| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1 | The History Cooperative

Philip Pomper and David Gary Shaw, editors. The Return of Science: Evolution, History, and Theory. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield. 2002. Pp. vii, 306. Cloth $75.00, paper $29.95.
Progress and providence once made history seem schematic. In the nineteenth century, dialectic, evolution, and the passion for scientific laws multiplied available schemes. Historians then recoiled from them, impelled by the accumulation of evidence, unpersuaded by all-encompassing descriptions—much less explanations—of how human lives and relationships change. Most of us reject self-designation as scientists, partly because our data are inaccessible to observation or experiment, and partly because we like the particular and unpredictable too much.	1
Now, however, science exerts enormous magnetism. It commands huge social prestige. It registers triumphs in the struggle to understand the world. People with the science-free schooling endured by my generation can no longer consider themselves well educated—and, if they are historians, rightly so, for humans are embedded in the ecosystems of which they form a part, and no human history is complete without reference to nonhuman nature. So science is back: sharing historians' curricula, influencing our ideas, informing our understanding.	. . .

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