Introduction: When Time Pretends to Explain
One of biology’s most persuasive explanatory resources is time. Evolutionary history, selection narratives, and deep temporal scales appear to offer understanding simply by reaching far enough back.
But temporal depth is not the same as present intelligibility. This post shows how history comes to masquerade as explanation, and why that move feels convincing even as it closes inquiry.
1. The Allure of Origins
Origin stories exert extraordinary explanatory pull. To say that a trait, behaviour, or capacity evolved feels like saying why it exists.
Yet origins answer a different question:
How did something become possible?
They do not answer:
What makes this phenomenon what it is now?
The slide from origin to explanation is subtle — and pervasive.
2. Selection Narratives as Pseudo-Explanations
Selection narratives are especially potent because they resemble causal accounts:
a pressure is identified,
a variation is selected,
a trait persists.
But these narratives explain persistence, not constitution. They describe why certain forms did not disappear, not how present phenomena are enacted, coordinated, or made meaningful.
When selection history is treated as explanation, the phenomenon is displaced into the past.
3. Temporal Reach vs Explanatory Reach
Reaching further back in time often feels like gaining depth. In practice, it frequently produces the opposite effect.
As explanation retreats into deep history:
present relations thin out,
lived variation disappears,
normative force becomes opaque.
Temporal reach expands while explanatory grip loosens.
4. Why History Feels Sufficient
Historical explanation feels satisfying because it:
invokes necessity rather than contingency,
suggests inevitability rather than coordination,
replaces open questions with settled narratives.
Time functions rhetorically as authority. The longer the timescale, the less contestable the account appears.
5. The Cost of Historical Substitution
When history substitutes for explanation, several costs follow:
present dynamics are ignored,
variation is dismissed as noise,
meaning is treated as inherited rather than constituted.
Explanation ends precisely where phenomena are most alive.
Conclusion: Returning Explanation to the Present
History matters. Evolutionary processes matter profoundly. But they matter as conditions, not as explanations of present form.
To understand a phenomenon, we must ask how it is currently sustained, enacted, and made intelligible — not merely how it once became possible.
In the next post, we will examine how biology is often asked to explain meaning and normativity, despite lacking the semiotic resources to do so.
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