Botany, history, and natural selection

I'm in the midst of Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire and, for the most part, I'm enjoying it. The writing's a bit overblown and there's too much of his personal life included, but his main point is rather intriguing. The book would be considerably better if he more fully explored the ramifications of his argument and spent less time reminiscing about planting tulips in his parents' garden.

Here's his main point: humans like to think that they've domesticated a wide range of plants for their own benefit. But we don't need to view the human-controlled dissemination of plants as a process that solely benefits humans. Instead, (at the risk of anthropomorphizing them) plants have a real interest in making themselves attractive to humans. If, say, people find a particular flower enchanting and want fields of that flower surrounding them, that species is far more likely to survive than a brown, wilty thing that people would more likely crush under their heel than plant in their garden. In a very real sense, plants use people just as much as people use plants. Perhaps the relationship between human and plants should be seen more as symbiosis than domestication.

One of Pollan's more intriguing observations is about Darwin's concept of artificial selection. Darwin pointed to the fact that humans selectively breed plants and animals to bring out certain characteristics to support his claim that species change over time. Darwin went on to argue that natural selection was a different process, one in which an organism's environment provided the pressures that selected particular characteristics over time.

Pollan rightly points out that, from the perspective of the animal or plant being bred, there's no difference between natural selection and Darwin's artificial selection. Flowers don't care whether it's bees that are instinctively drawn to bright colors or gardeners who consciously seek out a certain shade who do the work of pollination. All that matters is that there's some external factors that affect what genetic material is passed onto future generations.

There's a parallel to draw between this conflation of artificial and natural selection and the production of history (in the sense of writing history, not in the sense of actually doing things later considered historic).

The birth of academic history is traced to Leopold von Ranke, a 19th-century German historian. Ranke stressed rigorous archival research which sought primary sources to get as close to the event in question as possible. This new "scientific" history is typically seen as a dramatic departure from earlier methods of producing history which simply took older, existing narratives as truthful.*

Scientific history can be seen an analogous to Darwin's artificial selection. The new historians went into the archives with an eye for sources with particular features: proximity to the event of interest, reliability, etc. Those features allowed the information present in those sources to be preserved for posterity in the articles and books written by historians. In a very real sense, this is a case of survival of the fittest, where the fittest are those sources most valued by historians with consciously constructed objectives.

If academic history is an instance of artificial selection, what, then, is history's parallel to natural selection? It seems to me that the myriad ways in which non-historians engage with the past constitute the natural selection of history.

Plenty of the past is forgotten.** But certain people and events are remembered, even without the help of professional historians. Take Independence Day celebrations. Americans started commemorating the Fourth of July in the earliest years of the republic. Parades, speeches, newspaper reprints of the Declaration of Independence, you name it. But not everything about Independence Day was remembered. The fact that Philadelphia was the location were independence was declared, for example, was almost completely ignored. People wanted to see the Fourth of July as a national holiday, not one linked to a particular place (for more on this speculative conclusion, see my paper The Forgotten Fourth).

Details aside, the point is that individuals and societies make decisions about what bits of the past are to be passed onto future generations.

As you may have guessed by now, my overarching argument is entirely parallel to Pollan's. The distinction between the artificial selection practiced by historians and the natural selection that everyone else engages in is spurious. Historians and the general public certainly look for different things when they seek to remember the past. Historians, by and large, want reliability. Most Americans want stories that they can personally relate to.

But what matters is that there's no inherent difference between the historical selections of historians and the historical selections of the general public. From the perspective of the historical information itself (I'm anthropomorphizing again... my apologies), it matters little whether it gets preserved by historians or marchers in a parade.

This doesn't mean we should treat the historical knowledge of the public as equally valuable as that of professional historians. Far from it. But historians should recognize that their knowledge of the past is ultimately selective and subjective, just like everyone else's.

*This is a drastic simplification. It's been shown rather definitively that Ranke was not the first to examine historical sources with a critical eye. See, for example, Francesco Guicciardini.

**I've got another post brewing on this. The gist: the past is lost. We can only recover a small bit of it. But it's still worth getting whatever we can.