Science Proceeds One Question At a Time

Lessons From the History of Biology

MIDWAY through his 900 page history of biology, zoologist Ernst Mayr considers the problem posed by Alfred Wallace. Wallace was a contemporary of Charles Darwin who independently developed a theory of speciation by means of natural selection. By the time Wallace came on the scene Darwin had been sitting on his evolutionary theory for two decades. Reading Wallace’s 1858 paper “On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties” spooked Darwin. He did not want to be scooped. Within a year Darwin had rushed his material into an “abstract which… must necessarily be imperfect” as it only gave “the general conclusions” of his theory, and offered only a “few facts in illustration” to support them.¹ We know this abstract well: it was published as The Origin of Species.

This history thrusts a puzzle on the historian. Mayr states it like this:

The enormous resistance which Darwin’s theory encountered in the ensuing eighty years proves conclusively how difficult it is to put its eight components together properly. It is not like many of the discoveries in the physical sciences, where at a given period the same discovery is often made simultaneously by several people because they were looking for the missing piece in a jigsaw puzzle (Merton, 1973). That a second person, without knowing of Darwin’s work, would come up with the same theory of evolution by natural selection would seem utterly improbable. This theory was so novel, in such a contrast to anything that anybody had ever thought before, that it took nearly another hundred years before it was generally accepted. That another person, among the relatively few people thinking about evolution, would come up with essentially the same theory, at the same time, was totally unexpected, and yet it happened.²

Mayr carefully considers some of the answers other historians and biologists have put forward. (These include the influence of an industrialization on British thinking writ-large and new awareness of biological diversity, among others). He rejects them all. He suggests that Darwin and Wallace were not just Victorian naturalists who traveled the tropics—they were Victorian naturalists who traveled the tropics with a copy of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology in hand.

Charles Lyell was an essentialist and a creationist. He answered questions like “what are the causes for the extinction of species?” and “how did the specific species we see in the fossil record arise?” in an explicitly essentialist and creationist fashion. These answers were not sound—but the questions were. These questions “were encountered by Darwin when he read the Principles of Geology during and after the voyage of the Beagle. As a result of Lyell’s writings, these questions became the center of Darwin’s research program.”³This was all true for Wallace as well.

Mayr argues that the “Lyell-Darwin relationship illustrates in an almost textbook-like fashion a frequently occurring relationship among scientists.”⁴ This is not quite the relationship between pupil and teacher, or that of the “forerunner,” but something else. It is the relationship between the question-poser and the answer-finder. As Mayr writes:

It has often rightly been stated that Lamarck, even though a genuine evolutionist, was not really Darwin’s forerunner. Darwin did not in any way build on the Lamarckian foundations; rather he built on the Lyellian foundations. But one can hardly call Lyell a forerunner of Darwin’s, because he was adamantly opposed to evolution, he was an essentialist, he was a creationist, and his whole conceptual framework was incompatible with that of Darwin. And yet he was the first who clearly focused on the crucial role of species in evolution and stimulated Darwin to choose that way to solve the problem of evolution, even though this was done by showing that Lyell’s proposed solutions were wrong.

What does one call a person who shows the path even though he is not a forerunner in the conventional sense? In an analogous fashion my own work on geographic speciation and the biological species was stimulated by opposition to Goldschmidt’s (1940) proposed solution of speciation through systemic mutations. There are literally scores of cases in the history of science where a pioneer in posing a problem arrived at the wrong solution but where opposition to this solution led to the right solution. ⁵

A recurring theme in The Growth of Biological Thought is that most progress in biology has occurred not through technological breakthroughs but conceptual innovation (cytology is his obvious exception). For the most part, the evidence that famous biologists of the 19^th and 20^th centuries used to form groundbreaking theories had been sitting around unused for decades. It is easy to imagine an alternative world where the modern synthesis occurred in the 1910s, or natural selection was described in the 1820s. The data was there. The concepts and categories needed to understand that data was not.

In Mayr’s vision, the concepts scientists use are the children of the questions they ask. Mayr organizes his entire history in terms of the major questions that naturalists and biologists were attempting to answer in any given era. It is a refreshing approach that could and should be applied more broadly.⁶

I see examples of the same dynamic in history and social science often. To pick one example, Edward Luttwak’s book Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire is wrong in every one of its essential arguments.7 So conclusively wrong is this book that I do not think it should be included on any syllabus. Since Luttwak published that book in 1976, a dozen studies of Roman frontier deployments, Roman strategic culture, and Roman decision making have been published. All offer a steady refutation of Luttwak’s work. However, not one of those books or articles would have been written without Luttwak’s work. Luttwak was wrong in every particular except the questions he asked—but those questions were good enough to create an entire subfield of research. May all our errors do such good!⁷

I have never read a proper guide to asking good questions. Most academic research programs reduce down to asking yesterday’s questions to increasingly narrow data sets. We do not know how to train scholars in the art of posing question.

I wonder if the new era of AI tools will change this. Successful use of an LLM seems to mostly be a matter of clever questions. The LLMs work wonders—but only if you know the right questions to ask it. It would be a sunny outcome if using LLMs ends up training the next generation of scientists and thinkers into posing better questions.

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1. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (New York: Signet, 2003), 2.

2. Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance (Cambridge, Ma: Belknap Press, 1989), 494.

3. ibid., 380.

4. ibid.

5. ibid., 381

6. ibid., 6-8; 43-45.

7. For a summary, see Kimberly Kagan, “Redefining Roman Grand Strategy.” The Journal of Military History 70, no. 2 (2006): 333-362. In my opinion the best of the books to have come out this subfield is Rome and the Enemy: Imperial Strategy in the Principate (Berkley: University of California Press, 2002).