What Geologists and Political Scientists Can Learn From One Another
Born of Ice & Fire by Graham Shields Reviewed by Oliver Shields
Life gnaws its way up through the lithic layers of
time, shapeshifting, taking any form it can that will fit through the path it
creates ahead.
Abstract: Examining how my father’s book “Born of Ice & Fire: How Glaciers and Volcanoes (with a Pinch of Salt) Drove Animal Evolution” (2023) relates to my life and research, I first review the narrative choices made by the author and then propose a common historical framework for the disciplines of geology and political science that sheds light on life’s problem-solving behavior. This cross-pollination is prompted by the scientific framework linking geology with economics that Graham Shields puts forward and amends, rooted in Enlightenment Age thinking, which I proceed to uproot and turn on its head.
My earliest memories are dominated by dinosaur dreams and real-life Australian
fauna, always held firmly apart by layers upon layers of rock down to my
synapses. I had always felt lucky to have seen opossums up close in a boulevard
tree or wallabies at Billabong sanctuary or the playground. They were among the
hundreds of animals I could identify at home in encyclopedias, dead or alive, about
which so many questions had been left unanswered in the last twenty years of my
life from 2004 to 2024, after leaving behind Australia — which remains a dazzling
memory of a world bathed in sunlight.
In Australia I had a good understanding of dinosaurs because I spent
weeks on end as an Allosaurus, at times impersonating a dragon, with an emerald-green
tail that I didn’t take off day and night. I had been told that the Allosaurus
I got, among others that I brought to my new home in Switzerland, had been a
gift from a fellow colleague of my dad’s, Markus, whom in the intervening years
I’d never see again. When questions crept up in my mind about the origin of
animals, I had only aboriginal and colonial fairytales for company, until the
questions would wane, turning my attention back to encyclopedic knowledge of
the commonest ilk. Shocked at the discovery that no one at kindergarten knew
that chickens were indeed dinosaurs (to my consternation one of the teachers
contradicted my claim, which led me to double down when talking to my mates and
their parents, calling out the lie whenever I got the chance to), I find myself
coming full circle but still skeptically dismissed by the children, rather than
the teachers, among whom I now exert a certain authority at the kindergarten I
work at, deserved or undeserved.
Spending my time as a teacher, I couldn’t help but notice the teaching
potential of dad’s book and I’m glad to conclude, it’s my favorite kind of
teaching book, as it introduces geological concepts, measurements, and theories
comprehensively insofar as the purpose lies in explaining its thesis to an
uninitiated reader able to follow the details on which the case — laid out
before him — rests. The book does not reduce geology to “whatever the
professor thinks” the object of geology ought to be, but positions itself within
a tradition with the purpose of explaining it fully, while also questioning its
very roots.
Admittedly, at first, I wanted to skip to “Fossil Records” to get straight
into the evolutionary action, but a simple remark Graham left changed my mind.
Presenting the story of the Snowball Earth Hypothesis as his own intimate
exemplum of what constitutes the progress of science, collectively and in the
realm of one scientist’s set of ideas, was possibly the most ingenious way to
frame the first half of the book, as it certainly kept me glued through the
first one-hundred typo-less pages (there’s one on p. 285 though, an “is” too
much). It’s only appropriate to emphasize the shocking nature of the discovery
in the sheer originality of its full implications; as indeed a new and
unexpected finding, such as the Snowball Earth Hypothesis, ought never be
portrayed as a bulwark of definitive traditional methods or mantras, as
repeated by the geological high priests of yore ever since the Enlightenment
age.
Its strongest and most admirable quality as a science book, however, is
that it argues against itself — and it does so explicitly and with consistency.
What is done rather inconsistently, however, is remind the reader when it is
doing so. As a narrative suggestion from chapter 8 onwards, suppose this maxim were
repeated more consciously whenever different hypotheses are advanced, for
instance when going through several possible effects of evaporites on CO2 in
the atmosphere, some of which are explicitly rejected, otherwise bringing them
up at all seems somewhat of a random exercise to a reader (usually) on the
look-out for an authoritative scientific judgement, rightly or wrongly.
I consider the repetition of clarifications to be generally in rather
short supply. For example, as metaphors go, describing geological processes
that are magnitudes in slowness beyond slow motion requires a repertoire
replete with evocative expressions, which fossilized into academic geological
short-hands, mixing phenomena of widely different varieties—the very large and
very small—and speeds that are nigh impossible to get your head around as the
uninitiated reader. So how does the book fare in attempting to leap-frog from
esoteric to exoteric? The first metaphor in the book (without giving it away)
goes a long way to prepare for the mental gymnastics of geological time, yet at
page 115, where time divisions are reintroduced, the metaphors are lacking and
the reader is left asking himself “Now, where on the metaphoric scale might
those time divisions be?” This is one of several examples I could give of
missed opportunities to refresh the reader’s memory. They go hand in hand with
another one of my minor quibbles: there are terms left unexplained at first
occurrence but the effort is made to explain them later on. Quizzical at first,
this might be excused as a means of enhancing the flow. Notwithstanding flow,
as the author is well-aware at other instances, in a story which is to live up
to popular science repetition (!) is your friend and constant companion
through an avalanche of novelty. Though no author should evade the use of
synonyms for fear of being scientifically “incorrect”, repeating the same
jargon over and over again; as the specific literary skill which popular
science demands is to keep the language at an enjoyably eloquent level while
avoiding implicit terminology draped in definitional drivel. It is my true and
honest opinion that it would make all science more readable, and more worthy of
reading too.
Apart from these editorial choices, I find myself to be much more in
line with what Graham writes about the scientific method in this book than what
he has said to me in person, already a couple of years ago now, in Zürich. I find
it “basically correct” (a phrase with which one always manages to sound
arrogant) when he waxes philosophical on the scientific progress of
historically based study. As Ying, dad and I were walking up the Limmat he
looked surprised when I defended the discipline of ancient history as a
scientific endeavor rather than mere speculation. But much of what applies to
geology is also true of the discipline studying ancient texts. The most
plausible explanation for an observer of the source material requires backing
up by circumstantial evidence, in the case of dating newly discovered bamboo
slits of the Analects of Confucius, significant philological, material, and
textual evidence must be amassed or tested against to withstand scholarly scrutiny.
Of course, if the evidence is lacking, it’s the wrong place to look for
scientific progress. However, in the case of Analects of Confucius manuscripts
that turned up in a museum in Shanghai, a later breakthrough has added them to
the pool of usable evidence in historically situating the ideological tenants
of Confucianism pertaining on matters of statecraft. Despite lacking archeological
context, characteristic incisions in the bamboo were discovered some decades
after their recovery, which negates the plausibility of a forgery, since no one
knew of the incisions or that they were characteristic of textual material
dating to early China at the time of the rediscovery. With the benefit of
hindsight, textual forgeries of pre-modern times may require impossible
foresightedness to go unnoticed. To take another example, Hellenistic philologians
may map out ancient Greek word morphologies and vocabulary to situate a
document to a given century’s written corpus, making use of linguistic vowel
and consonant change laws. Dating methods root the text in a historical context
(the amalgam of other evidence from that period) that can be used to understand
the text better.
Stronger political implications, however, cloud the judgement of researchers
in the field of human history, as opposed to natural history. It is much
harder, even for a creationist, to be taken seriously in proposing that stegosaurus
cohabited with neanderthals in the discipline of paleontology than it is for a Hebrew
or Buddhist scholar, for instance, to defend a motivated view which contradicts
the facts just as blatantly as the idea of dinosaurs and humans chronologically
sharing an ancient planet, such as the idea that the early religion of Buddhism
contained no superstitions or that the ancient Jewish religion contained no
polytheism, making the anachronistic case that original ancestral traditions
were “just as” rational, or more rational than they are today; or claiming that
the gospels were originally written in Aramaic and dating them to the supposed life
and times of Jesus, to pretend they are historically accurate in depicting the
Messiah. Therefore integrity is key. Indeed, I believe we can learn from my
dad’s a posteriori study of nature about the a posteriori study of human
society.
At several instances the author compares historical events with each
other — global glaciations, climate change events, oxidizations, and evolutionary
forcings — while admitting that they operate within a contingent framework, in
other words, that systemic balance does not bind them to an absolute set of
rules. The shadow of political economy, especially Marxism, has been cast into
stone as the assumption that comparative history requires a self-perpetuating system
maintaining itself in balance. Comparative economic history across the world
and across time supposedly only becomes meaningful when the “late capitalist system”
in Brussels is directly comparable to the same process in Shanghai, or when feudal
Belgium can be compared to “feudal” China, and so on. In conjunction with
determinism, assumptions such as these turn history into an oracular
pseudo-science which aims to make predictions about the course of history — about
when the slave system needed to come to an end in Korea and feudalism begin or
when the age of capitalism will finally end and socialism start in Denmark —
rather than a problem-oriented one, that ultimately looks at how problems were
overcome in the past, fueling an understanding upon which creative solutions
can be actively devised — in the present. What links planetary events to
economic and political events is not the underlying balanced system implicit in
the old phrase “economy of nature” — as the Enlightenment philosophers believed
— but they may be linked up by a problem-centered approach to history.
Animals could evolve because life forms devised solutions to survive, we can study the history of these solutions (and failures) through the fossil record, but we cannot make predictions. Wouldn’t it seem strange if we attempted to predict the advent of animals by projecting onto history a sequence of evolutionary stages, each of which is in balance with the earth system, leading life from one balanced system to the next, a former life form transforming into a new one because the “material circumstances” of the earth system changed? Yet it is, ludicrously, what Gaia Theory proposes by tying the regulation of the earth’s system to life and thus geological epochs to life forms in habitable balance with the times. [Unsatisfied with Darwin, Karl Marx himself saught to find a theory akin to this, see his letters of the 7th of August-9th October 1866. Upon finding a book to cling onto by Pierre Trémaux and making Friedrich Engels read it, his belief that Trémaux's theory must represent progress over Darwin's, hilariously, withstood the thorough debunking of Trémaux's ignorance and factual errors on the subject of geology that Engels points out to him, demonstrating that Marx had no scientific methodology to speak of when confronted with the fact that the evidence wasn't on his side. The issue that Marx raises: "Der Fortschritt, der bei Darwin rein zufällig, hier nothwendig, auf der Basis der Entwicklungsperioden des Erdkörpers." is, in fact, addressed in Born of Ice & Fire. Marx was obsessed with the idea that progress is the result of historical material forces. As a historical nihilist:] I say instead, life gnaws its way up through the lithic layers of time, shapeshifting, taking any form it can that will fit through the path it creates ahead. The phenotype sets itself the problem of survival in habitable niches and is forced to work out a situation-dependent solution, if it isn’t to be eliminated. Born of Ice & Fire reconstructs the problem-situation of life during, after and before the emergence of animals, making it possible to retrace the (objectively directionless) problem-solving process and single out the factors that made complex life possible, with the previously mentioned comparisons supporting the argument.
Not many people accept at face value that causes or reasons are historically comparable with one another when both the material circumstances in which they occur and the causes differ from each other. Although they have something in common. Evoking the concept of “Time’s Arrow” (also chapter 10 in dad’s book), Karl R. Popper gives a few simple examples for the irreversibility of physical systems in The Open Universe (1988), like the emanation of particles from a center, and concludes, “all causes (though not all forces) spread from centers” (in footnote 1 to chapter (*79) The Past and the Future) — centers like the inorganic sun or the earth’s core or the tiny organisms feeding off the energy cascade. Centers from which causes irreversibly originate disrupt the systemic “balance” of the earth system — as well as the economic system. In corrupting the very idea of “balance”, their forces cannot be labeled as merely reactionary to the “true” material development of history or doomed to fail against the inevitably balancing system. These causes transformed the problem-situation of life on earth, pre-conditioning animal evolution no less. The causes of change are what makes the comparisons meaningful on multiple levels, since we are curious about them and want to know whether they tell us something about our own activity in causing change.
In what “drives” evolution (the metaphor used in the subtitle and on p. 266) it is easy to confuse effect for cause, as if the precise form an animal took was determined by general concentrations of molecules in the water and air. Well aware of the absurdity of mixing up pre-conditions with causes, mere effects of causes and “something else” or “someone else” being the cause, Socrates, in the Platonic dialogue Phaedo 98c-99a, points out a fundamental contradiction he discovered in his youthful cosmological pursuits: the contradiction of someone, claiming ‘[I, Socrates,] act with reason or intelligence; and then, in trying to explain the causes of what I am doing now, should assert that I am now sitting here because my body is composed of bones and sinews […] and that this is the cause of my sitting here with my legs bent’. We are required to (at least tentatively) study historical causes as causes, propensities as indeterministic, and problems as solvable through active means, not as merely resolved through the passive waxing and waning of material contradictions.
(Hold that thought for me please, would you.)
∞
My dad and I had talked about applying the historical reasoning he uses
for geology to economic theory one evening in his living room in London. Upon
listening to remarks intending to cross-pollinate the field of economics with
fresh ideas from geology, I abashedly remember bluntly blurting out: “That’s
not how economics works.” A bit later I keenly offered to get my dad a copy of
Niall Ferguson’s book Money, which to his utmost credit, he diligently
read. As strangely as my brain sometimes works, the remark was not intended as
a discouragement. Already then, I saw the possible parallels, but they reminded
me of what I criticize above. In due time, however, the questions which
germinated then and there led me to put forward the following paragraphs
comparing some causes of political and economic change with others.
∞
(I make a return to resolution via active means.)
Seeking to make outcome-oriented decisions, humans have — always in the face of terrible problems — tried to come up with definitive and final solutions, with terrible consequences. Whenever they have come up with specific answers, they have often left traces in different parts of the world and in different epochs. Last year in a series of articles, I studied utopian communism in its different forms throughout Chinese history. Utopian communism is a good example of a problem-solving process in human history that can be traced across the earth (from Greece to China) and across time (from antiquity to the present) in much more detail than that of life in the pre-cambrian period. In this way, problem-centered comparisons in politics and economics can be established for which the problem-situation can be historically reconstructed; indeed, it makes for a fruitful model of political science (unlike World Systems Theory, I should add).
Utopian solutions are all of a similar nature despite originating from
diverse problem-situations; whereas starting off with problems of a similar
nature, it is equally possible to trace significantly distinct pragmatic problem-solving
processes and thus diverging solutions, as in determining the salt tax in human
history. From the Roman Republic and Han dynasty China, through colonial India
to parliamentary France or twenty-first century Switzerland, the deliberation
and reasoning process observed in different political regimes unsurprisingly
lead to different results for the poor in society, who are the ones most
affected by salt taxes.
The Shanghai-based intellectual Jin Xu has in her book Empire of
Silver (2017, Eng. tr. 2021) used this approach to shed light on the Great
Divergence — the fact that China ended up in the 19th century with a
technologically less advanced society than the West —, arguing that decisions
made during the Song dynasty were a factor in the lack of an industrial revolution,
while at the same time in Europe better solutions were found to solve the same
problem of how to finance the state’s military expenditures, which eventually
led to the banking system. Ever since then, money has gotten more efficient in
the West as evidenced by steadily declining interest rates in the longue durée (in
Rogoff et al.), while in the Chinese empire interest rates were high at the
dawn of modernity (Xu, p. 210, which affected the flow of silver currency). One
of Chinese modernity’s most influential ideologues, Kang Youwei, was still
advocating age-old traditional Chinese methods in his state-financing program, as I discussed in an article in French last year. During Kang Youwei’s lifetime Japan successfully
industrialized, leaving China behind, meaning that industrial technology and
industrial policies were applied by the right people to solve the right
problems — namely those people that saw which problems industrial methods could
solve more effectively when compared to pre-modern methods.
Another important factor is institutional, namely that modern banking arose from the organizational principles of Northern
Italian republics, such as Genova’s Casa di San Giorgio, and Japanese
industrial policy was implemented within the confines of total revision-style constitutionalism,
with its economic law codes being written by the same 19th century German
economists that traced the origin of modern banking back to the Casa di San
Giorgio. The state’s structure, as Jin Xu repeatedly reminds the reader, is
crucial for economic history, since it is, I argue, in many respects a change
causing “center”.
For an ancient Greek political comparativist, like Aristotle, writing “a
constitution” of a state simply meant describing how society was already
organized (we are told by Ptolemy “Al-Gharīb” that Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens is merely one of 171 such
constitutions of his making). In contrast, the 18th century revolutions
in Europe greatly accelerated the tradition of totally revising the
constitution in having it literally and figuratively re-written (by
intellectuals, like Rousseau, elite politicians, like Gouverneur Morris or John
Adams, or autocrats, like Napoleon, and with or without direct democratic
ratification by the people), redrawing the map, resetting the system,
redefining the rules. A close reading of the primary sources from people at the
center of change (as for instance: the private and secret protocols of the 1848
Swiss total revision assembly numbering 23 members, eight of which were lawyers) can
prove which constitutional options were on the table and the reasons given for taking them; the
circumstantial evidence gleaned from contemporary newspapers, pamphlets, songs,
etc., can enrich the interpretation or increase its plausibility (and using AI
on circumstantial evidence could vastly improve the interpretation of the primary
evidence).
Contra what my dad dismissively quips about the French Revolution on p.
4., my view on both industrial and political revolutions attributes to aggregate
human decision-making and state institutions the responsibility for causing
both the advantages and disadvantages of political economy. To simply imagine
that one economic system after another balances itself out, uninterrupted by the mere ebbing
and flowing of politics, is akin to contending that geological eras move in
clean steps and stages, a view, as I understand it, overturned by Born of
Ice & Fire. As far as the quintessential economic “balance” between
expenditure and the average expectation of future earnings goes, the increasing
efficiency of credit — money and debt — irreversibly redresses that balance, just
as unexpected expenditure for dealing with large external shocks frequently disrupts
it (the implicit comparison, here, is to the irreversible tendency of "Time's Arrow" and the volcanic eruptions, etc., disruptions tracing their ultimate cause back to the cooling of earth's core); the case study on The Israeli Economy by Joseph Zeira (2021) offers telling
examples of the economy dealing with external shocks. Financing deficits to
prevent a crisis requires regularly renewed ingenuity in resolving problems,
while sometimes the state ends up going bankrupt anyway.
It follows that fostering a culture of ingenuity is a major systemic priority.
New forms of problem-solving have likewise arisen from revolutions, like the
Athenian 508 (BCE) revolution that created a new form of democratic
problem-solving, with significantly different outcomes for everyone involved,
although balancing expenditure and earnings was not necessarily the democratic
regime’s greatest strength (if one consults Thucydides). Here in Switzerland,
the French Revolution too reshuffled state institutions quite a bit,
introducing a collective executive leadership, a modern parliament, modern
direct democracy, and (the prospect for) a public education system, &c.,
thus redirecting the channels of ingenuity flowing through the Helvetian body
politic, such that solutions could once again arise from the imaginative demos.
But successful total revisions have certain prerequisites. Just as the
education system should fit the constitution, as Aristotle had it, a change in cultural ideas ought to prepare the next generation in improving said constitution, as Condorcet
knew too well. It is not the progress of knowledge or a technological leap per
se that constitutes revolutionary change in human society, rather it is the
adoption of new cultural attitudes — and with it, new political institutions on
scales both large and small — that change our problem resolution behavior.
Ultimately even the writing of books depends on the directionless
imagination with which each and every one of us is equipped. Because, just as
forcings set the stage for Darwin’s “theater of agency” (see Darwin’s
Psychology by Ben Bradley), when we enter the stage of history, we... as actors... may, ourselves,
determine whether or not to restrain our imagination... whether or not we doubt
and come up with new solutions... whether to fill the void with new tales of fact
and fiction! Because applying the function of our imagination to unsolved problems
enables us to dazzle the darkness without by fueling the fire within.
Oliver D. Shields, for Dad’s birthday, the 26. April, 2024.