Research

No matter what period or part of the globe historians study, we tend to think of science is a set of institutions, objects, and methods for producing knowledge. My work asks – what can science teach us about what we don’t know, or even about what we cannot know? When scientists run up against the limits of their data, say in the study of the deep past or analysis of complex systems, how do they think about the limits of knowledge? My basic contention is not only that scientists have been extremely creative and philosophically adept at thinking about the limits of knowledge, but that the shape they give to non-knowledge has had enormous political consequences, from the ways we understand human biological difference, to the evolution of the liberal state. I study moments in history, from 1920s France to 1990s United States, when scientific ideas about unknowability and irresolvability become politically generative, fundamentally shaping the politics of the present world.

My first book, The Truth of Biology: Logics of Life in 20th-Century Liberalism, shows how epistemic hurdles faced by French biologists in the interwar years inspired and informed a revitalization of liberal historical theory, reshaping the politics of knowledge in France for decades to come. Until the mid-twentieth century, French biologists remained largely committed to neo-Lamarckism. They believed that the inheritance of acquired characteristics, not natural selection, explained the history of species. Seeking the prestige and scientific authority of experimentalism, early-twentieth-century French evolutionary biologists developed a program of “experimental anatomy” modeled on Claude Bernard’s nineteenth-century experimental physiology. When, after decades of trying, they were unable to induce Lamarckian inheritance, biologists began to abandon experimentation altogether, arguing in the 1930s that natural laws were unstable and unknowable. This interwar epistemological crisis had lasting consequences in French biology and beyond, inaugurating a period in which science was seen not as a path to universal truths, but as a method of articulating the ultimately limited nature of all human knowledge.

You can see me discussing pieces of this project here.

I am also at work on two additional projects. The first is a history of complexity science, examining how “complexity” became a universal concept applicable to everything from how biologists theorize the origins of life on earth to how economists model financialization in the post-1970s economy. The second is a short project on the history of bioethics as a human science.