| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

M. Norton Wise, editor. Growing Explanations: Historical Perspectives on Recent Science. (Science and Cultural Theory.) Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2004. Pp. vi, 346. Cloth $89.95, paper $24.95.
This collection of essays concerns broad changes underway across several scientific areas: changes, in the first order, not in institutions, or areas of inquiry, or even in tools and techniques, but in guiding episteme. The argument is that across the physical and life sciences, the character of scientific explanation has undergone a major transformation during the past two or three decades. Where once the sciences had held up reductionism and unification as ultimate explanatory goals, now many focus on complexity, chaos, and contingency. Ecology has largely replaced elementary particle physics as the model discipline.	1
In case studies ranging from theoretical physicists' string theory, to the mathematics of topology and nonlinear dynamics, to civil engineering, molecular biology, immunology, and the new boom field of "artificial life," the contributors highlight several features common to this new brand of scientific explanation. According to the new view, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; critical properties can be emergent, dependent on scales of observation and on complex interactions among components; nonlinearities can produce large effects from small causes; and the objects of study are often hybrid, inducing boundary crossing among experts in different specialties. Interest in dynamics now trumps (static) constituents. Many of these key explanatory elements have been stimulated, the contributors suggest, by new tools, especially high-speed computing and the ubiquity of simulations. Most important, editor M. Norton Wise suggests, these changes in forms of explanation have narrowed the gap between the "two cultures": natural scientists' turn to emergent phenomena has in effect turned them into historians, focused on narratives and contingencies.	. . .

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