Growing Explanations: Historical Perspectives on Recent Science (review)

The Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico, who died in poverty and obscurity in 1744, could be the patron saint of Growing Explanations. Vico's slogan, verum et factum convertuntur, "the true and the made are convertible," announced that one could know what one could make and, conversely, that what one could make, one knew. Vico attached to this principle the consequence that history was the only true science since history, alone among subject matters, was entirely made by human beings. Beginning soon after Vico's death, generations of seekers after the relations among truth, artifice, history, and science have adopted Vico's dictum and applied it to their own devices. There are, after all, many ways to make a thing: by law, by language, by construction, by simulation. The authors of this rich and intrepid exploration are the latest to adapt Vico's verum factum. They do so by deriving from the sciences of the last half-century a new meaning for "the made," namely, "the grown."

This most recent take on making gives Vico's corollary a changed meaning. History remains the only true science, but for a new reason: Scientific explanations are historical explanations. According to the worldview described and keenly analyzed in Growing Explanations, to explain the complex features of the world—the structure of the cosmos, the functioning of natural and social systems, the nature of life, consciousness and selfhood—one must grow them. To know a thing, that is, we need somehow to enact or re-enact its history. Computer simulation is the paradigm method for growing phenomena described in the book. But other techniques, used both separately and in combination with computer simulation, also appear, including such mathematical systems as chaos theory (Amy Dahan Delmedico), catastrophe theory (David Aubin), and fuzzy logic (Claude Rosental). The book's eleven essays also include suggestive examinations of "grown" explanations in string theory (Peter Galison), finite-element analysis (Ann Johnson), cybernetics (Evelyn Fox Keller), immunology (Alfred I. Tauber and Ilana Löwy), and artificial life (Richard Doyle and Stefan Helmreich).

Growing differs from the older kinds of making—notably building—in a host of ways. It is irreversible: One can take a watch apart and put it back together as good as new, but one cannot do the same with a creature (or a river or the stock market). A grown thing, unlike a built thing, is irreducible to its parts. Growing diverges from building also in being driven and directed at least in part from within, not fully subject to the control of the grower. Growing, finally, is a contingent process with an unpredictable trajectory and outcome. At the heart of all these distinctions between growing and building lies the notion of emergence, which encompasses the gradual, contingent, irreversible, self-directed processes by which grown things happen.

But what precisely is emergence? This question lurks beneath all the discussion in Growing Explanations, coming to the surface in several of the essays and serving as the subject of the final chapter by Claus Emmeche. Emmeche writes that emergence is no longer "mysterious" (316), and he presents a technical definition that he translates as "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts" (318). But doesn't this holism, no matter how plausible and compelling, retain a certain mystery at its core? Throughout Growing Explanations, the authors characterize emergent properties as surprising and unpredictable, making mystery seem actually definitive of emergence.

This important and provocative volume makes a persuasive case for the claim that complex phenomena require a particular kind of understanding, one that is historical in nature, and for the further proposal that the world will turn out to be complex all the way down. Less overt but equally present in Growing Explanations is the implication that this new, historical mode of explanation will be defined, in part, by its dramatic limits. Emergent phenomena—the objects of the new science charted in this book—seem to be those for...