Telling the story of life: On the use of narrative

Abstract

In natural sciences, the “tree of life” is reconstructed using retrodiction. It should be followed from the present to the past. But we need to tell a story, which course is from the past to the present. So a number of misunderstandings occur, the fi rst of them being cosmic fi nalism. It is important to understand that evolutionary facts are proved using two kinds of scientifi c reasoning, the one of nomologicaldeductive sciences and the one of paletiological-abductive sciences, and both are equally valid. Confusing them is also a great source of misunderstandings and political manipulations in non-biologists. We also detect a number of pitfalls and biases inherent to the use and abuse of narrative for telling the history of life. These pitfalls are not only misleading public’s minds, but also researchers’ minds, especially those who think they can map a mathematical law onto a succession of dates of arbitrarily chosen events. Then we provide a series of dates of arbitrarily chosen events related to the history of life and earth.