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The integration of chaos and history is one of using a theory of present change to explain past change. Other historical scientists employ this strategy. In paleontology, Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould developed their evolutionary theory of punctuated equilibrium by applying a modern theory of speciation to the fossil record. (According to the theory of allopatric speciation, a new species is created when a small group of organisms is isolated from the larger population, then changes dramatically—larger populations are more genetically stable than smaller populations. The period of change is relatively rapid compared to the stability of long-lasting larger populations. In the paleontological record this process would leave few transitional fossils, leaving so-called gaps described by Eldredge and Gould as evidence of a speciational process.)6 In archaeology, Lewis Binford argues that it is the job of the archaeologist not just to record the raw data of a dig but to interpret human action from human artifacts by the development of “principles determining the nature of archaeological remains to propositions regarding processes and events of the past.”7 This is what Fernand Braudel insists be done in the application of psychological, sociological, and economic theories to history.8 Human history is human behavior writ past.

Chasing the Universal, Embracing the Particular

The issue of randomness and predictability in physical, biological, or social systems remains one of great import because the debate touches on such deeply meaningful issues as free will and determinism. Carl Hempel’s search for so-called covering laws in history was an attempt to extract predictability through historical laws. Hempel went so far as to conclude that “there is no difference between history and the natural sciences.”9 Hempel was wrong about covering laws, but right about history and the natural sciences—not, however, in the direction one might think. History is not governed by Hempel’s “universal conditional forms,” but neither are the physical and biological worlds to the extent we have been led to believe. Scientists are coming to realize that the Newtonian clockwork universe is filled with contingencies, catastrophes, and chaos, making precise predictions of all but the simplest physical systems virtually impossible. We could predict precisely when Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 would hit Jupiter but could muster at best only a wild guess as to the effects of the impacts on the Jovian world. The guess was completely wrong. Why? The answer strikes at the heart of understanding the nature of causality, as the late Stephen Jay Gould notes: “Do large effects arise as simple extensions of small changes produced by the ordinary, deterministic causes that we can study every day, or do occasional catastrophes introduce strong elements of capriciousness and unpredictability to the pathways of planetary history?”10

There is some irony in Gould’s inquiry. For decades historians chased scientists in quest of universal laws but gave up and returned to narratives filled with capricious, contingent, and unpredictable elements that make up the past, resigning ourselves to the fact that we would never be as good. Meanwhile, a handful of scientists, instead of chasing the elusive universal form, began to write the equivalent of scientific narratives of systems’ histories, integrating historical contingencies with nature’s necessities. Ironically, says Gould, “This essential tension between the influence of individuals and the power of predictable forces has been well appreciated by historians, but remains foreign to the thoughts and procedures of most scientists.”11 Gould demonstrates how even a subject as predictable and subservient to natural law as planets and their moons, when examined closely, reveal so much uniqueness and individuality that while “we anticipated greater regularity . . . the surfaces of planets and moons cannot be predicted from a few general rules. To understand planetary surfaces,