Rationally Speaking #3 - Can History Be a Science?

Rationally Speaking Podcast

New York City Skeptics

Philosophy, Society & Culture, Science

4.6 • 787 Ratings

🗓️ 28 February 2010

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Our guest, Prof. Peter Turchin from the University of Connecticut, joins Massimo and Julia to discuss whether history can be studied and understood in a scientific manner. In an article in Nature (3 July 2008) on what he termed “cliodynamics,” he discusses the possibility of turning history into a science. In it, he proposes that history, contrary to what most historians might think -- is not just one damn thing after another, that there are regular and predictable patterns, from which we can learn and that we can predict. Of course, he is not the only scientist to have turned to history in an attempt to make that field more scientific, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse immediately come to mind. And naturally, many historians vehemently object to what they perceive as a crude scientistic attempt at interdisciplinary colonization.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Rationally speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.
0:22.4	For more information, please visit us at NYCCEceptics.org.
0:31.0	Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.
0:41.4	I am your host, Massimo Piliucci, and with me, as always, is my co-host Julia Galev.
0:46.6	Julia, what's today's topic?
0:48.8	Masmo, today we're asking, is it possible to study history scientifically?
0:53.2	Are there general laws and principles underlying
0:55.4	how history unfolds and can we infer them from historical data with a level of rigor matching
1:00.1	that of the sciences? Here with us today is our first live guest, Professor Peter Churchin,
1:04.9	who's a professor at the University of Connecticut in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology,
1:09.7	an adjunct professor of mathematics.
1:11.8	He works on the scientific study of historical dynamics, a field for which he has coined the term
1:16.1	Cleodynamics. He's written three books on the subject, including 2006's War and Peace and War,
1:21.9	the Life Cycles of Imperial Nations. Welcome, Peter. Thank you.
1:26.5	So, just to start off, I have to say, my first reaction to the
1:30.4	idea of studying history scientifically was that human societies are just too complex, and history
1:37.9	being a result of thousands and thousands of different variables and changing over time would just be it would
1:45.5	just be too infeasible to study it with the kind of rigor that we require in the sciences.
1:51.0	I'm sure you've heard that a lot.
1:54.0	Well, in fact, that was my first reaction to you.
1:56.0	Remember, I was trained as a biologist and I became, well, a Cleodynamicist only in the last 10 years.
2:05.3	So it started really as a hobby. I thought about some history or biology, the work of people such as
	...

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