians, to try to figure out where it comes from. Most contributors did not offer an account of its origins, but those who did located it principally in the sociobiology debates of the mid-1970s. Diagnosing the problem that way, I believe, risks flattening both the malady and the prognosis. My second, and more central, point concerns how we might best engage with scientific material, as a matter of historical practice. This concerns the use of sources, and all historians’ debates at some level hinge on that issue.