-
6. History, Whiggery, and Progress
- Indiana University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
6 HISTORY, WHIGGERY, AND PROGRESS Comparisons are invidious, especially when they involve the awarding of superlatives.Though humans love to bestow such honors (Nobel Prize for Chemistry,Best Actor in a Leading Role,Collegiate National Champions, etc.), the criteria for rating anything “best” are often questionable. However, a good case can be made for regarding one fossil as the most important ever discovered: the Berlin specimen of Archaeopteryx lithographica. Pat Shipman expresses the awe paleontologists feel toward this specimen: “The importance of the Berlin specimen cannot be overstated. It is more than a stony record of an extinct species. It is an icon—a holy relic of the past that has become a powerful symbol of the evolutionary process itself. It is the First Bird” (Shipman 1998, p. 14). Archaeopteryx looks like the perfect “missing link”—a snapshot of the crucial moment in evolution when birds began to diverge from reptiles. It is a remarkable mosaic of reptilian and avian features (see McGowan 1983, pp. 115–18). Because it is such clear and undeniable evidence for evolution,Archaeopteryx has often been the focus of controversy . Some anti-evolutionists have even resorted to the desperate measure of claiming that Archaeopteryx is a hoax (see Dingus and Rowe 1997, pp. 121–23 for a brief account). Crackpots aside,controversy over Archaeopteryx continues because paleontologists still disagree over its pedigree. Did birds descend from theropod dinosaurs in the Late Jurassic (the time of Archaeopteryx), or did birds evolve from crocodylomorph ancestors far back in the Triassic ? The roots of this disagreement grow deep into the history of vertebrate paleontology.It has antecedents in the famous mid-Victorian quarrel between Richard Owen and T.H.Huxley.Huxley,“Darwin’s Bulldog,” and Owen, a staunch anti-Darwinian, sharply disagreed 126 over the nature of dinosaurs and their connection to birds.Owen held that organisms possessed only a limited number of archetypal body plans (re®ecting the intentions of the Creator), and that evolution could never transgress the bounds set by these ideal types.For Huxley, Archaeopteryx was clearly intermediate between two major types,birds and reptiles,closely resembling small dinosaurs such as Compsognathus. The story of the Huxley-Owen controversy is told by Adrian Desmond in his 1982 book Archetypes and Ancestors. This book is one of the earlier efforts to view the history of science from the standpoint of the sociology of knowledge (p. 114). Desmond’s approach is to examine the history of paleontology with the aim of showing how social commitments and ideology in®uenced science: “So my strategy, broadly speaking, will be to investigate how far abstruse debates over mammal ancestry or dinosaur stance re®ected the cultural context and the social commitment of the protagonists, and as a result to determine the extent to which ideological in®uences penetrated palaeontology to shape it at both the conceptual and factual level” (p. 17). In particular, Desmond disputes the traditional view that Owen was a reactionary ideologue whereas Huxley’s science was pure and progressive .He claims that Huxley ground just as big an ax as Owen and that his conclusions about birds and dinosaurs were equally self-serving. This chapter presents Desmond’s account of the Huxley-Owen controversy over birds and dinosaurs as an instance of social constructivist history of science. Historian Jan Golinski has written a sympathetic overview of the in®uence of social constructivism on the recent practice of historians of science (Golinski 1998). He argues persuasively that social constructivism is best defended not with philosophical polemics, but by showing that it has generated new knowledge and deeper understanding of the history of science (p. xi). I certainly agree that constructivist approaches such as Desmond’s have produced new knowledge and deeper insight into the workings of science.However , I shall argue that constructivist history is crucially limited because it cannot account for,or explain away,one of the most important aspects of science—that it progresses. I also ask why recent historians of science have found constructivism so appealing. One reason is that constructivism avoids the cardinal historiographic sin—the writing of “Whig history.” Whig history portrays science as a linear ascent from past error to present truth and classi¤es historical ¤gures as “progressive” or “obscurantist,” de127 History, Whiggery, and Progress [44.193.11.123] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 13:56 GMT) pending on whether they helped or hindered that ascent. Accepted historiographic methodology now demands historical sensitivity, that is, that the past be interpreted...