In my class today, we are talking about how you create knowledge regarding human evolution. We will discuss, in brief, how we know what we know about the world around us. In that context, we will talk about how scientific knowledge, based on a specific perspective and methodological approach, differs from other kinds of knowledge production. I am not a science purist…I think there are other ways of creating knowledge about the world that have value. But when it comes to understanding the natural world (not necessarily our experience of the natural world, but rather the world itself), science is best.
Applying a scientific perspective to the world of the past, for example the ~5-7 million years of hominin evolution, requires an awareness that we are one or two steps removed from direct observation. Instead of observing how the world works within the controlled setting of a lab, we instead rely on observations of how the natural world has changed throughout time and across space, using our understanding of active forces to infer how such forces operated in the past.
There are pros and cons to such a diachronic perspective. On the positive side, there are no artificial constraints on what has actually happened. The world is what it is, it is not what we have set up on a lab bench (leaving aside the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy view…). However, this also means that the observations available to us–fossils, geological formations, traces of past atmospheric conditions, etc…–require their own interpretation. They are not matter of fact things. That they exist is matter of fact, but understanding why they are the way they are and what they mean for the world of the past is a scientific question which demands a scientific answer. That the paleo-sciences require an additional inferential step does not in any way diminish their science bona fides, it just puts them within a particular epistemological framework.
I therefore take the perspective that evolution (and science, in general) is not something that asks for your belief. It only asks for your acknowledgement. And that acknowledgement does not close the door on skepticism. Indeed, the scientific practice is fundamentally based on skepticism, the idea that our current understanding of the observations available to us is subject to revision given new observations.
Applied to paleoanthropology, this provides a valuable perspective for understanding why new fossil discoveries overturn old theories. It is not, as some critics of evolution like to point to, evidence of the failure of our field, but rather evidence of its success. Ideas should change as our observations of the world change.
All of which is a nice excuse for me to link to Holly Dunsworth’s (Anthropology Dept., University of Rhode Island) segment for NPR’s “This I believe” series, titled, “I am evolution.”
Of course I believe evolution.
But that is different from believing in evolution.
To believe in something takes faith, trust, effort, strength. I need none of these things to believe evolution. It just is. My health is better because of medical research based on evolution. My genetic code is practically the same as a chimpanzee’s. My bipedal feet walk on an earth full of fossil missing links. And when my feet tire, those fossils fuel my car.
And to add a little bit at the end, we are also talking this week in my course about how biological anthropology (and paleoanthropology in particular) fit within the broader field of anthropology. I think the same perspective outlined above can be invoked here. Biological anthropology is well-equipped to answer a specific set of questions based on observations of human variability, past and present. Some of these questions overlap with the interests of the other sub-fields of anthropology in dynamic ways, and in some instances, the evolutionary perspective provided by biological anthropology is clearly superior. But not in all cases, and not without leaving the door open for critique and skepticism.
“Indeed, the scientific practice is fundamentally based on skepticism, the idea that our current understanding of the observations available to us is subject to revision given new observations.”
No, not JUST new observations!!! If you follow and propagate that, you must prevent any paper being published that merely comes up with a better theory but lacks new observations. And since creating a theory is an imperfect act of creation, and not some strict logical process, there is never any kind of guarantee of perfection, certainly not in palaeoanthropology Our current understanding is subject to revision given new observations OR NEW THEORIES!!!
It’s a very serious issue in science.
Also, the idea that process is special, does suggest that theories need to be created in a special way, which is completely wrong…
“…we will talk about how scientific knowledge, based on a specific perspective and methodological approach, differs from other kinds of knowledge production.”
It is not a methodological approach that distinguishes science!!! It is finding the theories that best explain our observations, and while that often involves certain well-controlled approaches, it is not the same thing at all. It’s not at all clear that’s what you mean by “a specific perspective and methodological approach” amounts to finding the theory that explains the best.
http://sciencepolice2010.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/sciencepolice-14-latest.pdf
Of course you are correct that science is in practice at the interplay between theory and observation. This is an iterative process. New observations, interpreted in a theoretical context, lead to the revision of theoretical understandings of the world. Revised theory, thereby, lead to a change in how we interpret old (and new) observations.
The relatively slow pace of discovery within the fossil record illustrates this process extremely well. New fossils discoveries (observations) are interpreted within a broad theoretical context, but also can modify some of the specific details of how we understand that theory (i.e. evolutionary processes in recent humans), thereby changing how we might interpret previous fossil discoveries.
Science is a loop, in other words.
For me, the iterative nature of scientific knowledge is all part of the methodological approach taken by science, hence my description of it as such. How we create and modify theory within a scientific perspective is part of the methodology of science, not outside of it. It is also one of the reasons that science is not merely the rote accumulation of observations, but also open to creativity of thought.