Parsimony Revisited

Leonard Finkleman writes…

Last year I wrote an essay about cladistics and parsimony. It made some rounds and then the deadline for the following month’s essay came up and I turned my thoughts to other things. I suppose this hit-and-run mentality is what we call “blogging.”

This year I took a midterm exam for this first time in more than a decade. While I did well (as one would hope that a full-time professor might), confronting the errors I made on the exam has forced me to revisit my thoughts on parsimony. Today I have to admit: I committed a small error on the exam that’s since revealed a greater error in my approach to cladistics. So, you know, mea culpa.

(That’s right! Philosophers do admit mistakes. The admissions are just expressed in languages they don’t speak.)

Here’s what you’re now getting into: first I’m going to talk about significant figures in scientific measurement and draw out their broader meaning in scientific research; then I’m going to turn back to cladistic parsimony and argue, against the ghost of my 2016 self, for an a priori reason to favor that approach in paleontology.

This is admittedly a dry post, so here's a feathered tyrannosaur (Gorgosaurus libratus) to reward your patience. Art by John Conway.

"Sig figs"

Some day will be my last and on that day I’ll be able to tell you the convention for significant figures in science writing. I’ll be able to do that because I forgot it on my midterm and took some knocks for the forgetting. In that sense my error was a productive one: I won’t make it again. I can’t imagine wanting to talk about this on my last day, but at least the option is there.

What is the convention? Scientists aim for precision as well as accuracy in their measurements, but different fields have different standards of precision. A geologist studying rock strata laid down over thousands of years can hardly be expected to resolve measurements to the same timescale as a particle physicist studying nearly-instantaneous subatomic reactions. Hoping to standardize reporting of numbers in scientific publications, Eisenhart (1968) recommended the following: state a measurement’s potential error to two significant digits and state the measurement itself to the resulting number of digits given for the potential error.

In enrolling for paleontology classes, my goal was not only to learn what paleontologists do, but why they do it. So I did some digging into why this should be the convention.

Alas! Like a bad field season, my digging didn’t turn much up. Eisenhart didn’t justify his recommendation. His paper is a master class in the “it’s right because it is said to be right (by me, who would never use the word ‘I’ in print)” school of science writing.

For my own part, however, I see two goals accomplished through maintenance of Eisenhart’s convention. First, it relativizes scientific measures to the appropriate degree of uncertainty in the discipline. If a discipline’s measurements are uncertain within a calculated range, then that range of uncertainty then determines the discipline’s most precise measurements (i.e., the ones that ought to be reported). The second goal accomplished is to ensure that the expression of a measurement’s uncertainty is never trivial. All scientific results are uncertain to some degree and reporting of those results should reflect that.

Bear in mind that “error” and “uncertainty” are terms of art in scientific practice. They aren’t assessments of truth function or attitudes towards other beliefs. They are, in fact, measurements. When Renne, et al. (2013) measured the age of the Cretaceous-Paleogene event at 66.043 ± 0.043 Ma, the uncertainty—± 0.043 million years—measures not anything about the given value of 66.043, but instead about the range of values that the natural world would yield. Very roughly, scientific error and uncertainty measure just how much our perceptions (i.e., statistical samples) represent the fullness of reality (i.e., populations).

This is (perhaps) another reason why Eisenhart might have thought that significant figures should be determined by uncertainty measures rather than by reported values. A realist assumes that reality determines perception and not the other way around, after all.

You're really sticking it out! As a token of my thanks, here are some woolly Pachyrhinosaurus. Art by Mark Witton.

What I got wrong in my (relative) youth

In my parsimony post, I wrote:

…we would recognize paleontology as a distinct and matured discipline (rather than as a handmaiden to other life sciences) if we could find some kinds of information uniquely valued in paleontological research. Qualitative similarity and temporal placement seem to be two such kinds of information. Inability to account for these kinds of information also happens to be the greatest weakness with cladistic parsimony.

In other words: phylogenetic reconstruction of extinct taxa depends on features that are difficult to quantify (although some cladists have given it the old college try), and so using cladistic parsimony to reconstruct evolutionary relations puts paleontologists at a unique disadvantage. Put yourselves in a position to succeed, people!

I maintain that there are philosophical problems in defining the populations from which fossil samples are drawn. But this is not to say that phylogenetic reconstruction of extinct taxa is purely a matter of perception. Rather, it's a matter of which element of reality we're trying to describe. It might be the relations between features of the fossils themselves (as I've hinted elsewhere) or it might be the evolutionary histories of the once-living animals that left those fossils behind. I'm leaning towards the former view because extinct populations are unobservable in principle rather than in practice, but in either case our phylogenetic reconstructions attempt to capture something real.

In scientific practice measurement of reality (rather than of perception) is expressed in terms of error and uncertainty. If paleontology is to be recognized as a mature and distinctive science, then, its research outcomes must include uncertainty measures. Those uncertainty measures relativize the degree of precision possible in paleontological measurements. All well and good so far.

Cladistic parsimony is one among several analytical methods in phylogenetic reconstruction. The purpose of these methods is to quantify and to measure relatedness between taxa. But among those paleontologists who don't share my esoteric views regarding the metaphysics of fossils, the reality to be captured in phylogenetic reconstruction is not relatedness per se. Relatedness is only a proxy for evolutionary history.

What parsimony measures do that other measures don't is attempt to quantify macroevolution itself. It does this by counting the number of evolutionary changes required to generate an hypothesized evolutionary history. In so doing, the uncertainty of the analysis—its relation to (unobserved) real evolutionary history—can be quantified. Without that measure, hypotheses about evolutionary history would lack an appropriate quantified context.

My original argument was that paleontological hypotheses about evolutionary history would always be imprecise relative to hypotheses generated by other life sciences. That's still true: molecular biologists, for example, can work with much higher-resolution data about changes in the genome. But this is only a problem if paleontologists are held to the same standards of precision as (say) molecular biologists. I now recognize this assumption as false. Maintaining the significant figure convention ensures that measurements in a scientific discipline are held to a standard of precision appropriate to that discipline. The defense against unfair critiques of imprecision (which was my original concern) is built into reporting practices.

Halcyon days of yore!

I still think that there are problems with the integration of paleontological and neontological data. Nothing that I've studied so far has allayed those suspicions, and if anything I'm now more convinced of that. But the harsh lesson about significant figures (delivered with the deduction of a full point of credit!) has at least tempered my views in this one respect: maybe paleontology can be more amenable to parsimony analysis than I originally thought.

Works Cited

1. Eisenhart, C. (1968). Expression of the Uncertainties of Final Results: Clear statements of the uncertainties of reported values are needed for their critical evaluation. Science, 160(3833), 1201-1204.

2. Renne, P. R., Deino, A. L., Hilgen, F. J., Kuiper, K. F., Mark, D. F., Mitchell, W. S. 3rd, Morgan, L.E., & Smit, J. (2013). Time scales of critical events around the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary. Science, 339(6120), 684-687.

The Wilderness Before Time

Derek Turner writes …

Once I asked a class on environmental ethics how they would define “wilderness.” One student half-jokingly said that “wilderness is any place you can go, where other animals might eat you.” Anyone familiar with Werner Herzog’s film, Grizzly Man, will know that there is something right about this.

Timothy Treadwell, in Alaska's Katmai National Park. This does not end well.

My student’s comment contains an insight: wilderness is where we go to be reminded that nature doesn’t care about us, and that nature always has the last word.

What if the spiritual pull that draws us to dinosaurs is not that different from what draws us to Denali? Or to Alaska's Katmai National Park, which provided the setting for Grizzly Man?

Like Timothy Treadwell, the subject of Herzog’s film, some of the characters in Jurassic Park also get up close and personal with animals that can, and sometimes do eat them.

"Wilderness is any place you can go, where other animals might eat you." 

Is there a connection between wilderness and paleontology?

Consider the following argument:                                                                             

P1. Wild landscapes—places where humans have no permanent presence, and where human activities have relatively little impact—are especially valuable.

P2. Pre-human landscapes were wild.

C.  Therefore, pre-human landscapes were especially valuable.

Let’s call this the WBT (“wilderness before time”) argument.

(I discuss some other possible connections between paleontology and environmental thinking in earlier posts, here and here.)

Is the WBT argument a good one? It is valid, meaning that the conclusion follows logically from the premises. But are the premises true?

The Prehistoric Wild

P2 looks to be in pretty good shape. The pre-human world was wild if anything is. Some have argued that no place on Earth today is truly wild, because human activities—especially the burning of fossil fuels—have altered every square inch of the planet.[1] However, the pre-human wild was the real deal, completely unaffected by anything that humans would ever do in the future. Because we cannot intervene in the past, we can do nothing to “tame” or “civilize” the pre-human wilderness.

Troubles with The Wilderness Concept

P1 is more questionable. Many environmental thinkers in North America, at least since John Muir, have held that wild places have special (possibly intrinsic) value. There have been many efforts to get clear about the value(s) of wilderness, and the literature on this issue in environmental ethics is vast.[2] Speaking autobiographically, though, reading William Cronon’s classic essay, “The Trouble With Wilderness,” has made it very tough for me to get behind P1.[3] 

Perhaps the most serious problem (though by no means the only one) concerns the often violent history of mistreatment and displacement of Native American and First Nations communities. In North America, many of our cherished “wild” places are landscapes that people had lived in and loved and modified and been modified by for a very long time before disease-bearing Euro-American settlers showed up. In some cases, newcomers forced Native people out and subsequently declared those places “wild,” as if they had always been empty, or as if the people living there were less than human. The idea that such areas are untrammeled by humans is a mythical smokescreen that hides a history of injustice. It’s hard to see how to treat wilderness as an anchoring environmental value without confronting this history.

Gratuitous wilderness shot, from a backpacking trip in the Sierra Nevadas, at Thousand Island Lake in the Ansel Adams Wilderness.. Does the human presence mar the scene? 

Another problem with P1 is its negative anthropocentrism. The idea that something has value in virtue of the fact that humans have not interacted with it implies that human interaction with something diminishes the value of that thing. Hence the injunction to "leave no trace" in the wilderness. But that’s just as arbitrary and unmotivated as positive anthropocentrism, the view that membership in a particular biological species confers special moral status. One could just as well define “wilderness” as any place that’s unoccupied and untrammeled by some other nonhuman species—any place untrammeled by squirrels, for example.                                                                                                    

There is much, much more to be said here, but these are two main reasons why I hesitate to defend P1. When it comes to fundamental environmental values, it might be more helpful to talk about biological diversity, or ecological health, or sense of place, or the value of individual living things and biological relationships.

Nevertheless, wilderness can exert a profound pull, even upon those of us who are more than a little skeptical. We go—at least, those who are lucky enough to be able to afford the cost of transportation and the expensive backpacking gear—in order to be humbled and perhaps tested. We go to be reminded that nature, like the gods of the ancient Epicureans, is utterly indifferent to human life and well-being.

So the WBT argument is valid, and P2 is true, but P1 is problematic. I’m therefore not sure we should buy it. But let’s think about what the argument might mean for paleontology.

Paleontology and the wild, Pre-Human Past     

It’s no coincidence that paleontology started to capture the American imagination in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, at precisely the moment in American cultural history when people like John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt begin to lament the “closing” and the “taming” of the North American wilderness. The wilderness preservation movement was born of nostalgia: The distinctive American character was forged in the process of developing and cultivating the wild frontier—or so went the story told by Frederick Jackson Turner and others—and we need to preserve remaining wild places so that people can continue to have those formative experiences. At the same time that the federal government was establishing national parks—Yellowstone in 1872, Yosemite in 1890, followed by many others—wealthy philanthropists were establishing museums in New Haven (1866), New York (1869), Chicago (1893), and Pittsburgh (1896), institutions whose mission was to give people a window on a prehistoric wilderness that really was untrammeled, and where lots of animals would have been happy to eat you or crush you underfoot.

The WBT argument suggests that paleontology might have, in addition to various epistemic goals, the non-epistemic one of putting us in touch with pre-human wilderness.

The scientific effort to reconstruct the deep past is, perhaps in part, a kind of cognitive backpacking trip—a way of visiting a landscape, one displaced from us in time rather than in space, and one whose value depends on the fact that humans do not belong there. The joys of paleontological reconstruction may derive in part from the promise of access to wilderness. This points to another way in which the scientific study of the deep past is suffused with the values of the broader culture (See Joyce’s great discussion that issue here.) Perhaps we feel impelled to reconstruct prehistoric landscapes because they have value qua wilderness.

The familiar epistemic goals of historical natural science blend with nostalgia for wild places that are increasingly hard to find.

In an earlier post, I suggested that dinosaurs might be overrated, in the sense that their high cultural profile is out of proportion to their scientific importance. Why, for example, is it more important to figure out the colors of the dinosaurs than to figure out why the ammonoids had such high speciation and extinction rates?[4] The WBT argument, together with my student’s observation, goes some way toward accounting for this. Perhaps we want to do our cognitive backpacking across prehistoric landscapes where some of the animals could eat us. 

[1] One person who made this point relatively early was Bill McKibben, The End of Nature, Random House, 1989.

[2] See especially the papers collected in The Great New Wilderness Debate, edited by J. Baird Callicott and Michael Nelson, University of Georgia Press, 1998, as well as The Wilderness Debate Rages On, edited by J. Baird Callicott and Michael Nelson, University of Georgia Press, 2008.

[3] William Cronon (1995) “The Trouble with Wilderness, Or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. New York, W.W. Norton, pp. 69-90.

[4] M.M. Yacobucci (2016), “Towards a model for speciation in ammonoids,” in Species and Speciation in the Fossil Record, edited by W.D. Allmon and M.M. Yacobucci. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 238-277.

Walt Disney's Dinosaurs: The Story of The Rite of Spring

Jillian Noyes writes . . .

As kids, we all had our favorite dinosaur films.  For many millennials, the seminal The Land Before Time (Don Bluth, 1988) brings about a wave of nostalgia. For others, Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993) has no comparison.  A few may even cite Disney’s groundbreaking CG epic Dinosaur (Ralph Zondag & Eric Leighton, 2000) as a personal favorite, even if it’s aged quite poorly.

For me, however?  My favorite dinosaur film was (and still is) the Rite of Spring segment in Walt Disney’s magnum opus Fantasia (1940).  The interplay between Stravinsky’s ballet score and spectacular displays of prehistoric barbarism immediately struck a chord with me and my younger brothers when we first saw it as dinosaur-obsessed kids.  Forget the big-eyed, cutesy Bluth-o-saurs like Ducky and Littlefoot - if you wanted to see dinosaurs in all their terrifying majesty but weren’t allowed to watch Jurassic Park, The Rite of Spring reigned supreme.

No contest, really. IMAGE CREDITS: Universal Animation Studios/Amblin Entertainment (Land Before Time); Walt Disney Animation Studios (Rite of Spring)

As a Film Studies major, my appreciation for Rite of Spring has only deepened over the years, and I’ve come to find the making-of process behind it just as fascinating as the finished product.  What’s especially interesting is how Disney’s dinosaurs are a time capsule of what was considered to be the cutting edge of paleontology in the 1930s and early 1940s.  With the benefit of scientific hindsight, it also demonstrates just how much paleontology has advanced in the last 80 or so years.

At the turn of the century, dinosaurs were just beginning to creep into the public imagination thanks to the efforts of Roy Chapman Andrews, Friedrich von Huene, Henry Fairfield Osborn, and the non-profit museums who were all too happy to display their findings to enthusiastic crowds. It’s hardly surprising, then, that characters like Gertie the Dinosaur (Windsor McKay, 1914) were among the first animated movie stars, albeit significantly less scary than how museums presented them.

But Walt Disney was about to subvert things entirely.

From the very start of preproduction on Fantasia in September 1938 Disney wanted to include a prehistoric sequence that would serve as “a coldly accurate reproduction of what science thinks went on during the first few billion years of this planet's existence” (Fantasia).  So he brought on Julian Huxley, Barnum “Mr. Bones” Brown, and Roy Chapman Andrews as scientific consultants for the project, along with Edwin Hubble.  To think that all of them worked on the same project -- an animated film, no less! -- is mind-boggling.

Disney, Hubble, and Huxley - a meeting of geniuses. IMAGE CREDIT: Huntington Digital Library

Each man contributed his own expertise to the film, based on the most-cutting edge studies of the time.  Huxley, hard at work on his magnum opus Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, shared his research on genes and their role in biological development, which animators translated to the screen in a hypnotic prelude sequence dubbed the March of Life.  Speaking from his own experiences in excavating fossils from Howe Ranch Quarry in Wyoming, Brown explained his hypothesis that the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction was caused by intense drought.  This too was memorably rendered in the finished product, specifically during the climax of the work, in which scorching sunlight spares no creature.  As for Andrews, the exact nature of his contributions are unclear.  Given Walt Disney’s penchant for live modeling sessions, though, one can reasonably assume that he granted animators access to the American Museum of Natural History’s extensive fossil collection for reference.

Some of the amazing concept art and initial treatments for the short. IMAGE CREDIT: Walt Disney Animation Studios Archives

Concept art was drafted, model sheets based on clay maquettes were developed, and animals were brought in for the animators to study their movements (including a baby alligator!).  The goal, as Disney put it, was to have “science, not art, write the scenario of the picture” (Fantasia).  As such, no detail was spared.

Of course, science marches onward, and what was considered “coldly accurate” in 1940 is hilariously inaccurate now.  Cataloging every single fault would be fruitless (especially since some have already done it).  What’s far more interesting, at least in my opinion, is that Disney and co. actually got some details right.

During the most iconic sequence of the short, a Tyrannosaurus rex and a Stegosaurus do battle against a backdrop of ominous rain and crackling thunder.  While the Stegosaurus puts up a good fight, uppercutting the carnivore with its spiky tail, it proves to be no match for T. Rex, who swiftly clamps down on the herbivore’s neck and bites down until its prey drops dead with a hearty thud.

Of course, this scenario is laughable, given that the two dinosaurs in question lived 150 million years apart from each other.

IMAGE CREDIT: Walt Disney Animation Studios Archives

But look closely at the animation cell above, taken directly from the aforementioned scene.  In one of the very few instances where aesthetics were given precedence over accuracy, Disney insisted that the big beastie of the piece have three fingers rather than two.  Why?  “I really think it looks better with three” he reportedly said (Moore, 207). 

Now, which carnivorous beast bore some resemblance to T. Rex (to the point that there’s been some classification confusion over the past century or so), lived in the same era as Stegosaurus, and had three fingers (which I’ve conveniently counted?)

IMAGE CREDIT: Wikimedia.commons.

That’s right, Allosaurus.  As it turns out, Disney’s aesthetic eye proved to be more accurate than science years before it was conclusively proven by paleontologists.

That’s far from the only accidental accuracy demonstrated by Disney and his animation team.  Several dinosaurs in the short demonstrate complex herd-like behaviors - a far cry from the image of the solitary, isolated lizard beast which dominated scientific and cultural thought at the time (Switek).  Many of them are lumbering and brutish, but there are also creatures that are agile and lithe - again, foreshadowing the revelation that dinosaurs were closely related to avians .

But as interesting as coincidental predictions may be, that’s not what makes Rite of Spring such an enduring work.  Rather, it’s the way in which it engages directly with the viewer, using animation to show a perspective which was once deemed impossible to witness. “Science is brought to life in a way that no textbook can possibly do”, Brian Sibley wrote of the film, and it’s that aspect which makes me appreciate it so much more than Land Before Time and its ilk.  Far from being “cute animal personalities” - Disney’s words, not mine (Fanning) - the dinosaurs in Rite of Spring tap into our most primal fears and desires in order to suture us into the most animalistic of perspectives.  When Stegosaurus succumbs to T. Rex, a part of us withers away along with the former’s remains.  When we witness dinosaurs hatching from eggs, hope is restored in us.  When the dinosaurs fight to survive, we are reminded just how brutal our own existence can be. There is no latent metaphor for a modern-day controversy like in Jurassic Park; no clear-cut heroes or villains like in Land Before Time – just us and the dinosaurs who are completely oblivious to their own mortality.  That universality, I believe, is what makes the short so special and timeless.

Rite of Spring resides in the company of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and Night on Bald Mountain as Fantasia’s greatest legacy.  It’s inspired countless artists, researchers, scientists, and paleontologists – not to mention countless parodies and riffs.  It revolutionized the kinds of stories which could be told through animation, pushed scientific boundaries, and inspired new discoveries.

But most importantly, it proved that the impossible was possible.  Against all odds, Disney had succeeded in bringing dinosaurs back to life.

References:

Fanning, Jim. "Fifteen Fascinating Facts About Fantasia." D23. Walt Disney Company, n.d. 01 Nov. 2016.

Moore, Randy. Dinosaurs by the Decades: A Chronology of the Dinosaur in Science and Popular Culture. Santa Barbara. California: Greenwood, an Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2014. Print.

Seastrom, Lucas O. "Fantasia’s Rite of Spring as a Scientific Document: Edwin Hubble, Julian Huxley, and the Fusion of Science & Art." University of Walt Disney. N.p., 23 June 2014.

Switek, Brian. "Disney's Age of Dinosaurs." Smithsonian. Smithsonian Institution, 5 Dec. 2011.

Four Features of Historical Counterfactuals

Derek Turner writes . . .

In 2015, the following meme flashed across social media:

Folks on the political left shared this in large numbers, and with considerable righteous indignation. People complained that in all their years of schooling in the United States, no one had ever shown them this map! Why weren't kids taught about the Native American polities that were diminished or erased by Euro-American colonization and settlement? But then someone pointed out that this map was never intended to represent any actual historical political landscape. Oops. From the very beginning, it was an exercise in counterfactual history. What political units would exist in 2015, had the epidemics, the violence, and the displacement not occurred? 

Those who didn’t already have egg on their faces quickly responded that even as an exercise in counterfactual history, the map is both far-fetched and ethically problematic. It’s ethically problematic because it still represents the erasure of many Native nations and communities that exist today.  It also builds in an assumption that indigenous polities would develop into units that look like European nation states. And don't call the Puebloans of the southwest the "Anasazi." Here, though, I want to focus more on the epistemological than on the ethical problems. What the map represents seems far-fetched and speculative. I’m very confident in saying that. But what exactly are the grounds for making such an assessment?

A Multidimensional Epistemology for Historical Counterfactuals

In general, historical counterfactuals take the following form:

If some upstream condition A had been different, then downstream outcome C would have happened instead of what actually happened.

In an earlier post, I tried to make a little headway by drawing a distinction between preventing and enabling conditions. Some counterfactual claims are about upstream conditions that prevent downstream outcomes from happening, while other counterfactuals are about upstream conditions that make it possible for downstream outcomes to occur.

Here I carry the analysis further by distinguishing four other dimensions along which historical counterfactuals can vary. I’ll call these upstream departure, downstream departure, historical depth and historical slack.

Variation along these dimensions can affect whether counterfactuals are reasonable or (like the one above) far-fetched. My view is that it really is possible to assess counterfactuals, even when it comes to the deep past. There is, however, no easy formula for doing so.[1] The assessment is always holistic and often messy. But identifying these dimensions of variation is a good start. 

Upstream Departure

When thinking counterfactually, we can imagine bigger or smaller deviations from what actually happened upstream. To assess the degree of upstream departure, focus on the upstream conditions alone. It’s hard to be precise about the size of the upstream deviation from the actual, but some easy examples will make it clear that in practice, we often have a pretty good idea of what counts as a bigger vs. smaller upstream departure.

(1) If Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont had won the Democratic nomination in 2016, then Donald Trump would not be president of the United States.

(2) If Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut had won the Democratic nomination in 2016, then Donald Trump would not be president of the United States.

I don't know whether either of these statements is true, though I’m sure a lot of people believe (1). Note, however, that (2) involves a bigger upstream departure than (1). In making this judgment, we have to draw on background knowledge—for example, that Sanders and Clinton were engaged in a competitive primary race, and that Chris Murphy was not seeking the nomination at all. There’s a sense in which the departure described in (1) could easily have happened, whereas it’s very hard to see how the departure described in (2) could have happened. Claim (2) is also, I think, a lot harder to assess than (1), for the simple reason that we have less evidence about what sort of campaign Chris Murphy might have run, or how people might have responded to him.

Downstream Departure

Historical counterfactual thinking also involves imaginative departures from what actually happens downstream, and these, too, can be bigger or smaller. Thus:

(3) If Bernie Sanders had won the Democratic nomination in 2016, then he would have won the states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, defeating Donald Trump by a narrow electoral margin.

(4) if Bernie Sanders had won the Democratic nomination in 2016, then he would have won the general election in an electoral college landslide.

I'm not sure if claim (3) is true, but these sorts of claims are worth thinking about, if only because lots of people believe them. And people argue about them all the time.

Again, in order to assess the degree of departure from what actually happened, we have to consult our background knowledge. The results of popular voting in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin were pretty close, so (3) would seem to involve a small departure from the actual past. But popular voting results in many states, including a number of reliably red states, would have had to come out very differently in order for Sanders to win an electoral landslide. In this case, hopefully, it’s easy to see that (4) involves a bigger downstream departure than (3).

Historical Depth and Historical Slack

Historical depth is a matter of the amount of time that has elapsed between the upstream and the downstream conditions. The political examples above are all historically shallow, which also makes them a bit easier to think about. The counterfactual map of Native American political bodies is historically deeper. The counterfactuals we might care about in paleontology—like some of the claims that Gould makes in Wonderful Life—are vastly deeper.[2]

Historical Slack has to do with the relationship between the upstream change and the downstream change.[3] Here’s the rough idea: Historical counterfactuals are tight when the upstream departures from actual and the downstream departures move in tandem. That is, a tight counterfactual asserts that a big upstream change makes for a big downstream change. Or that a small upstream change makes for a correspondingly small downstream change. Historical counterfactuals exhibit more slack when the upstream departures and the downstream departures have different magnitudes—for example, where a small upstream change is said to lead to a big downstream change, or where a big upstream change is alleged to make little difference downstream. (Note: I'm treating slack as a feature of the counterfactual claims, rather than a feature of history itself.)

Rolling Back History

What I’ve said so far is really just an opening sketch. Much more needs to be said about how these four features—upstream departure, downstream departure, depth, and slack—bear on the question of whether it’s rational to believe counterfactual claims. And then much more needs to be said about how this might apply to questions about evolutionary history.

However, with nothing more than these opening distinctions on the table, it’s possible to glimpse an epistemology of historical counterfactuals that’s different from one standard approach. In his book, The Philosophy of Philosophy, Timothy Williamson describes an imaginative “rolling back” method for assessing historical counterfactuals—a method that sounds very similar to Gould’s thought experiment of replaying the tape of history, the topic of John Beatty's recent post, though Williamson seems unaware of Gould.

The offline use of expectation-forming capacities to judge counterfactuals corresponds to the widespread picture of the semantic evaluation of those conditionals as “rolling back” history to shortly before the time of the antecedent and then rolling history forward again according to patterns of development as close as possible to the normal ones to test the truth of the consequent.[4]

So we rewind the tape of history in the imagination, make the upstream changes, and run the tape forward while holding as much fixed as we can.

[O]ne supposes the antecedent and develops the supposition, adding further judgments within the supposition by reasoning, offline predictive mechanisms, and other offline judgments … To a first approximation: one asserts the counterfactual conditional if and only if the development eventually leads one to add the consequent.[5]

Apply this to the case with which we began: Roll back time, say, to 1492. Then “suppose the antecedent”—suppose that Europeans do not come to North America to colonize, settle, displace, or dispossess. Then roll history forward again, while relying upon other background knowledge. Do things end up as represented in the map above?

This account of the rolling back method is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t take us very far, because it doesn’t say anything about the differences among counterfactual claims, and how those differences might matter epistemically. What we need to do is contrast different historical counterfactuals, while focusing on the dimensions outlined here.

So What’s (Epistemically) Wrong With the Map?

One problem with the map, as an exercise in counterfactual history, is the magnitude of the upstream departure. The map exhibits considerable historical depth (500+ years), and a fair degree of tightness, since the suggestion is that huge upstream departures would have made for correspondingly big downstream changes in political outcomes. But the upstream departure puts out of play so much of what we know about the world, that it becomes very difficult to get a fix on what the resulting downstream departure should be.

But we should be careful not to conclude that bigger upstream departures always make for less plausible historical counterfactuals. Or that smaller upstream departures generally make for greater plausibility. Consider:

(5) If time-traveling Homer Simpson had sneezed 66 million years ago, then everyone today would have forked tongues. 

(6) If no asteroid had hit the earth 66 million years ago, then humans would not exist today.

Whether someone sneezes is a much smaller change than whether an asteroid hits. Yet the counterfactual (6) with the much bigger upstream departure is vastly more plausible than (5). These examples, show, I think, that the assessment of historical counterfactuals has to be holistic and multidimensional. It won't work to focus on upstream departure alone. Much also depends, for example, on relevant background knowledge about the causal connections that might link the upstream with the downstream departures.

Thanks

I shared some of these ideas with an audience at UCLA’s Cotsen Institute for Archaeology in November 2015. (This partly explains my use of a non-paleontological example here!)  I also want to give a special thanks to Ramzi Kaiss for many helpful conversations about contingency and counterfactuals last year. 

[1] But see Avi Tucker, Our Knowledge of the Past. Cambridge University Press, 2004, who tries to account for assessment of historical counterfactuals within a Bayesian framework.

[2] S.J. Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. W.W. Norton, 1989.

[3]Tucker says that that “when historiographic counterfactual hypotheses are overstretched across many causal links, evidence is missing for determining them” (2004, p. 231). This notion of stretching across many causal links is ambiguous between historical depth and historical slack.

[4] Timothy Williamson, The Philosophy of Philosophy. Blackwell Publishing, 2007, p. 150.

[5] Williamson (2007, p. 153.)