The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [113]
The track record of historians has not vindicated these claims. So far, at any rate, the study of the past hasn’t told us much about the future. Historians, generals, and especially politicians have much more frequently drawn the wrong lessons from history than the right one (that there are no lessons).
Nevertheless, many historians insist that their work be judged on the foresight it is supposed to confer. This goes double for the historians who wish to shape a country’s diplomacy or its economic and social policies. Henry Kissinger became a power broker because he convinced people that knowing what happened at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 was going to help Nixon deal with the Soviet Union’s leadership.
Scientism shares with these historians the insistence that to provide knowledge, their discipline has to show improvement in predictive success. The alternative is to treat the discipline of history as a source, not of knowledge, but of entertainment. As a source of enjoyable stories or polemics written to move readers to action, to tears, or to nostalgia, history is unbeatable. But few historians are prepared to treat their discipline as merely literary art. Yet that is inevitable, unless history can be put to successful predictive use.
Unfortunately for historians, history—the actual events of the human past—shows no pattern, cycle, or regularity that can provide predictive knowledge about the human future. Scientism has strong proof that it can’t. That is why, when it comes to providing the foresight required to certify something as knowledge, history is bunk. The past is not just bereft of meaning. The only patterns it may have had in the past cannot be exploited to provide foreknowledge.
Scientism’s reason for pessimism about history as useful knowledge, like so much else in its understanding of human affairs, starts with an insight from Darwinian evolutionary biology. Evolution results when generation after generation of blind variations on adaptive themes are passively filtered by the environment. Passive filtering permits all those variants that are minimally good enough to hang around to make more copies of themselves. The result is cumulative local adaptation. Adaptation is local because it’s relative to the environment. What is adaptive in one environment—say, white fur in the snowy Arctic—becomes maladaptive in a new one. That’s what will happen when global warming moves the Arctic snow line north of the polar bear’s habitat. Geological and climatological environments change slowly and mostly remain constant for epochs. This allows for the gradual accumulation of small changes eventually to produce adaptations of “extreme perfection” (Darwin’s words). As species proliferate in the evolutionary history of Earth, their members begin to have effects on one another and on members of other species. Animals and plants become part of one another’s environments, their ecosystems. We are familiar with many cases of this phenomenon: predators and their prey, symbiosis, mutualism, mimicry, parasitism. Most of these relationships arise between animals and plants of two different species. But sometimes they occur between animals and even plants in the same species.
When this happens, among animals especially, the evolution of adaptations can speed up wildly. Each animal’s environment includes other animals. So its environment changes as fast as variations arise in the traits of the other animals. The polar bear coat remains thick for scores of millions of years because the Arctic remains cold all that time. Meanwhile, the seal’s ability to detect polar bears by smell, instead of sight, gets better and better. That strengthens selection for polar bears with a tendency to hunt seals from downwind. That in turn puts pressure on seals to switch to some other predator detection system, and so on, until one species or the other (or both) go extinct. For obvious reasons,