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5. Personal correspondence, May 22, 1993. McNeill offered this additional caution: “I think the new burst of chaos theory has a lot to teach historians and am glad to find you doing it. In general we are an untheoretical profession: learn by apprenticeship and reflect little on the larger epistemological context of our inherited terms. But clarity is always desirable and you seem bent in that direction. I wish you well in illuminating the historical profession; but suspect most of my colleagues will not even try to understand!”

6. Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould. “Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism,” in T. J. M. Schopf, ed., Models in Paleobiology (New York: Doubleday, 1972).

7. Lewis Binford, An Archaeological Perspective (New York: Academic Press, 1972); In Pursuit of the Past: Decoding the Archaeological Record (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983); Working at Archaeology (New York: Academic Press, 1983).

8. Fernand Braudel, On History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

9. C. G. Hempel, “The Function of General Laws in History,” in P. Gardner, ed., Theories of History (New York: Free Press, 1959), p. 346.

10. Stephen Jay Gould, “Jove’s Thunderbolts,” Natural History (October 1994): 9.

11. Stephen Jay Gould, “The Horn of Triton,” Natural History (December 1989): 18.

12. Ibid., p. 24.

13. Rom Harré, The Principles of Scientific Thinking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).

14. Ian Stewart, Does God Play Dice? (London: Blackwell, 1990), p. 17.

15. Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos (New York: Bantam, 1984), p. 169.

16. Ibid., pp. 169–70.

17. Edward Lorenz, “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?” Address at the AAAS annual meeting, Washington, D.C., December 29, 1979.

18. George Reisch, “Chaos, History, and Narrative,” History and Theory 30, no. 1 (1991): 18.

19. For the historical sequence of QWERTY see Paul David’s “Understanding the Economics of QWERTY: The Necessity of History,” in W N. Parker, ed., Economic History and the Modern Economist (New York: Blackwell, 1986). See also S. J. Gould’s development of parallel biological and technological systems in “The Panda’s Thumb of Technology,” Natural History (January 1987): 14–23. For a general history of the typewriter, see F. T. Masi, ed., The Typewriter Legend (Secaucus, N.J.: Matsushita Electric Corporation of America, 1985); F. J. Romano, Machine Writing and Typesetting (Salem: Gam Communications, 1986); and D. R. Hoke, Ingenious Yankees: The Rise of the American System of Manufactures in the Private Sector (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). Hoke notes the paucity of historical records for reconstructing the history of the typewriter and was forced to rely on company histories, advertisements from magazines, photographs and illustrations of typewriters, surviving typewriters, and biographical material on the inventors, manufacturers, and entrepreneurs in the industry.

20. Per Bak and Kan Chen, “Self-Organized Criticality,” Scientific American (January 1991): 46.

21. Ibid., p. 47

22. Ibid., p. 52

23. Ibid., p. 48

24. Stuart Kauffman, “Antichaos and Adaptation,” Scientific American (February 1991): 78.

25. Ibid.

26. John Cohen and Ian Stewart, “Chaos, Contingency, and Convergence,” Nonlinear Science Today 1, no. 2 (1991): 9–13.

27. Ibid., p. 3.

28. Ibid., pp. 2–3.

29. John L. Casti, Complexification (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), pp. 262–63.

30. Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England (London: HarperCollins, 1970).

31. Ibid.

32. Data from False Memory Syndrome Foundation, Philadelphia.

33. John Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (New York: Scribner, 1994). For a history of UFO sightings and alien abduction claims see Phil Klass, UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1988); and Robert