Excerpt

The fossil record of animal life is far more incomplete and patchy than even the most obscure historical records. Consequently, some of the approaches developed by paleobiologists over the past couple of decades to assess the reliability of the fossil record, investigate patterns, and infer underlying processes may be useful in analyzing historical data as well. Here I discuss two examples where paleontologists have investigated historical questions, in one case, the evolution of cornets, in the second, estimating the survival rate of Medieval manuscripts. Depending on the scope of Big History, there are a number of areas where history and paleontology overlap, particularly in the investigation of early human history. More rigorous analysis of the biases of the historical record may be of some use in determining which historical patterns are sufficiently reliable for further exploration. 

Introduction

Paleontology, astronomy, geology, and archaeology and aspects of evolutionary biology are historical sciences. They differ fundamentally in their approach and methods from largely ahistorical disciplines such as physics, chemistry, physiology, and much of molecular biology [5, 21, 25]. Physicists often assert that because they are not predictive, historical sciences are no more science than history. Such assertions commit at least two errors. 

The first is to ignore the vastly greater number of potential variables in historical disciplines than in physics, with an attendant increase in the complexity of interactions between them (physics is predictive because its subject matter is relatively simple). Complex dynamics make a mockery of prediction, as evidenced by the lack of reliable climate and earthquake forecasts (see discussion by Krakauer, ch. 6, this volume). But not even the most arrogant physicist (perhaps a redundant class) would doubt that the study of climate and earthquakes is scientific. 

The second logical error is that of uniformitarianism (also known as actualism). Physicists assume (the proof is more difficult) that their underlying laws are constant through time and space. They are not perplexed by the possibility that the speed of light or the nature of the neutrino was different 2.5 billion years ago or on the other side of the Universe. In historical disciplines the uniformitarian assumption is far less reliable and often demonstrably false. Indeed a promising question to explore in many historical sciences is how historical processes change through time. True, the historical sciences have less recourse to direct experiment, and their evidence may often be fragmentary or missing. Yet the historical sciences have developed a range of statistical and quantitative techniques to assess the reliability of historical data, quantify patterns of change, and develop models of the underlying processes and the more limited use of narrative. 

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