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Why the sciences need the humanities
By carstenherrmannpillath | April 30, 2008
When I was travelling the long haul from Germany to Australia and China recently, I took a book with me that I wanted to read for a long time, always scared by its sheer size: Stephen Gould’s “Structure of Evolutionary Theory“. The aim of that trip was to attend the cultural science workshop at Brisbane. On my way back home, I was amazed how that choice of readings matched the topic of the workshop.
Gould’s magnificent book is a great example that the humanities are an indispensible input to the sciences. Gould himself works partly as a historian of science, painstakingly analyzing documents and original writings of leading biologists of the 19th and 20th century. He is also famous for his use of architecture to make an important point on exaption in evolutionary theory, “he spandrels of San Marco”. His approach reminded me very much of a remark made by Ernst Mayr, one of the foremost biologists of the 20th century, made in an interview on occasion of his hundredth birthday. I used this remark as motto in my 2000 book “Evolution of Culture and the Economy: Elements of a Transdisciplinary Method” (in German). He said, that the dividing line between functional biology and evolutionary biology runs along the same line as between the sciences and the humanities.
I think that there are two fundamental reasons why the sciences need the humanities. With ‘humanities’ I refer to the old-fashioned notion proposed by the German philosopher Dilthey, i.e. the ‚ideographic’ sciences of the mind, the Geisteswissenschaften.
The first reason is that the sciences need to reflect on their concepts and conceptual structure. The only medium that allows to do that systematically is via the reflection of the history of thought in the particular science. This is by no means done regularly in the sciences. As Lee Smolin emphasized in his book „The Trouble with Physics“ recently, even in physics there is a need to go back to the original texts in order to be able to generate fresh thoughts. The fact is that many of the fundamental concepts of the sciences do not have an entirely empirical foundation, but are shaped by worldviews and values. In the case of evolutionary theory, this is the much-quoted Victorian setting of Darwin’s gradualism and selectionism, as Gould emphasizes repeatedly in his book. With the standard scientific methods of falsification and confirmation it is impossible to analyze the impact of these foundational concepts. Only the humanities can significantly contribute to that. Further, contrary to what we perceive in retrospection, in the time when new theories emerge, there must be a great variety and diversity of competing concepts, which is fuelled by the creative impulses which ultimately are rooted in mechanisms familiar from the humanities. In the sciences, this diversity is mostly forgotten, after the leading paradigms have been established.
The second reason is more complex and plays an important role in Gould’s book. In this brief comment, I can only mention the example of the role of morphology in evolutionary biology. Especially in continental traditions of biological research (e.g. Rupert Riedl), there was always an emphasis on ‘Gestalt’ principles as a special kind of causal force in evolutionary change. This is mostly rejected by reductionists as an unscientific revival of the Aristotelian distinction between effective and final causes, but Gould’s book clearly shows that there is an important role to play for this kind of thought. It seems that methods of the humanities might be an effective way to discover fundamental structural principles in the empirical world which are not accessible by direct observation. In evolutionary theory, these are the “Baupläne” underlying entire phylogenetic branches. In some principled sense, mathematics is also a Geisteswissenschaft. If one ponders about the recent controversies about string theory in physics, and if one realizes the economic and technological barriers to further experimental testing in high-energy physics, it seems that again, the reflective capacity of the humanities could help a lot to clarify open questions. In particular, the humanities would allow to recognize fundamental structural homologies in different areas of science. For example, Gould’s hierarchical theory of evolution seems to meet Laughlin’s emergentist physics.
I am writing this as an economist who faces the inexorable trend iny my science to finally purge economics from its legacy of the humanities. I think this is a great mistake, and Gould’s book helps me a lot in legitimizing my perspective, which is one of the rare cases of an economist trained in the humanities.
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