In Darwin's Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace ...

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Eysenck: “Newton’s gravitational force was such a concept; Pavlov’s ‘conditioning’
is such another. These terms do not refer to actual observable objects
or events, but to hypothetical constructs which make thinking about
observable events easier and which may enter into our equations describing
and ‘explaining’ the behavior of objects, animals, or human beings.” 23 For
psychologists Clarence Brown and Edwin Ghiselli, “Why is it so?” is the
ultimate question to be asked about any human action, and “Explanation is
the fundamental method through which we discover the answer to this type
of question.” For the social scientist, they argue, “explanation proceeds to the
discovery of higher-order meanings by means of the manipulation of concepts”
where theories and interpretations form the basis of these higher-order
meanings. 24
One important question asked in this book is this: Why did Wallace believe
it was not possible for evolutionary mechanisms to account for the advanced
development of the human mind? There is no reason that this question cannot
be studied and answered in a scientific manner using the best available tools
of description and explanation. The goal in this biography, then, is to address
this and other questions about Wallace in the most rigorous, scientific manner
possible, teasing out the factors and variables that mattered most, using the
factorial matrix design to construct a test of this relative influence, and analyzing
the historical data to reach a deduction from the test. The conclusions
stand or fall based on the evidence and interpretation. That is the efficiency
and elegance of science. Like all scientists, historians want to understand
causality, in this case causes of past effects. It so happens that because of its
set of methods that includes rigorous testing, careful examination of the data,
corroboration among other members of the community, and the agreement
that all conclusions are provisional, science is the best cultural tradition we
have for understanding the cause of things, present and past.
Historical Science in Practice
How can the normal types of evidence that historians use—documents, letters,
memos, photographs, and the like—be employed in a more scientific fashion?
We might consider four higher-order levels of analysis that have been and are
being used by other historical scientists.
1. Convergence of Evidence. In August 1996, NASA announced that it had
discovered life on Mars. The evidence was the Allan Hills 84001 rock believed
to have been ejected out of Mars by a meteor impact millions of years
ago, which subsequently fell into an earth-crossing orbit and struck our planet.
On the panel of NASA experts was paleobiologist William Schopf, a historical
scientist specializing in ancient life. Schopf was skeptical of NASA’s claim