STUDYING THE DEEP PAST: PHILOSOPHICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS
Although cosmology, biology, and archeology have a long history of human interest in and study of their respective subjects, they are very young scientific disciplines. Cosmology went through a speculative stage in the earliest human intellectual endeavours, entered a mathematical stage in the 17th century, and is now (since WWII) considered a physical science. The formulation of the Big Bang theory of the origin of the physical universe, first proposed as a developed physical model by Georges Leamître, marked the beginning of the surprising advancement of the field. Meanwhile, the development of molecular biology, especially the discovery of the molecular structure and function of DNA, put biology on a firm scientific footing. But this was very recent, only since the 1950s, following the early 20th-century new synthesis of Darwinism and modern genetics (the latter initiated by the pioneering work of Gregor Mandel). Finally, although people have studied archeological artefacts for thousands of years, systematic ways of recording and measuring were introduced only at the turn of the 20th century and then crucially amended with the insights of physical anthropology and forensic chemical techniques of analysis, of which carbon-dating is the best-known. Some of the core topics of these sciences of the origins, notably the cosmological quest for the origin of the physical universe, the biological search for the origin of life, and the archaeological quest for the origin of the human mind, share both methodological features and intellectual challenges. Although these are specialized scientific pursuits with unique subject matter, theoretical accounts, and techniques of analysis, a cluster of common topics and themes is emerging, centered on their methodology. These include the following: 1) Theoretical accounts of phenomena in these sciences are inevitably based on indirect evidence of past events. The development of their theories is bound to go through pronounced and protracted periods of under-determination of indirect evidence , unlike the more experimentally oriented sciences. Thus, a proliferation of ideas and careful considerations of alternative accounts of relevant issues and phenomena and their adequate treatment are an essential part of their progress, much more so than in some other scientific fields. 2) They all face an unusual magnitude of selection effects (biases) in gathering data and establishing evidence to test various hypotheses. However, various selection effects related to dating and assessing relevant phenomena were reflected on and methodologically ameliorated in cosmology (e.g. in case of certain types of early galaxies or black holes) substantially earlier than in archaeology and paleontology, suggesting the potential value of closer communication between the fields. 3) Theories and models are inherently interdisciplinary, and the ideas driving them draw on a variety of sources before they are distilled in a more exact form. 4) They all borrow and indirectly rely on experimental and observational techniques from other disciplines, making the assimilation of such background knowledge into relevant theories and accounts of studied phenomena conceptually challenging. This has been a particularly controversial issue in archeology, but it also remains contentious in the origin of life science. Reflecting on how ideas from various domains of knowledge are intertwined in these sciences would yield valuable philosophical and methodological insights. For example, cosmology has always been crucially motivated by various speculative, theological, and mathematically-based views. Moreover, the recent resurgence of the idea of panspermia in the origin of life sciences and astrobiology could fruitfully be considered in interdisciplinary exchanges. And the study of the origin of consciousness (along with the characteristic mental capacities of homo-sapiens) would benefit from an exchange of ideas drawing on reductionist and non-reductionist accounts of mind and life, insights in cognitive science, and relevant archaeological evidence. |