Introduction: Scientific knowledge of the deep past.
Historical scientists, from cosmologists to archaeologists, tackle important but difficult tasks: reconstructing the events and entities which populate the deep past, understanding their formation and development, and learning how to see our contemporary world in terms of its long history. Of late, philosophers have paid increasing attention to these epistemic challenges and the nature of such sciences (see Turner 2014) The papers collected here offer both a (by no means exhaustive) look at the variety of epistemic practices and targets found in the historical sciences and illustrate new directions in the philosophy of historical science. We take 'historical scientists' to be those involved in the scientific investigation of the deep past. Maureen O'Malley focuses on how molecular data has revolutionized phylogenetic reconstruction and the epistemic challenges bred by that very success. Lindell Bromham uses a series of case studies to demonstrate the comparative method's (see below) power in investigations of macroevolution. Both discuss how our incapacity to experiment directly on past subjects can be mitigated mitigated in ways highly reminiscent of experimental method. Adrian Currie identifies a connection between the use of comparative data in biology and archaeology, which underwrites a re evaluation of evidence in the latter. Derek Turner revisits inferences about extinct lineages based on fossilized remains, using a mistaken prediction of his own to discuss the difficulty, but necessity, of making predictions about future scientific success or otherwise. Somewhat serendipitously, each paper explores past targets at different scales. Currie looks at the archaeological challenge of interpreting rock art and the use of the 'comparative method' in paleoanthropology. Such methods involve comparing different cases, and using those comparisons to make empirical inferences. For instance, Currie discusses the use of island dwarfism in elephants and hippopotami to test theories of the same in hominids. He covers the shallow end of the deep past: a few thousand years for archaeology, a little over ten thousand for paleoanthropology. Wading deeper, Turner looks at recent efforts to extract information about dinosaur coloration from the fossil record on a scale of tens of millions of years. Bromham discusses larger scale questions, for instance the frequent evolution, but short lifetime, of salt tolerant plant lineages. Such investigations not only expand our temporal scale to many millions of years, but our scope of concern: as opposed to considering the color of a few lineages, salt tolerance is examined across the plant kingdom. Finally, O'Malley is interested in the use of molecular data to tackle questions about phylogenetic relationships among the earliest eukaryotes: the deep oceans of time, hundreds of millions of years ago (still
Studies in history and philosophy of science