When A Story, Not A Story, Is A Story

A story is not a story when scientists use the term. They should say, an account, but they use the word, story. 

"And then and then and then" is not a story, it is a series of events. "Once upon a time" is not a story, it is a situation. "This causes this causes this" is not a story, it is a causal chain. These all can be considered accounts, a weak synonym for story.

When someone in science tells an actual story in the literary sense, with characters and action and motivation and conflict and theme and structure, scientists call this anecdotal. Anecdotal is a pejorative term to scientists, it means that a story cannot be entered into the record as reliable evidence. All stories, even true ones, rely on some contrivance in the telling.

Thus, the semantics of science and the semantics of the humanities are skew lines, non-intersecting long after C.P. Snow observed this state of affairs.

I just read an essay by a scientist that said, the rocks have stories to tell. Scientists will take literary license like this to make a point to a lay audience, and that is permissible. Scientists permit this hyperbole because the implicit meaning of this phrase is understood: rocks provide evidence of change, and science carefully pieces together this evidence to provide a cause and effect account of change. 

An account, even when positing cause and effect, falls far short of being an actual story. Ask a teenager how she spent her day, you will get a rambling account of one activity after another, annotated with exasperation and gossip and self justifying speculation about cause and effect, but you won't get an actual story. Ask a thoughtful adult the same question and the account soon digresses into philosophical ruminations, punctuated by disjointed personal anecdotes.

You can appreciate why scientists distrust anecdotal sources as too subjective and selective. And yet, scientists claim when explaining a scientific discovery that they are telling a story, an objective story, solidly platonic, elevated above any given human storyteller, a story told by nature itself. These stories are called lectures and journal papers, hard to follow and abstract and apparently having no overarching theme except to say that this is The Way Things Are.

The Way Things Are: that is the focus of interest for scientists. They are not particularly interested in how this construct, The Way Things Are, came to be. They would not admit to scientific findings being a construct. Construct is a humanities word, a solipsistic notion that the scientific method strives to transcend. This disavowal of collective subjectivity is the institutionally unacknowledged core of modern scientific practice, even as many practicing scientists wryly acknowledge as much in personal anecdotes that will never be included in any paper submitted for publication.

An authentic story (not to be confused with a story that is true, although an authentic story can be true, but it can also be fiction) is a construct, a shameless construct, an unapologetically bold collaboration of human minds, encompassing the minds of storyteller and story receiver. 

An authentic story is an account using cause and effect to convey meaning. Even if the authentic story concludes that there is no meaning, then that is its meaning, that all is pointless. An authentic story is always meaningful, even if the meaning provides no consolation.

Science eschews meaning. I don't think it must, but traditionally, it does, because of the history and culture of science. Let the facts speak for themselves, let the rocks tell their stories, which are really accounts told by the scientists who investigate rocks, leaving themselves out of the accounting. "The way things are" should not be burdened with "the meaning of the way things are" lest science devolve back into the dark ages.

The position of science regarding what things mean is this: everyone is free to attribute their own meaning to The Way Things Are, but such musings are beside the point. Purpose is for philosophy and theology and fiction to ponder. Science investigates reality without prior assumptions of what reality is supposed to mean, and without fear of what reality compels as consequences. The facts are the facts, follow them where they lead.

I ask myself, is it possible to fashion an authentic story about scientific findings, a story that conveys meaning, that also is compatible with the detachment of science that makes it so potent?

I think it is possible. In truth, this is the way I learn science, by studying scientific findings and how they were found, and considering what this process means to me, transcendently.

Currently, I am studying paleontology, a field which in the past was mostly argumentation but which has become increasingly analytical, availing itself of computational tools. Paleontology has also become in the last quarter of a century more integrated with other earth and life sciences, as it strives to trace the tapestry of life over time. 

The vast span of geologic time, divvied up into episodes of unimaginable duration and labeled with Latinized place names where characteristic rock formations were first found, this brain-glazing ramble of global change that strains the attention span of even the most devoted student, has found a unifying paradigm over the last half century of earth science. That paradigm is Plate Tectonics.

Pretty simple when you distill it down to its essence: cold rafts of rock ride atop the billowing melt, splitting apart and colliding and annealing again in a recurring flux, changing atmospheric and oceanic flows and composition, while life evolves to exploit the opportunities thus provided, thereby changing the planet and itself still further.

Does this account have meaning? Is the Earth telling an authentic story?

I think the Earth is not so much telling as composing a story, an authentic story that challenges us to redefine what Meaning means. I think Earth's evolution invites us outside our bubble of self justifying constructs to consider Meaning from a detached perspective.

Life perseveres. Life adapts. Life invents. Life creates and destroys, devours and is reborn. Life's purpose is to go on living. Life is the fundamental product of Earth. Life is its own Meaning.

The rocks with their entombed fossils do not tell this story, we tell it. Life on Earth has no purpose other than to be, but we have a purpose as the voice of the Earth, speaking to our own kind about our inheritance and our legacy, our history and our destiny, as the most disruptive, and perhaps someday, the most healing life form on the planet.

That's quite a story.