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By Root 439 0

of medical diagnosis and prognosis, the lure of alternative medicine, and the interface of science and spirituality. I was with my mom every step of the way, from initial diagnosis of depression in a psychiatrist’s office, to CAT scans and MRIs, to the surgery waiting room (numerous times), to her final hospital stay, nursing home, and, finally, when she breathed her last. How even a hardened skeptic deals with death, particularly that of someone as close as a parent, demonstrates, I hope, that skepticism is more than a scientific way of analyzing the world; it is also a humane way of life.

Part III, “Science and the (Re)Writing of History,” begins with chapter 8, “Darwin on the Bounty” by demonstrating how science can be put to good use to solve a historical mystery—what was the true cause of the mutiny on the Bounty—and how evolutionary theory provides an even deeper causal analysis of human behavior under strain. Historians operate at a proximate level of analysis, searching for immediate causes that triggered a particular historical event. Evolutionary theorists operate at an ultimate level of analysis, searching for deeper causes that underlie proximate causes. In this case I am not disputing what historians have determined happened to the crew of the Bounty, and what in the weeks and months preceding the rebellion led them to take such drastic action against their commander. What I am looking for is an explanation in the hearts of the men, so to speak; not just how, but why, in the sense of what in human nature could lead to such actions. As such, in this study I am extending what I have done in my previous work as a professional historian. In Denying History, I analyzed the claims of the Holocaust deniers and demonstrated with rigorous science how we know the Holocaust happened. In my biography of Alfred Russel Wallace, In Darwin’s Shadow, I employed several theories and techniques from the social sciences to ground my subject in a deeper level of understanding of human behavior. I am not attempting to revolutionize the practice of history, so much as I am trying to add to it the tried-and-true methods of science, so often neglected (because of the balkanization of academic departments) by historians.

Chapter 9, “Exorcising Laplace’s Demon,” applies the modern sciences of chaos and complexity to human history, showing how meaningful patterns can be teased out of the apparent chaos of the past. I have been thinking about how to apply chaos and complexity theory to human history since those sciences came on the scene in the late 1980s, while I was earning my doctorate in history. I have always been interested in the philosophy of history. Our flagship journal is History and Theory, and that title says a lot. History is the data of the past. But data without theory are like bricks without a blueprint to transmogrify them into a building. It is theory that binds historical facts into a cohesive and meaningful pattern that allows us to draw deeper conclusions about why (in the deeper sense) things happen as they do.

In a related analysis, chapter 10, “What If?,” I employ the always enjoyable game of “what if history, suggesting that scientists, too, can play this game to useful ends to explore what might have been and what had to be. Here I am most emphatically doing history not just for history’s sake, although that is part of it, but for us. I believe that history is primarily for the present, secondarily for the future, and tertiarily for the past. It is great fun to ponder how the history of the United States might have unfolded after 1863 had General McClellan not received ahead of time General Lee’s plans for the invasion of the North. Lee most likely would have been victorious at Antietam/Sharpsburg, which would probably have led the British and French to recognize the South as a sovereign nation, which would have encouraged them to aid the South in breaking the North’s blockade of ships bringing valuable resources from Europe, which possibly would have led to the South’s ability to carry out war for many