When Life Nearly Died by Michael J. Benton

Author:Michael J. Benton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thames & Hudson

The search for pattern

Does history follow rules or not? In matters of human affairs, some historians see a horrible inevitability in the rise and fall of nations. Countries and peoples can be said to go through cycles of rising fortunes, successful conquest, then decadence, followed by collapse. Marxist historians argue that there is a pre-ordained plan, driven by socio-economic forces and the tension between the ruling classes and the ruled. Others would use militaristic or martial metaphors: nations rise and fall as a result of their fighting power. When confidence is high and the steel is sharp, that nation prevails.

In 1923, the Russian astronomer and archaeologist A. L. Tchijevski published his ‘Index of Mass Human Excitability’. He argued that humans behave excitedly and violently at regular intervals, nine times each century. Each cycle of excitability lasts for 11.1 years, and the maximum level of violence is associated with sunspot activity. In 1943, the American psychologist Raymond P. Wheeler of the University of Kansas argued that civil wars follow a 170-year cycle. Every third wave is supposedly more dramatic than the others, giving phases of extreme violence every 510 years. The cause in this model is supposedly periods of drought, which apparently have happened every 170 years. Other historians view such notions as utter nonsense, entirely without substance.

The search for pattern and meaning in history is an incredibly attractive pursuit. A quick search of the internet reveals hundreds of websites devoted to showing how history follows patterns. The theories range from the crackpot to the seemingly sane. Why should this search for pattern be so popular? If you look hard enough you can find cycles, patterns, regularities in any series of historical events. Such claims can only be justified if they can be turned into predictions. So, the millennialist has to show by calculating the birth dates of Genghis Khan, Napoleon and Hitler, or whatever, that the rise of the next nationalist conqueror can be predicted.

Pattern in history could all be in the mind. Humans are tidy creatures who like to file information away in meaningful boxes. It is comforting to be able to catalogue all the kings and queens of England, and classify them as either good or bad, not something in between. Far easier to see patterns in history than to have to accept the alternative – a raw and uncontrolled series of changes of immense complexity, and devoid of meaning. The same is true of evolution.

Evolutionary history was a comfortable phenomenon for the pre-evolutionists, and indeed for modern creationists. God planned everything, and He imposed a clear pattern. Every fossil had its place in the scheme of things, and the apparent coming and going of different groups of plants and animals was all part of a parade towards perfection. Whether these evolutionary changes were seen as unidirectional (time’s arrow) or cyclical (Charles Lyell’s view), there was a goal and a measure of predictability.

Early theories of evolution, such as that of Jean Baptiste Lamarck, were no less goal-directed – what the philosophers call ‘teleological’.

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