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a subtle one, involving a complex array of thoughts and emotions. Thus, we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that there is a biochemical connection here as well. Recall the brain chemicals that turn love into an addiction. In brain studies a connection has been found between seeking social status and the neuro-transmitter serotonin. In African vervet monkey groups, the highest-ranking males have the highest level of serotonin. In humans, serotonin makes people more sociable and assertive, extroverted, and outgoing. Low levels of serotonin are associated with low self-esteem and depression, and are countered pharmacologically with antidepressant drugs such as the SSRIs—selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (e.g., Prozac)—which block the reuptake of serotonin in the synaptic gaps between neurons, causing them to fire more and make you feel more awake, alert, and alive!

Now, again, it would be too simple to conclude that Bligh’s and Christian’s competing desires for status led to the mutiny on the Bounty; but it is fair to consider that the dual effects of our two evolutionary forces—strong attachments in Tahiti, coupled with Bligh’s and Christian’s competition for status and hierarchy—together produced an underlying level of emotion triggered by the proximate events of April 27–28, 1789.

Proximate causes of the mutiny on the Bounty may have been missing coconuts and lost tempers, but the ultimate cause was evolutionarily adaptive emotions expressed nonadaptively in the wrong place at the wrong time, with irreversible consequences.

9

Exorcising Laplace’s Demon

Clio, Chaos, and Complexity

HISTORIANS DO NOT COMMONLY turn to engineers for insight into how and why the past unfolds as it does. But since the process of modeling history in the language of chaos theory and nonlinear dynamics is a richly interdisciplinary study far afield from traditional historiography, it may be fruitful to seek the thoughts of one whose vision has been sharper than most.1 Paul MacCready, inventor of human- and solar-powered flight, pioneer of electric automobiles, and engineer extraordinaire, upon reading a paper I had written on chaos and history,2 found himself “thinking of a note I contributed to American Scientist wherein some 75 scientists described what got them into science. I was the only respondent to note that a person answering this question creates a plausible history but not necessarily a real one.”3

There were innumerable influences in your past, but you remember only a few of the major ones, and you instinctively weave these into a plausible history explaining how you became what you presume you are. This interpretation of history is both logical and nonfalsifiable and so tends to establish its own validity. Chances are it’s wrong.4

This problem of reconstructing the past to explain the present is, of course, an old and familiar one to philosophers of history but in this context needs restating because there is considerable risk in weaving plausible histories with instruments from another science. Are we, as William H. McNeill told me he once did, merely remodeling history to fit the language of a new physics? “I find your argument about chaos and history entirely congenial, though when I was young and struggled with finding my own ways of thinking about these questions I was drawn to the language of an older physics, seeing human society as a species of equilibrium, nested within other equilibria—biological, physical—and each level of equilibrium interacting with the others.”5 Is this no more than an epistemological game of chasing the latest trends in the physical sciences? If history changes with the physics of the day, then are we no closer to understanding what really happened and why? Perhaps, but then all of the sciences are equally guilty. Science is not the affirmation of a set of beliefs but a process of inquiry aimed at building a testable body of knowledge open to rejection or confirmation. So too is history . . . or at least it should be. Thus, making such applications from another field is no more