Synthesis From Beyond History: A perspective from the sciences (A Series: 5/5)
In the previous blog posts in this series, I pondered how historians go about synthesizing information.
On what I dubbed the “prosaic account,” (link here) which drew on guidebooks for doctoral students training to be historians I noted how historians define a problem or puzzle, review relevant documents, and assemble them in a format that is effective and persuasive.
On what I dubbed the “poetic account,” (link here) I compared historians to detectives who put forth hypotheses about what may have happened in a specific situation, search for information relevant to rival hypotheses, and then offer an account that in some ways resembles the solution to a mystery. Over the decades of their lives, the most gifted historians have pursued a number of large-scale problems or concerns; these issues are perennially on their minds; and when they encounter an unfamiliar item, document, line of testimony, and the like, they attempt to place that discovery within the broader frameworks that are ever with them. As historian Juan Huizinga expressed it cogently, analysis and synthesis are occurring all the time. The most gifted historians communicate their findings in ways that are artful, memorable, poised to stand the test of time.
In this blog post I ponder whether this formula is unique to the study of history, or whether something similar may occur in other domains. An effort to respond in any detail and depth would require an examination of different scholarly disciplines (from astronomy to zoology) as well as different professions (auditing, law, medicine), different callings (art, dance, literature, religion) as well as different roles (guiding a democracy, navigating an authoritarian state, advising, counseling, parenting, teaching, etc.)
Clearly, this is a task of a lifetime. At most, in a score of blog posts in the past year, I’ve begun this task in a modest way. And I have been guided and inspired by a few others who have undertaken analogous tasks—their names are listed in the references to this and other blog posts.
In this—the final post in this survey—I begin a consideration of synthesizing in different areas of scholarship. While I have cast my eye across the scholarly landscape, I focus mostly on the sciences—the disciplines of our era.
Probably closest to historians are social scientists—their ranks include sociologists, psychologists, economists, anthropologists, and political scientists. While the study of history dates back to ancient times, the social sciences only emerged in the 19th century—with ties to historical and linguistic studies on the one hand, and to the emerging natural and physical sciences on the other (hence the honorific “science”). Like historians, social scientists examine human behavior (individual as well as collectivities) in its variety at a given moment (or over time) and under many circumstances and conditions. And of course, when possible, social scientists seek decisive explanations for how humans think and act as they do…sometimes hoping to make grounded predictions as well.
While historians and social scientists are in many ways bedfellows, their goals and methods are distinctive. Social scientists seek factors that explain human behavior; and so, whenever possible, they examine situations that can be controlled (experiments or quasi-experiments) and factors that can be quantified over time and circumstance (e.g. demographic or calendrical information). Ideally, they are looking for the laws and principles that govern all human activities across time and space. And if they were to succeed in this ambitious goal, coming up with laws that explain human behavior independent of social, cultural, and historical context (highly unlikely), many historical puzzles would evaporate. Just such bold claims have occasionally been made by compound fields with names like cliometrics or psychohistory.
Some historians are quite sympathetic to the social sciences; they readily use sociological or economic methods and are pleased to posit laws or law-like behaviors. But other historians see themselves as more akin to scholars in the humanities—literary scholars, musicologists, aestheticians, or philosophers. For them, the uniqueness of historical events and personages is a given; attempts to find laws that cut across time, space, populations are a fool’s errand. Such historians would dismiss out of hand the ambitions cited in the previous paragraph.
I should add that these issues are ones that permeate historiographical discussions—some of them are described in the second post in this blog series (link here).
But when it comes to the disciplinary terrain of today (and, even more, of tomorrow) the “real” sciences are in the ascendancy. No college major has seen enrollments drop more precipitously than history, and the “winners” in this instance are the “hard sciences”, and particularly computer science.
No doubt, synthesizing occurs in every science—and broad scholars like Gerald Holton and Thomas Kuhn have sought to convey the nature of thinking within and across the traditional sciences. But the remaining challenge is a determination of the ways in which “real” scientists synthesize.
Of course, some scientists are deep into the analysis of a single problem or topic—I’ve written about one scientist who spent forty years on the retina (Gardner, 2020). Such scholars may well synthesize but are exhibiting a microscopic form of synthesis. And indeed, it may be possible to
“see the world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower”. (William Blake)
I’m focused here on scientists who have a broader ambition.
As it happens, Charles Darwin (1809-1882) had an exceedingly broad ambition: He wanted to account for the variety of flora and fauna (plants and animals) that existed around the world at his time and which had emerged in the eons since the earth was created and forms of life had begun to emerge. Of course, such an endeavor challenged the Biblical account of creation taking place in six days.
The scion of a wealthy and well-connected family, Darwin had difficulty in deciding on a career to follow—some even thought that he was a “slow learner”. Over a five-year period (1831-1836), aboard a vessel called The Beagle, he sailed around the globe, making copious notes and observations of the flora and fauna that he observed in widely different ecological niches—whenever possible, actually collecting instances of various species. He spent the ensuing twenty years carrying out a variety of endeavors—raising pigeons, collecting and breeding beetles, dissecting and classifying invertebrates like barnacles, analyzing data about landmasses and geographical formations, pondering whether eggs and seeds could travel across land and bodies of water, the structure and distribution of coral reefs… the list goes on. He continued to keep notes, corresponded with scientists and naturalists in many countries, reflecting on what he had seen and heard, attempting to put it all together, at least for his own curiosity and for the interests of his close correspondents, publishing monographs on targeted topics. But (as in many ways, as a proper member of the English Establishment) he never put the puzzle together in a single accessible publication.
But then in 1858 Darwin learned that a younger colleague—Alfred Wallace—had written a short paper in putting forth his own reflections on the evolution of species. Given this “wake-up” call, Darwin realized that he could no longer procrastinate. And so, over the next year, he composed and published The Origin of Species which many consider the most important scientific treatise ever written.
For a long time, it was believed that Darwin’s principle insight came at an “a-ha” moment—when he read (or re-read) the writings of the political economist Thomas Malthus. Malthus had argued that when too many human beings were competing for food and living space, there would inevitably be conflict; those with the most skills, resources, and/or luck would survive, while others would die out. Having long pondered what happened to species over time (and also what had happened to geological formations for an even longer period), Darwin made the crucial deduction, association, or synthesis: a parallel analysis could illuminate the origin, development, conflict between and perishing of disparate forms of animate life. As he famously put it in his notebook
“Here, then, I had at least got a theory by which to work.”
My colleague and friend Howard Gruber (1922-2005) spent many years studying the development of Darwin’s thought. In a prize-winning book, Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity, Gruber puts forth a far more complex account of the origin of Darwin’s daring thesis. On Gruber’s analysis, Darwin had a very wide set of interests—what Gruber aptly dubbed “a network of enterprise.” Darwin pursued these loosely related topics over many years. He noted when he was progressing and when he was stuck in these disparate pursuits (only a fraction of which I have cited). The versatile scholar found it relatively easy to drop a concept or problem for a while, and then pick it up when new findings, thoughts, puzzles, solutions, emerged.
In addition to a very extensive correspondence, Darwin also kept numerous notebooks, where he (and later, Gruber and other historians of science) could follow the development of his thinking. Especially important were the aids to thought of wide scope—diagrams, sketches, lists, metaphors—that brought together various strands of thought. The best known: the sketch of the tree of life, with its diverse branches, some connecting, some thriving, some dying off. (See the illustration at the top of this page).
As one ponders Gruber’s account of Darwin’s powers of creative synthesis, one notes clear analogues to what I’ve termed the “poetic view” of history. Like Darwin, outstanding historians have a set of issues that occupy their consciousness (and perhaps their unconscious mind as well) for years. These scholars follow them when fruitful, then put them aside, but reliably reactivate them when new information comes to the fore, or old information comes to be considered in novel ways. And at a certain point, when the issue seems to have been resolved as much as feasible, the scholar goes public—and may well move on to a new set of concerns, though never wholly abandoning the original network of enterprise.
Of course, you may well think—Darwin was one scientist, a very unusual one, focusing on the grandest of issues. To what extent can the Gruber analysis—even if correct in the case of Charles Darwin—be applied to other biologists, let alone other scientists or other scholars?
Fortunately, we have a reasonable preliminary answer to this question. In Creative People at Work, editors Howard Gruber and Doris Wallace—along with their students—apply this general framework to a number of creative individuals. Included in this collection are accounts of philosopher-psychologist William James, poet William Wordsworth, diarist Anaïs Nin, novelist Dorothy Richardson, scientist Albert Einstein, as well as Jean Piaget, the biologically-oriented psychologist who was also studied by Gruber. The emerging picture conveys well some of the ways in which synthesis may occur across the course of a scholarly lifetime.
Reservations:
It must be noted: Gruber and his colleagues have studied a limited number of creative individuals, all living in the last few centuries. Nowadays, with recently launched branches of biology (like cell biology, genetics, neuroscience), the modes and foci of synthesis might be different.
It’s also not clear that chemists, physicists, or computer scientists go about formulating and solving problems in the manner of biologists. And the more that they move away from words, images, diagrams, sensory information, the harder it is for non-physicists to understand how contemporary scientists synthesize—but clearly, they do!
Indeed, the most admired physicists—Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Richard Feynman, Steven Weinberg, Edward Witten—are all engaged in vast efforts to synthesize—string theory, n-dimensional space, black holes, the sought-after “theory of everything”. Put differently, such scholars have explicitly sought to encompass in one grand scheme the tiniest particles as well as the largest forces that have been identified or hypothesized. I would be delighted if a physicist-teacher could provide an “account for students” of the kind of synthesizing done by the physicists of today…and tomorrow.
But, leaving both biology and physics, I have chosen to give the final words to Robert Woodward—by general agreement one of the greatest chemists of the 20th century—winner of the Nobel prize in Chemistry in 1965.
By a wonderful coincidence of word—and, perhaps, of concept—Woodward was universally admired because of his skill at synthesizing—assembling complex chemical entities from simpler chemical elements or substances (or, alternatively, if less dramatically, breaking down complex chemical entities into various constituents.)
As related by his daughter Crystal, “Woodward’s work as ‘artist’” was apparent in all areas of chemistry… but his art was developed to its “higher peak of perfection” in his synthesis. He began thinking about and trying to “dream up” syntheses when he was a boy. By the age of 12, he had worked out a synthesis for quinine.
In Crystal Woodward’s account,
“Conception of organic synthesis for compounds of any complexity usually involves a stepwise procedure of ‘working backward’ from the structure of a product to the structure of available starting materials… Frequently ‘blind alleys’ are encountered and other sequences must be envisioned. From this procedure usually emerges a number of possible synthetic routes, the most attractive of which is selected for trial in the laboratory…beyond that chemical synthesis is entirely creative activity, in which art, imagination, and inspiration play a domain role…this is an area which is entirely creative in spirit and in which there is unlimited opportunity for art and imagination (Wallace and Gruber 232)...the synthesizer needs ‘the flexibility essential for any long journey through unknown territory, beset with perils which at best can only be dimly foreseen.’” (239)
Historians deal with people and events; crystallographers deal with elements, bonds, actions, reactions. I suspect that these two fields of study attract quite different kinds of individuals, with contrasting interests and complementary skills. The skill of synthesizing clues from history is in many ways very different from the skill of synthesizing elements to create a new and sought-after compound element. It would be surprising to find future historians attempting to synthesize quinine; or future chemists pondering the causes of the French Revolution. Also, syntheses in chemistry are far more likely to be definitive than syntheses in history.
And yet at some level of analysis, these skills may be akin or at least distant relatives of one another! Dealing with ambitious scholarly aspirations spanning many decades; picking up and putting aside elements of this “problematic”; and occasionally making a discovery or linkage, or arriving at an insight that adds to their network of achievement and opens up the paths for other work by themselves, their colleagues, the students and the masters of tomorrow.
We are left with several possibilities: The syntheses of historians and scientists may have superficial similarities at best; these syntheses may share certain deep similarities; the similarities may be more formal than substantive; the dialectic between synthesis and analysis may obtain with respect to outstanding scholars across the disciplines. Or perhaps, just perhaps, at the deepest level, there are revealing affinities between scientific and historical synthesis.
References
Gardner, H., 2020. A synthesizing mind. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Gruber, H., 1981. Darwin on Man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Holton, G., 1988. Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Kahneman, D., 2011. Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow. New York: Farrar, Staus and Giroux.
Kuhn, T., 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Roberts, A., and Lamp, N., 2021. Six Faces of Globalization. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Schank, R., 1984. The Cognitive Computer: On language, learning and artificial intelligence. Reading: Addison-Wesley Pub. Co.
Tetlock, P., and Gardner, D., 2015. Superforecasting: The art and science of prediction. New York: Crown.
Wallace, D., and Gruber, H. (Ed.), 1989. Creative People at Work. New York: Oxford University Press.
Woodward, C., Art and Elegance in the Synthesis of Organic Compounds. In Wallace and Gruber, pp.227-253.