Writer and historian Gregory Radick visited King’s to share how exploring the possibilities of the past is much more than a parlour game and should fall under a historian’s job description.
At this year’s annual MacLennan Lecture, historian and philosopher of biology Dr. Gregory Radick dared to ask, “What if?” regarding the plausibility of counterfactual statements about the history of science. Anticipating some uneasiness at the premise of the lecture Radick began his talk with a plea for courage. “I am going to be counting on you,” he told an audience of King’s students, faculty and visitors in Alumni Hall, “to bear with dignity the jeers and sneers that will come from those that will say that counterfactual history is a parlour game.”
Visiting King’s from the University of Leeds, Radick’s trip was generously sponsored by Oriel MacLennan, who established the MacLennan Lecture series in 2017 and was present at the event. Each year, thanks to her donation, King’s invites a scholar to present a lecture in the field of science and technology studies or the history and philosophy of science. MacLennan’s interest in the history of science stems, in part, from her father, said Dr. Mélanie Frappier in her introduction to the event. He would rather show his daughter Pasteur’s laboratories than the Louvre when they visited Paris, she added. MacLennan’s own noteworthy scholarship is elevated by her steadfast commitment to the intellectual life of Halifax—King’s annual public lecture on the history of science being just one of the many ways she has facilitated academic endeavours.
Before arriving at King’s, Radick recounted how he had zipped from philosophy student events to biology study group meetings during the days leading up to the lecture. This eclectic series of appointments is a rather good representative of Radick’s work and, in some sense, the interdisciplinary fabric that makes up the history of science as a field. The subtitle of Radick’s recent book, Disputed Inheritance: the Battle over Mendel and the Future of Biology, alludes nicely to the different dimensions of his research. The work is a historical piece about the re-discovery of Gregor Mendel—a 19th-century Austrian monk who pioneered the field of genetics through his articulation of a set of principles of heredity through experiments in his garden—and the subsequent so-called ‘modern synthesis’ between Mendel’s laws of genetics and the theory of evolution by natural selection. Radick’s work also contends with philosophical concerns about how science is taught, how its development might possibly have been different, and how considering hypothetical alternatives in the history of science might make for better science down the road.
Making a counterfactual the focus of research might seem very strange to both the historian and the scientist. But Radick’s interest in the subject gets at something important about how science and history both work.
We might assume, says Radick, that even if our history had been different, we would arrive at more or less the same place in our science. After all, we think of science as dealing with facts about the natural world, and we presume these not to be historically contingent. For example, we may think that we would have discovered the Mendelian laws of inheritance, one way or another, precisely because they are present in nature. However, Radick is skeptical of this view. A careful examination of the history of science (and of science today) shows that Mendel’s laws are far more historically contingent and not as reliable as we would think. There are many exceptions to the laws, and it is evident from Mendel’s work that his experiments were not an accurate reflection of how nature works, but how nature works in a laboratory, which idealizes natural phenomena to yield neat and comprehensive laws. This is not to say Mendel’s work is without merit, but we might contend with the interesting possibility that our notion of inheritance, not being the natural phenomenon itself, could have been idealized in a different way or to a different degree.
There were competing notions of inheritance at the time Mendel was re-discovered and Radick suggests that part of the reason for why Mendel’s work persisted over other views was simply that the proponent of the most plausible alternative to Mendelian genetics passed away before publishing his major work on the subject.
We think of the enduring legacy of Mendelian inheritance as being partly responsible for some damaging eugenic arguments and for some methodological problems in biology. The thrust of the issue is that Mendel’s highly idealized work may suggest genetic determinism where there is none at play. For example, a Mendelian worldview might suggest to us that intelligence is inherited, whereas we now think of it as highly contingent on extraneous causes (such as the conditions of one’s upbringing). It is worthwhile asking, then, what if Mendel had not ‘won’?
Radick’s project is the “attempt at de-extinction of never-realized alternatives” in the history of science. An exploration of counterfactuals—of “might have been” moments, as he put it—could yield better science.
At the end of his lecture, an enthusiastic audience wasted no time in meeting his “What if?” with a series of equally incisive questions, which continued well after the event had moved to a reception in the boardroom. Are counterfactuals any different from fake news or alternative facts? Is all scientific development historically contingent? These kinds of pressing inquiries were welcomed. It’s valuable to stress-test modern science, which may at times become dogmatic and inflexible. Radick’s historiographical method reminds us that we should not take the success of our scientific practices for certain by allowing us to wonder what the world would look like if our science itself might have been different.
Banner photo by Alan Iturriaga Coutino
