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Between the Earth and Life Sciences
Between the Earth and Life Sciences
I am a historian and philosopher of science interested in the intersection of the earth and life sciences. I am omnivorous in the questions I ask, which span the areas of Philosophy of Biology, Philosophy of the Earth and Environmental Sciences, and Science and Values. However, I am generally interested in how science works under difficult epistemic circumstances, as well as how scientists cope with epistemic failure. Recently, I have become interested in the science-policy interface (especially in conservation biology) and in issues stemming from the history of colonialism in paleontology. Here I describe a few things I'm currently excited about.
Evidential Reasoning In Extremis
Evidential Reasoning In Extremis
In my dissertation I analyzed how scientists reconstruct the past from a variety of disciplinary standpoints. My focus was on cases where the past was relatively well-behaved: where a rich network of similarity relationships permits robust inferences about geohistory. But the past can be unruly too: “a foreign country” where “they do things differently.” Here, familiar reasoning strategies are prone to break down, especially strategies that rely on contemporary analogs to interpret historical evidence based on postulated uniformities.
In recent work I have begun to look at what happens in these difficult epistemic situations. Put differently, I have begun to ask how historical scientists learn about conditions that depart in significant ways from our own. By “conditions that depart... from our own” I don’t mean anything metaphysically strange. Instead I mean actual past (and future) states of the planet, its biosphere, and its climate. How do scientists reason about these, especially when the present world provides few guide-rails for interpretation?
Image: Fossils from the soft-bodied Ediacaran macrofauna—aliens on Earth if ever there were
An entry point is provided by the motto, “the present is the key to the past." But this raises as many questions as it answers. The present does not resemble the past absolutely, after all. Material configurations have shifted, certain causes have come into being or ceased operating, and others have changed in intensity or complexion over time. All this must be accommodated if we are to reason responsibly about the past. But this is difficult, since (as the historical record of scientific practice shows) researchers are regularly confronted with “unknown unknowns”— things we don’t know that we don’t know, which are nonetheless crucial to establishing a good epistemic connection with the past.
How can we arrive at a more adequate picture of evidential reasoning in extremis? One approach is to examine cases in which scientists have ostensibly learned about alien features of the past and ask how they pulled this off. We can ask, for example, what strategies researchers have devised to study features of the past that lack analogs on the modern Earth. Here a promising case is provided by research into Earth’s first tectonic regime, which both lacks a modern analog and left few surviving traces in the geological record. We can also ask what kinds of mistakes researchers have made when confronted with alien features and how they recognized them as mistakes. Here paleontology provides a wealth of examples, none more instructive than research into the soft-bodied fossils of the Ediacaran biota. It may also be instructive to consider cases where researchers have turned to the past to better understand other compartments of the past. Cases like this sometimes arise in Precambrian paleobiology, and are useful when past worlds resemble other past worlds more closely than either resembles the present.
My goal in this project is not just to understand historical reconstruction, however. It is also to understand how reconstructions of the past can inform projections about the future (including future climates, sometimes described as “no-analog” for obvious reasons). This is an increasingly popular research strategy in areas ranging from climate science to conservation biology. Yet it must confront the problem that past events are likely to resemble future ones only imperfectly: something that raises a string of important questions about (1) how past and present events are characterized, (2) what similarity relationships are relevant, and (3) what kinds of post-hoc corrections are epistemically useful.
Other Projects
Other Projects
In future research, I plan to continue exploring the border zone between the earth and life sciences. One project, just begun, investigates the movement of theoretical resources across a prominent fault line in the sciences: the line separating industrial from academic science. This project builds off my recent historical work tracing the movement of models of sedimentary basin-filling from their seedbed in petroleum geology to academic paleobiology (Dresow 2023). In the planned research I will investigate the challenges involved in this movement, especially when the industry models are based on proprietary data that academic scientists do not have access to. How do scientists manage this clear epistemic hazard in light of the potential goods industry models might bring?
A second project concerns the foundations of ecosystem-scale conservation frameworks, like the IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature) Red List of Ecosystems. So far, in collaboration with Bennett McNulty and Lauren Wilson (University of Minnesota), I have analyzed the role conceptual models play in defining conservation units, and provided a critical perspective on the concept of “ecosystem collapse.” Future work will situate these concerns within a broader, productive critique of ecosystem conservation focused on the challenge of constructing workable monitoring systems on the timescale demanded by global agreements.
History of Science
History of Science
In addition to my philosophical interests, I have a number of interests in history of science. One current project explores the emergence of a new approach to stratigraphic complexity, first in geology, and then, following its creative appropriation, in paleobiology. Another examines the empirical research of the American paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, and seeks to elucidate its influence on his better-known work in evolutionary theory and the history of life. Methodologically, I believe that philosophy of science is best practiced in tandem with other forms of science studies research, particularly historical research. For this reason, I am interested in the methodological intersection between history and philosophy of science, and the possibility of an integrated HPS (see my article in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, and look out for my chapter on HPS in Debating Contemporary Approaches to History of Science, London: Bloomsbury, with a commentary by Hasok Chang).
Land snails in the genus Cerion, the major subject of Stephen Jay Gould's empirical research
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