Science as History and Big History

Dan Allosso

The past finds its way into all types of disciplines. Historical speculation is done by everyone, including scientists and popular science writers. I recently read a really interesting little book by British science writer Colin Tudge. Called Neanderthals, Bandits & Farmers: How Agriculture Really Began, this 50-page essay speculates wildly about the fate of the Neanderthals, ascribes the origin of global Great Flood myths to dim memories of rising sea levels after the last ice age, and suggests that agriculture spread with the original human migrations, rather than being simultaneously discovered in many places afterward. It’s short on “facts” and long on speculation, but it’s really fascinating speculation. (I wish I had this guy’s agent!)

The sciences all deal with change over time. Evolution is history. So it’s no surprise to people who read science that they are reading history. But recently science has leaped onto the history shelves in the form of Big History. I wonder if history-readers excited about Big History are aware that in many cases they’re just reading science. We may be impressed by the novelty of a view that goes back to the big bang, but this is nothing new to the science-readers. Even Bill Bryson had a bestseller out (A Short History of Nearly Everything, 2003, which is a really good read) when David Christian’s Maps of Time was making waves among historians. Other good examples of science-histories include Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe and Michio Kaku’s Hyperspace, both of which are stories of both the history of the universe and of our expanding knowledge of it: or, histories and historiographies.

Actually, the heritage of that science-reader type of big history goes back to some very interesting documents like Robert Chambers’ 1844 Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which presents a case for evolution and has been credited with causing Darwin to keep his ideas secret for decades. But unlike these science texts, what big history does, is try to contextualize “small history.” This is something the scientists aren’t concerned with. Big History doesn’t do what Fernand Braudel did, and add scope—it actually undercuts regular history (at least momentarily) by its sheer geological and cosmic scale. Maybe it sometimes goes too far, and passes a point where the comparison becomes meaningless. But at least it reminds us that the world didn’t begin when people started keeping records.

The context that history like Braudel's brings is environmental, which is also not what the scientists are doing. Except perhaps in the sense of the Anthropic Principle, which argues (circularly) that things “had” to be this way because these are the basic cosmic conditions that enable life. The scientific perspective is usually materialist, but not determinist in the human sense. While some scientists argue that given complete information about the initial conditions of the universe, a sufficiently powerful computer could predict the future, others point to quantum uncertainty as the way out of this trap. Still others, following the hints of scientifically-inclined humorist Douglas Adams, might suggest that there’s only one computer big enough to solve this equation, and it already exists: the universe itself.

There are evolutionary biologists, and evolutionary psychologists. Are there actually any evolutionary historians, who have deliberately applied the ideas of modern evolutionary theory to history?

On Constructedness and Historiography

Randall Stephens

The September 24 issue of the NYRB contains a review essay on the limits of the "social construction of reality" school. In "Why Should You Believe It?" John R. Searle writes:

Relativism has a long history in our intellectual culture, and takes several different forms, such as relativism about knowledge and truth, ethical values, aesthetic quality, and cultural norms, to mention a few. Paul Boghossian's book concentrates on the first of these. The basic idea he opposes is that claims to objective truth and knowledge, for example the claim that hydrogen atoms have one electron, are in fact only valid relative to a set of cultural attitudes, or to some other subjective way of perceiving the world. Furthermore, according to relativism, inconsistent claims may have what he calls 'equal validity.' There can be no universally valid knowledge claims.

His insightful critique takes on some of the more woolly notions of social constructedness. "The currently most influential form of relativism," Searle notes, "is social constructivism, which [Paul A.] Boghossian defines as follows: "A fact is socially constructed if and only if it is necessarily true that it could only have obtained through the contingent actions of a social group."

One particularly Rococo application of constructivism that Searle points out made me laugh. In 1998 Bruno Latour famously argued that the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II could not have had tuberculosis, as recent researchers claimed, because the tuberculosis bacillus was only discovered by Robert Koch in 1882. Such conclusions make it seem like we live in a world woven completely from our wild imaginations. To what degree do individuals or groups actually make reality?

Social constructivism along with a focus on agency has had a profound influence on the history profession over the past two decades. And in my area of specialization, American religious history, it looms large. But it is not always an accurate or helpful lens through which to view the past. Dismissing critics of the theory as hapless modernists is not the same thing as engaging that criticism. I'll stop right there before I get too specific.

I would like to see what deep history scholars and those who work at the intersection of biology and history think about social constructivism.

Of Voles and Men

David Meskill

Can the study of voles—meadow mice or field mice (genus Microtus)—prepare one to produce valuable insights into human history? Peter Turchin thinks so. With Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall, the theoretical ecologist joins Jared Diamond, Peter Richerson, and a growing number of other biological scientists who have recently turned their sights on human history. Turchin believes his work on the dynamics of vole and other animal populations has given him the basic tools not only to illuminate a particular topic in history—the rise and fall of agrarian empires—but even more ambitiously, to advance history as a discipline.

In Historical Dynamics, Turchin develops and compares several theories in order to explain the dynamics of empires during the long agrarian phase of recorded human history. Early on he introduces a basic and very helpful distinction from population ecology, that between three “orders” of dynamic change or growth: 1) linear or exponential; 2) asymptotic or logistic; and 3) oscillatory. The first kind, limitless growth, almost never occurs, not only because growth requires resources and almost all resources are limited, but also because growth triggers debilitating feed-back mechanisms. For example, in the classic predator-prey situation, the growth of prey populations inevitably allows predators to run wild. This leaves the asymptotic/logistic dynamic, in which growth (whether of a linear or exponential kind) slows until it stabilized around an equilibrium, and the oscillatory dynamic, in which there is either a boom and bust or repeated ups and downs. In both the asymptotic/logistic and the oscillatory patterns, the nature of the feed-back mechanisms plays the decisive role. The key difference between the two—something not at first self-evident, but then readily grasped—is that the former can occur only if the feed-back is immediate and singular, whereas oscillations occur either if there is a lagged feed-back or if more than one feed-back is in operation. To explain the rise and fall of states, Turchin thus argues, we need to look for lagged or multiple feed-back mechanisms.

Turchin considers four processes that may contribute to the rise or fall of states. These are 1) the logistics of expansion, 2) ethnic assimilation, 3) ethnic frontiers as sources of internal cohesion, and 4) the interactions between population growth and political stability. For the first process, Turchin draws on and elaborates Randall Collins’ work on the geopolitics of expansion (which is similar to Paul Kennedy’s theory of imperial overreach). This theory focuses on the gains of expansion, such as increased resources and people to exploit, as well as the drawbacks, such as longer borders to defend and longer routes between core and periphery. Because these negative feedbacks should act fairly quickly, Turchin argues, Collins’ theory accounts at most for asymptotic dynamics: it may explain why states reach a point where they stop expanding, but it can’t explain why they eventually collapse. The second process—ethnic assimilation or lack thereof—also isn’t the main focus of Turchin’s book. It’s not rejected as a possible explanation for the fall of states, as geopolitics was, but rather it is not developed fully enough to address the central question adequately. Even so, Turchin’s brief treatment of processes of assimilation is fascinating and demonstrates the power of mathematical models to reveal surprising patterns. Relying, for example, on Rodney Stark’s argument and data about the social networks that were crucial in the spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire, Turchin shows that the “threshold” or “take-off” arguments that have often been proposed to explain Christianity’s “sudden” popularity in the third century are simply superfluous. The explanations they offer lead to a dead-end. The same exponential rate of growth (which Stark explains in terms of social networks) can account for both the increase of Christians from, say, .0017% of the Roman Empire’s population in 40 CE to still less than 1% in 200 CE, as well as the apparent “take-off” from 1.9% in 250 CE to 10.5% in 300 CE and 56.5% in 350 CE. An understanding of exponential growth takes the mystery out of something like Christianity’s only apparently explosive development in the third century—and thereby redirects our search for causes.

Turchin’s book is most valuable for two other explanations of the rise and fall of empires. His most original contribution relates to the role of what he calls “meta-ethnic frontiers.” Symptomatic of the breadth and productive eclecticism of his thought, Turchin begins here with an idea borrowed from the medieval Muslim thinker Ibn Khaldun, who is sometimes called the world’s first sociologist. Ibn Khaldun, in trying to explain the cyclical rise and fall of Arab states in North Africa, pointed to the key role of asabiya, the internal cohesion and moral strength of a group. The originally high asabiya of mountain tribesmen allowed them to conquer effete low-lying cities, but after some time the allures of urban life would reduce their own collective fortitude—opening the way for the cycle to begin all over again. To explain where asabiya comes from in the first place, Turchin points to Frederick Barth’s seminal study of tribal identity in Afghanistan: group identity is always highest in conflict with another group. When things like religion, language, and way of life (agricultural vs. pastoral) are radically different, the people on each side of the border—which Turchin refers to as a meta-ethnic boundary—will develop a fierce sense of loyalty to their own people.

After developing his model of the waxing of asabiya along meta-ethnic frontiers and its waning in the imperial interior, Turchin tests the theory in considerable detail against the history of state formation and decline in Europe from the Roman Empire to 1900 C.E. (sweeps of this kind are frequent in the book). He does so by dividing Europe into more than 50 regions and coding each of them in century-long intervals for the elements forming a meta-ethnic frontier (religious conflict, etc.), together yielding more than 2000 data points. He then plots these results against the later emergence of states above a certain threshold size. Meta-ethnic frontiers, he finds, explain most—though not all—subsequent instances of later formation of large states. The unexplained exceptions remain a problem, Turchin readily admits, and he explicitly solicits improvements to his theory. For now, however, he argues, what is crucial is that the meta-ethnic frontiers theory has much greater relative explanatory power than its main rival, Collins’ geopolitical approach. (A possible criticism at this point is that Turchin’s test of his theory may have involved some ad hoc adjustments. Already knowing the outcome to be explained [in this case, where states did, in fact, form] Turchin may have tweaked his parameters [for example, the choice of the boundaries of the sub-regions] in such a way as to confirm his theory. Such adjustments, often unintentional, are hard to avoid. Thus, other tests, in which the parameters are chosen without knowledge of the outcomes, would be desirable. Turchin, ever aware of methodological matters and modest in his claims, would almost certainly agree and, indeed, himself repeatedly encourages improvements on and challenges to his theories.)

If asabiya-generation on the frontier accounts mainly for the expansion of states up to a certain equilibrium, excessive population growth largely accounts for states’ subsequent collapse. Here Turchin borrows from and modifies Jack Goldstone’s demographic-structural account of the collapse of early modern states. Goldstone’s theory revolves around the indirect effects of Malthusian growth. I.e. a growing population doesn’t lead directly to starvation, but to a strain on state capacity, inflation, and both more intense elite exploitation of non-elites and greater intra-elite competition.

In the end, Turchin admits that he hasn’t been able to synthesize the various strands into a single unified account. This may be disappointing, but it also fits well with his refreshing modesty and, more than that, with his broader intellectual agenda. Turchin wants to bring to history the mind-set of the scientist. Theories are not (or are only rarely) complete or simply “right”; rather, we usually only have the choice between better and worse theories, those that explain more or less. Hence, in order to make progress, Turchin argues, it is crucial that we frame our arguments in as explicit a way as possible so that we can compare their explanatory power. Constructing mathematical models, he believes, is invaluable for these purposes of testing and comparison. Furthermore, history needs math because its dynamics often involve non-linear, lagged feedbacks—as demonstrated in the rise and fall of agrarian states. The underlying mechanisms of these oscillations are usually too complex to be captured by merely verbal models, and can only be grasped with the aid of explicit mathematical ones.

While becoming a leading ecologist, Turchin has somehow also found the time and energy to acquire vast erudition not only in historical, but also sociological, anthropological, and economic, literatures. This natural scientist doesn't simply or crudely apply lessons drawn from his studies of voles and other animals to human populations; rather, he attempts to combine some of those insights into dynamics with an awareness of factors that make human history even more complex. While he advocates a bold methodological position, the modesty with which he makes his case should absolve him of the charge of “intellectual imperialism” often thrown at earlier generations of social and natural scientists, who encroached on the turf of historians. Turchin goes to considerable lengths to explain his models in ways that are generally comprehensible (though one may have to dust off little-used knowledge from high school or college math). Historians who focus on the many fields from which Turchin draws his case studies (France, Russia, China, Islam, Christianity, Egypt, England) may, or may not, find his explanations convincing. Regardless, he will surely welcome the scrutiny and debate.

Splitting or Lumping—de gustibus non est disputandum?

David Meskill

I don’t read journal articles, especially on cultural and social history, very often. When I do, I frequently find myself not merely disappointed with particular entries, but deeply frustrated with the field of history as a whole. This is because so many historians see it as their task to be splitters, and just splitters. They try to find exceptions to others’ generalizations; they “interrogate”—in the current lingo—“grand” or “meta-narratives” they dislike. This is fine, as far as it goes. It’s the critical work necessary for any advance in knowledge. The problem is that these historians rarely add to the criticism any daring new construction, which is equally necessary for the kind of knowledge we should be producing. They don’t offer new, truer, bolder generalizations and narratives to replace the old, discredited ones. Or perhaps they do, but only by insinuation (see Foucault’s negative Whiggism: everything is getting worse). That is, these historians are not lumpers—creating bigger pictures of reality. They revel in the specificity of their interests.

I am a lumper, an outsider in my own field. So when I recently read some articles in cultural history, articles interrogating, splitting narratives in the history of emotions (it should be acknowledged that cultural history is the home turf of the splitters), I again found myself frustrated with the whole approach. But, I told myself in resignation, this was ultimately a matter of taste. Some people just like to split, others to lump.
Is that the case, however? Between splitting or lumping non est disputandum? Do we just leave it at that?

I now don’t think so. At least a couple of methodological considerations suggest we ought to encourage historians to engage in more lumping and less splitting (or perhaps less splitting merely as an end in itself).

First, the goal of any science or intellectual endeavor should be to discover the simplest possible explanations of the broadest swathe of the world. If explanation A accounts for 99 “facts” about the world and explanation B accounts for the same plus one more, B is an improvement over A. It’s what we should aim for. It may not be possible to explain more than 99 facts in that area, i.e. explanation B may be out of reach. But it would remain a heuristic goal. The same goes for simplicity: if explanations C and D both explain something equally well, but D is simpler than C, we should prefer it over C (Ockham’s Razor). The upshot of this is that, all things being equal, a simple grand narrative is better than small or complex narratives. Now, there may not be any simple grand narratives that are also true. But I have the feeling that many historians, especially cultural historians, are asserting more than this. They are not only saying there aren’t grand narratives; they are saying, or at least suggesting, that we shouldn’t even search for them, we shouldn’t even maintain the simple grand narrative as a heuristic goal. They not only ascertain the ostensible messiness of the world; they appear to revel in it as well. But as far as I can tell, they have never provided, or even attempted to provide, any cogent reasons for abandoning the aim of achieving simple explanations of as much of the world as possible.

The second reason to prefer lumping over splitting has to do with ideas drawn from fractal geometry. This field studies “self-similarity” at different scales, for example the ways in which a cloud, a coastline, or a snowflake has the same shape (puffy, jagged, intricate) regardless of how closely you look at it. Because of this, fractals are said to be infinitely complex. Applied to history, this raises significant problems for the whole splitting project. If you want to split, just where do you stop? Why deconstruct only so far as level X? Why not keep going, to level X-1, X-2, etc. ad infinitum? If the world is infinitely complex (and this is what the splitting approach can sometimes teasingly hint at—in the spirit of Clifford Geertz’ “turtles all the way down” comment) then no real knowledge is possible, and no one should be writing anything. It only makes sense to stop—and to write—if you think the world is not infinitely complex, if you think there are identifiable regularities at some level. But once a splitter admits this, he/she has given up his/her game, or at least the spirit behind it. For if we can generalize about the world, then—see the first point above—we should try to make those generalizations as broad (and elegantly simple) as possible. Then it’s right back up the stack of turtles, as far as we can go.

I’m not suggesting the profession only needs David Christians, William McNeills and Jared Diamonds. We need lots of specialists, too. But what I think we could use less of is the urge only to split without building up, without offering daring grand narratives. Splitting alone, especially when it revels in destruction, is neither intellectually coherent (point 2) nor worthy of our intellectual aims (point 1).

What Can Historians Learn from Biologists

David Meskill

Can historians learn anything from biologists? Jared Diamond’s 1997 book Guns, Germs, and Steel sparked a flurry of interest among at least some historians, who published a special forum in the American Historical Review and held panels at the annual AHA meetings. A more common response to Diamond, however, if I go by numerous conversations with historians, has been disapproval tinged with an almost visceral rejection. I surmise that this disdain derives from the book’s underlying biological premise: as with other species, Diamond argues, humans’ fates have been determined by the environment and the availability of natural resources. It may also have to do with Diamond’s emphasis on the long term and his relative lack of interest in individuals and events. None of these things - the biological roots of human behavior, environmental determinism, the disregard for particularities – historians can abide. In fact, most historians have probably not taken a stance one way or the other in regard to Diamond’s book – or to the growing number of intellectual encroachments by natural scientists onto terrain usually reserved for historians. Whether due to parochialism or indifference, we historians remain, as Daniel Lord Smail has put it, in the “grip of sacred history.” We still conceive of history as starting with civilization and written records some 5,500 years ago in Sumer.

The relatively generous attention paid to Diamond actually confirms the extent of the problem: Guns, Germs, and Steel was a gripping, popular (but not unserious) read. If it hadn’t been a best-seller, it almost certainly would not have earned the AHA’s attention. Less visible, but in many cases even more important, works by natural scientists usually go unnoticed by historians. Since the 1980s, for example, several schools of biologists and anthropologists have been developing ambitious theories of “coevolution.” These approaches treat human culture as an evolutionary system in its own right and investigate its properties and its interactions with its genetic counterpart. They thereby hope to develop comprehensive, indeed potentially revolutionary theories of human behavior, something one might think would be of interest to historians. Yet a JSTOR search reveals that none of these books received even one review in a historical journal.

They deserve better. The following is a review of one of such project: Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson’s 1985 book Culture and the Evolutionary Process. (The others are Luigi Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus Feldman’s Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach [1981] and William Durham’s Coevolution [1991].)

Culture, as Boyd and Richerson (B & R) define it, includes all episodes of social learning of ideas and behaviors, whether by teaching or imitation. B& R provide considerable evidence that social learning of this type – and not individual learning or rationality, as neo-classical economics and rational choice approaches assume – plays a predominant role in human behavior. They point to the numerous cases of “cultural inertia,” in which people don’t respond to new circumstances, even for generations (see, for example, David Hackett Fischer’s excellent book, Albion’s Seed, on the persistence of different English folkways in America), and to psychologists’ plentiful evidence that people operate by various, often inaccurate, rules of thumb.

According to B & R, culture shares with genetic inheritance the three crucial ingredients necessary for an evolutionary system: variation, inheritance, and selection. I.e. people have different ideas and act in a variety of ways; they pass along these cultural traits to “cultural offspring,” who usually include their biological offspring, but can also include friends, students, etc.; finally, some cultural traits get passed on more often than others (for reasons to be discussed below). B & R therefore call their model a “dual inheritance” theory.

Crucially, the two inheritance systems, while similar, are not identical. Cultural evolution allows for “acquired variation.” It is Lamarckian. In genetic evolution the behavior of an individual has no effect on the genes she/he passes on. With culture, however, an individual can learn something on her/his own or otherwise pick and choose from her/his cultural heritage. What she/he passes on to cultural offspring has been changed. Additionally, in cultural evolution there can be many “parents,” not just the two of biological reproduction.

B & R distinguish between several different “forces” giving cultural evolution its directions. The first two, which belong together, they call “guided variation” and “direct bias.” Guided variation involves the interaction of individual learning, or innovation, and cultural evolution by social learning. Despite having culturally inherited certain ideas or behaviors, individuals are also capable of assessing their surroundings and options and developing a new response, one they did not inherit. For example, a medieval farmer stumbles upon a different way to plow his fields. If he can ascertain that this is an improvement over traditional methods – something that may not be easy to evaluate - he is then likely to pass on this new variant to his cultural offspring, in this case primarily his sons but perhaps also neighbors. Direct bias, on the other hand, is less innovative: the person does not invent a new response, but adopts one of the various options she has inherited from various cultural parents. However, a certain predisposition may favor – directly bias – one kind of cultural alternative over the others. In the cases of both guided variation and direct bias, criteria are needed to make individual judgments. And these criteria, B & R argue, must come from our genes, i.e. from biological natural selection. For this reason, they refer to these two forces as socio-biological. That is, cultural inheritance will track and reinforce biological inheritance.

With the other forces – which, B & R argue, are likely to be more important than guided variation or direct bias - this is not necessarily the case. The socio-biological forces depend on individual learning or discrimination: even in the case of direct bias, the individual has to make judgments about the available options, which bias to apply, and how to do so. But gathering such information has costs, which opens the door to other, less costly “forces” affecting social learning. Two of these are “indirect bias” and “frequency bias.” With the first, one individual identifies another whom he deems successful – an older brother, a village headman, a movie star - and copies many behaviors from him. Overall, this process is less costly because the first individual is not trying to assess which behaviors of the cultural parent have caused the latter’s success; he simply copies many or all of them. However, in some instances, B & R argue, costly “runaway” processes can ensue: people go to great lengths to dress like rock stars they admire, efforts that could never be justified in terms of clothes’ evolutionary selective power. The process is akin to the evolution of the peacock’s tail, in which an arms race over sexual attraction may impair the creatures’ survival. Frequency bias means that people simply copy the most frequent cultural variant, which will often prove to be a simple, efficient strategy.

A final force is natural selection, not of genes, in this case, but of cultural variants. This arises because genetic and cultural evolution are asymmetrical. We inherit our genes from our mother and father and the same two individuals are often important for imbuing us with our ideas and behaviors. However, we often inherit cultural variants from many other sources as well (siblings, teachers, friends, religious leaders, public figures). These non-parental sources will become relatively more important as we age. If we only inherited culture from our parents, B & R argue, we might expect that those ideas and behaviors would track or conform to the biological impulses we inherited from them: for example, we would imbibe the idea that having large families is a good thing. However, the existence of asymmetrical strands of cultural inheritance means that ideas and values can spread that may run counter to our biological imperative (and hence to what our biological parents on their own would teach us). Thus, teachers and other professionals may spread the message that professional success - something they themselves have achieved, and which requires sacrifices of the time and energy necessary for physical reproduction – is of great value. A Darwinian competition would then ensue – between biological parents and teachers over whose ideas and values would spread faster. B & R make a convincing case that this kind of asymmetric inheritance and the resulting natural selection of cultural variants probably lie at the root of the current, extraordinary demographic revolution. People, especially in affluent countries, are having fewer and fewer babies. Biology and biological Darwinism would predict just the opposite: as resources increase – as they have for humans over the last century or more, especially in industrialized countries – birth rates should steadily increase. In these cases, B & R say, the cultural variant “enjoy your own life, be successful professionally, don’t acquire these noisy, troublesome little creatures” has undermined the biological imperative to reproduce as much as possible.

Because of these final three forces – indirect bias, frequency bias, and natural selection of culture – cultural evolution will often come into tension with the dictates of biological evolution. They help to explain the internal conflicts that individuals experience much the way Freud described the struggles between id and superego. They also distinguish B & R’s approach from a strictly socio-biological one and from William Durham’s 1991 Coevolution, which foresees greater – though still not complete - congruence between biology and culture.

Finally, B & R ask how cultural evolution itself could have arisen in the first place? This is especially acute given cultural evolution’s frequent (biologically) maladaptive consequences. The generic answer is that as long as culture is overall biologically adaptive, its benefits outweigh its considerable costs. More specifically, culture may be expected to arise under particular environmental circumstances. If the environment remains constant for long periods, the best strategy is to hard-wire behavior in genes. This eliminates the costs associated with learning, either of the individual or social kind. If, on the other hand, the environment changes significantly quite frequently, then not only is genetic hardwiring the wrong strategy. Social learning, with its inertia, is as well. Under these circumstances, individual learning is the best option. Social learning – which allows for limited individual learning and variation – is best when the environment remains fairly constant but changes to some degree. In later work, B & R suggest that this was precisely the environment during the ice ages starting 2.5 million years ago and lasting until 12,000 years ago.

Culture and the Evolutionary Process is a challenging work. B & R rely frequently on mathematical models, which will not always be easy to follow unless one already has considerable facility with such methods. However, the authors always take the trouble to walk the reader through the main steps and, most important of all, the conclusions of the models. They also offer tangible examples from history and other social sciences to illustrate their points. The book should be required reading for anybody interested in “big” or “deep” history. Even at smaller time scales, the book offers a very stimulating framework for analysis, especially for thinking about broad patterns of social and cultural development. So, can historians learn anything from biologists? Yes – if they are willing.

David Meskill received his Ph.D. in Modern European History from Harvard University in 2003. He will be Assistant Professor of History at Dowling College in fall 2009. He blogs regularly at http://davidmeskill.blogspot.com/