Meeting Abstract
Although we like to separate scientific explanation from religious myths and secular fiction and history, there are many elements in common. Misia Landau and others have pointed out the correspondence between evolutionary “origin” stories and traditional folktales, including elements of protagonists, challenges, and problem-solving. Human evolution provides many vivid examples, including some “just-so stories” famously critiqued by S.J. Gould and R. Lewontin. Evolutionary biologists have a tendency to invoke mechanisms of what natural selection “would do” or “would be expected to do,” but often these inferences are neither tested nor testable, and they reduce to statements of faith, albeit different from religious statements in some important respects. How do we differentiate story-telling in science and in other domains? Alternatives to natural selection, such as those of Seilacher’s Konstruktionsmorphologie, as well as the use of strong phylogenetic inference, can test such hypotheses. The order in which features related to adaptations or complex behaviors evolve in lineages provides a strong constraint on and a test of scientific narratives. Science needs stories, and the use of accepted methods and practices is an advantage over other forms of discourse and disciplines. Yet in formal scientific publications, we forego most narrative elements of our research in favor of a formulaic discourse (“anti-narrative”) that obscures linear (narrative) structure and human involvement. Scientists have to work to overcome this disadvantage when explaining our research to the public: in the end, we don’t talk the way we write.
