Decoded at last: the 'classical holy grail' that may rewrite the history of the world. I don't know if it will rewrite the 'history of the world,' rather, the processes detailed in the piece might allow us to fill-in-some-of-the-blanks which dominate God's Book of History. 50 years ago reductionist physicists and mathematical model builders like Francis Crick and J.M. Smith created and revolutionized molecular and evolutionary biology respectively.¹ Certainly they helped biology move beyond the "stamp collection" stereotype, in other words, they taught biologists to fish rather than simply waiting for someone else to reel in the catch. Most degree programs in biology require at least one year of calculus, chemistry and physics to serve as a basis for later methodological explorations. A generation ago E.O. Wilson expressed the ambition to reduce the social sciences to a branch of biology. His project failed more than not, and to some extent I suspect that the full execution of such a goal was doomed by the limitations imposed by our neurological hardware (the exploration of the life sciences is constrained by the realities imposed by those sciences). Nevertheless, I do think that the methods and mindset of the natural sciences can offer some illumination to scholarly fields which have become covered with the dust of unsolved problems. This does not mean that historians, to give one example, need to load up on a large number of irrelevant course work in the natural sciences in preparation for their career, rather, they need to be familiar with the methods which might allow them to extract more data from the mines of the past. Empirical, even positivist, oriented scholars should grasp on to these scientific tools to rebut the all too real challenge of those who would obfuscate the study of the past by spinning a web of Theory which leave the quest for "evidence" in discarded bins.

Via Jim Nutley via Pejmanesque.

Addendum: I have spent a great deal of time on this weblog publicizing the power of genetic science in aiding in the reconstruction of our demographic past. But, I do want to emphasize that its role is supplementary and supportive, on one locus do too many build their theories upon, betraying a lack of understanding of the subtle difficulties of interpretation of hard data and a common confounding of the history of a gene with the ancestry of an individual and the history of a population.

Related: Up from ignorance and Up from ignorance II.

1 - Most of you know Crick was trained as a physicist. Fewer likely know that J. M. Smith was trained as an engineer. Certainly R. A. Fisher (a first in mathematics) brought models to the fore in evolutionary biology, along with J.B.S. Haldane and Sewall Wright, but from my reading it seems that in general most biologists of the day neither understood nor cared a great deal for "the sums" as J. M. Smith would say. As late as the 1970s an editor of a zoological journal asked Smith why he did not "cancel out the ds" when he saw a derivative in the form of dy/dx (assuming it had to be an algebraic complexity that could be eliminated).