Abstract
In natural sciences, the “tree of life” is reconstructed using retrodiction. It should be followed from the present to the past. But we need to tell a story, which course is from the past to the present. So a number of misunderstandings occur, the first of them being cosmic finalism. It is important to understand that evolutionary facts are proved using two kinds of scientific reasoning, the one of nomological-deductive sciences and the one of paletiological-abductive sciences, and both are equally valid. Confusing them is also a great source of misunderstandings and political manipulations in non-biologists. We also detect a number of pitfalls and biases inherent to the use and abuse of narrative for telling the history of life. These pitfalls are not only misleading public’s minds, but also researchers’ minds, especially those who think they can map a mathematical law onto a succession of dates of arbitrarily chosen events. Then we provide a series of dates of arbitrarily chosen events related to the history of life and earth.
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Notes
- 1.
See Barberousse and Samadi, Chap. 11, this volume.
- 2.
See Barriel, Lecointre (“Filiation”) and Tassy, this volume.
- 3.
Additive consilience is the increase in reliability brought to a scenario or theory from the conjunction of independent facts that are not only compatible with on another, but which are also mutually reinforcing as well.
- 4.
See Tirard, Chap. 10, this volume.
- 5.
See Lecointre, “Filiation”, Chap. 9, this volume.
- 6.
On the epistemology of the notion of species, See. Samadi and Barberousse, Chap. 11, this volume.
- 7.
See Huneman, this volume.
- 8.
See specifically Chaline et al. (1999), Nottale et al. (2000). Along these lines, there is also Cash et al. (2002), whose abstract is as follows: “We propose to apply the log-periodical law used to describe various crisis phenomena, biological (evolutionary jumps), inorganic (earthquakes), social and economic (financial krachs), to various steps of the human ontogenesis. We find a statistically significant agreement between this model and the observed dates”. See also Brissaud (2007) on jazz.
- 9.
For a more detailed critique, See Lecointre (2001).
- 10.
See Tirard, Chap. 10, this volume.
- 11.
Translated by Elizabeth Vitanza, revised by the author.
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Lecointre, G. (2015). Telling the Story of Life: On the Use of Narrative. In: Heams, T., Huneman, P., Lecointre, G., Silberstein, M. (eds) Handbook of Evolutionary Thinking in the Sciences. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9014-7_19
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