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The natural sciences and history seem to represent alternative, even antithetical, ways of understanding the world. The natural sciences seek recurring patterns in nature and explain them using general laws. History concerns itself with unique events and explains them using narratives of how they happened as they did. This dichotomy has come to seem natural, even inevitable. But it is neither. Charles Darwin believed that it is possible to integrate the natural sciences and history into a unified program of inquiry that can explain stable and recurring patterns in nature using contingent historical processes rather than general laws. And he devoted his career to building such a unified program. In this dissertation, I examine the development and character of this science of history.
Darwin did not begin his scientific career pursuing this project. When he first began to build a science of living nature, Darwin's goal was to discover and characterize the necessary and invariant laws that govern and explain the living world. He had internalized a conception of science that had been formulated by John Herschel, Charles Lyell, and Charles Babbage. They had seen scientific explanation as consisting in showing phenomena to be the necessary results of universal laws, taking as their model Isaac Newton's laws of motion. Darwin in his turn consecrated himself to the ambition to do for the living world what Newton had done for the heavens: he would discover and characterize the laws of life.
Within a decade, however, Darwin would come to abandon his ambition to subsume the living world under a regime of invariant laws. He came to reject the simple, linear conception of causation on which his Newtonian program had been founded in favor of an understanding of evolutionary causation as ineluctably complex. He also came to realize that history has causal power in the living world, both constraining and creative.
Darwin ultimately concluded that, to do justice to the profound complexity and historicity of the living world, he would have to integrate the natural sciences and history into a unified program of inquiry. This required him to rethink what laws of nature are and to reconceive the goals of scientific explanation. He came to understand explanation of living nature in more pragmatic terms, as making phenomena intelligible to working naturalists and providing them a conceptual framework to organize and drive their scientific work. Most fundamentally, he concluded that explanations in the sciences of life must take history seriously, not as a fixed stage on which evolution unfolds, but as a critical component of biological explanation.
In order to create explanatory tools better adapted to his revised conception of science, Darwin returned to several ideas he had encountered as a young man and reimagined them through a historicizing lens. These included the natural theological notion of contrivance, the biblical and literary image of the tree of life, and the imaginary demon that the mentors of his youth had created to define a regulative ideal for scientific knowledge. Darwin did not merely appropriate these older ideas. He reconceived them by viewing them through a historicizing lens to make tools for making sense of the phenomena of living nature.