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Reality-directed imagination, for its part, endeavours to re-create, in the intellectual realm, actions and events that have existed or have taken place, which we may have plenty or partial information about.

Reality-directed imagination is thus a means to retain a solid sense of reality rather than to submerge into the everlasting landscape of fantasy. We imagine what was and try to afford it life.  

Without reality-directed imagination, on the other hand, the study of history would be well-nigh impossible.

By resorting to reality-directed imagination we are able intellectually to disconnect ourselves from the present; to visualize, like a landscape gradually making its appearance as we move backwards in time, the setting in which an event occurred or the personal features of an individual we follow. We are able emotionally to connect ourselves to the prevailing conditions or to a person's thoughts.

In the study of history we make use of reality-directed imagination as we depict in our minds the characters of individuals or the nature of events. We even try to fill the gaps by resorting to our imagination ever vigilant not to lose sight of reality as it was. In other words, we attempt to imagine the unknown by resorting to the known.

Without imagination as a study-device, the learning of history becomes well-nigh impossible, for the information furnished to us is rendered unintelligible. We are unable to relate to it in any meaningful manner. We assess it in a mechanical way, devoid of image, sound and feel. Our attempt to understand it leads to a dead-end for we cannot leap forward from the stale fact before us and relate it to other facts beyond it.

Without imagination we cannot compare, distinguish and separate; we cannot know the difference between the particular and the general. In order to study history we need to avoid the mechanical, on the one hand, and the fantastic, on the other. In other words, we ought to eschew both lack of imagination and fantasy-directed imagination; the first does not allow us to proceed forward while the latter leads us to the realm of the unreal.

There was no guarantee that the economy’s downward spiral wouldn’t continue, as frightened businesses and consumers curbed spending and, in the process, increased unemployment. The CEA presents a series of charts comparing the 2008-2009 slump with the Great Depression. In every instance, the 2008-2009 downturn was as bad as — or worse than — the first year of the Great Depression: employment loss, drop in global trade and change in households’ net worth.

The starkest of these was the fall in households’ net worth (people’s assets, such as homes and stock, minus their debts, such as mortgages and credit-card balances). It dropped by $13 trillion, about a fifth, from its high point in 2007 to its trough in 2009. This decline, the CEA notes, “was far larger than the reduction [adjusted for inflation] . . . at the onset of the Great Depression.”

What separates then from now is that, after 18 months or so, spending turned up in 2009 while it continued declining in the 1930s. This difference reflected, at least in part, the aggressive policies adopted to blunt the downturn. The Fed cut short-term interest rates to zero and provided other avenues of cheap credit; the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), enacted in the final months of the Bush administration, poured money into major banks to reassure the public of their solvency.

Still, Obama’s role was crucial. Against opposition, he decided to rescue General Motors and Chrysler. Throwing them onto the tender mercies of the market would have been a huge blow to the industrial Midwest and to national psychology. He also championed a sizable budget “stimulus.” Advertised originally as $787 billion, it was actually $2.6 trillion over four years when the initial program was combined with later proposals and so-called “automatic stabilizers” are included, the CEA says

More generally, Obama projected reason and calm when much of the nation was fearful and frazzled. Of course, he didn’t single-handedly restore confidence, but he made a big contribution

the recovery from the Great Recession is mostly complete. This seems plausible. Since the low point, employment is up 15.6 million jobs. Rising home and stock prices have boosted inflation-adjusted household net worth by 16 percent. Gross domestic product — the economy — is nearly 12 percent higher than before the financial crisis

his impact is underestimated. Suppose we had had a second Great Depression with, say, peak unemployment of 15 percent. Almost all our problems — from poverty to political polarization — would have worsened. Obama’s influence must be considered in this context. When historians do, they may be more impressed.

materialism is not the greedy desire for material goods, but rather the belief that the fundamental reality of the world is material;

idealism is not the aspiration toward lofty and laudable goals, but rather the belief that the fundamental reality of the world is mental or idea-like. English-speaking philosophers today tend to speak of “physicalism” or “naturalism” rather than materialism (perhaps to avoid confusion with the Wall Street sense of the term). At the same time, Anglo-American historians of philosophy continue to find the distinction between materialism and idealism a useful one in our attempts at categorizing past schools of thought. Democritus and La Mettrie were materialists; Hobbes was pretty close. Berkeley and Kant were idealists; Leibniz may have been.

And it was these paradoxes that led the Irish philosopher to conclude that talk of matter was but a case of multiplying entities beyond necessity. For Berkeley, all we can know are ideas, and for this reason it made sense to suppose that the world itself consists in ideas.

Soviet and Western Marxists alike, by stark contrast, and before them the French “vulgar” (i.e., non-dialectical) materialists of the 18th century, saw and see the material world as the base and cause of all mental activity, as both bringing ideas into existence, and also determining the form and character of a society’s ideas in accordance with the state of its technology, its methods of resource extraction and its organization of labor. So here to focus on the material is not to become distracted from the true source of being, but rather to zero right in on it.

one great problem with the concept of materialism is that it says very little in itself. What is required in addition is an elaboration of what a given thinker takes matter, or ideas, to be. It may not be just the Marxist aftertaste, but also the fact that the old common-sense idea about matter as brute, given stuff has turned out to have so little to do with the way the physical world actually is, that has led Anglo-American philosophers to prefer to associate themselves with the “physical” or the “natural” rather than with the material.  Reality, they want to say, is just what is natural, while everything else is in turn “supernatural” (this distinction has its clarity going for it, but it also seems uncomfortably close to tautology). Not every philosopher has a solid grasp of subatomic physics, but most know enough to grasp that, even if reality is eventually exhaustively accounted for through an enumeration of the kinds of particles and a few basic forces, this reality will still look nothing like what your average person-in-the-street takes reality to be.

The 18th-century idealist philosopher George Berkeley strongly believed that matter was only a fiction contrived by philosophers in the first place, for which the real people had no need. For Berkeley, there was never anything common-sensical about matter. We did not need to arrive at the era of atom-splitting and wave-particle duality, then, in order for the paradoxes inherent in matter to make themselves known (is it infinitely divisible or isn’t it?

Central to this performance was the concept of  “materialism.” The entire history of philosophy, in fact, was portrayed in Soviet historiography as a series of matches between the materialist home-team and its “idealist” opponents, beginning roughly with Democritus (good) and Plato (bad), and culminating in the opposition between official party philosophy and logical positivism, the latter of which was portrayed as a shrouded variety of idealism. Thus from the “Short Philosophical Dictionary,” published in Moscow in 1951, we learn that the school of logical empiricism represented by Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath and others, “is a form of subjective idealism, characteristic of degenerating bourgeois philosophy in the epoch of the decline of capitalism.”Now the Soviet usage of this pair of terms appears to fly in the face of our ordinary, non-philosophical understanding of them (that, for example,  Wall Street values are “materialist,” while the Occupy movement is “idealist”). One might have thought that the communists should be flinging the “materialist” label at their capitalist enemies, rather than claiming it for themselves. One might also have thought that the Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent failed project of building a workers’ utopia was nothing if not idealistic.

Consider money. Though it might sometimes be represented by bank notes or coins, money is an immaterial thing par excellence, and to seek to acquire it is to move on the plane of ideas. Of course, money can also be converted into material things, yet it seems simplistic to suppose that we want money only in order to convert it into the material things we really want, since even these material things aren’t just material either: they are symbolically dense artifacts, and they convey to others certain ideas about their owners. This, principally, is why their owners want them, which is to say that materialists (in the everyday sense) are trading in ideas just as much as anyone else.

In the end no one really cares about stuff itself. Material acquisitions — even, or perhaps especially, material acquisitions of things like Rolls Royces and Rolexes — are maneuvers within a universe of materially instantiated ideas. This is human reality, and it is within this reality that mystics, scientists, and philosophers alike are constrained to pursue their various ends, no matter what they might take the ultimate nature of the external world to be.

What the rise of the BRICs symbolizes to both panicked individuals in the West and optimistic ones elsewhere is a radical shift in the geography of power -- a catch-up or reversal of the Western global dominance that was established with the Industrial Revolution.

developing countries won't be able to follow the West's path to becoming rich, because that path required certain things that were largely particular to that one period in history.

The challenge ahead for the BRICs, then, is to figure out how to maintain growth in a world where the vast new frontier opened up by the Industrial Revolution appears to be closing. The BRICs can play the West's game better than the West, both through technological innovation and population growth, but only for so long. The whole world has to figure out a way of dealing with energy and agriculture.

The Times’s reporters spoke with residents who supported the Tea Party and its proposed cuts to federal spending, even while they admitted they could not get by without government support.

the fate of the middle class counties and urban ghettos is entwined. When the poor are left to rot in their misery, the misery does not stay contained. It harms us all. The crime radiates, the misery offends, it debases the whole. Individuals, much less communities, cannot be insulated from it.

Thanks to a decades-long safety net, we have forgotten the trials of living without it. This is why, the historian Tony Judt argued, it’s easy for some to speak fondly of a world without government: we can’t fully imagine or recall what it’s like. We can’t really appreciate the horrors Upton Sinclair witnessed in the Chicago slaughterhouses before regulation, or the burden of living without Social Security and Medicare to look forward to. Thus, we can entertain nostalgia for a time when everyone pulled his own weight, bore his own risk, and was the master of his destiny. That time was a myth

To be human, according to Spinoza, is to be party to a confounding existential illusion — that human individuals are independent agents — which exacts a heavy emotional and political toll on us. It is the source of anxiety, envy, anger — all the passions that torment our psyche — and the violence that ensues.

There is no such thing as a discrete individual, Spinoza points out. This is a fiction. The boundaries of ‘me’ are fluid and blurred. We are all profoundly linked in countless ways we can hardly perceive. My decisions, choices, actions are inspired and motivated by others to no small extent.

we’re all in this together. We are not the sole authors of our destiny, each of us; our destinies are entangled — messily, unpredictably. Our cultural demands of individualism are too extreme. They are constitutionally irrational, Spinoza and Freud tell us, and their potential consequences are disastrous. Thanks to our safety net, we live in a society that affirms the dependence and interdependence of all. To that extent, it affirms a basic truth of our nature. We forsake it at our own peril.

But the Picasso biographer John Richardson once called “Le Tricorne” the artist’s “supreme theatrical achievement,” and many art historians and architects consider it an integral part of the Four Seasons.

The curtain has apparently been on the verge of eviction for months. In November, Mr. Rosen called the conservancy to say steam was leaking from the wall in what is informally known as Picasso Alley, and needed repairs that could be done only by taking down the curtain.

“But then the question is when anyone would ever see it again,” she added, “if it survived the move.”

Leslie Berlin, a historian of business at Stanford, organized her nominations not as an overall list but grouped into functional categories.

Innovations that expand the human intellect and its creative, expressive, and even moral possibilities.

Innovations that are integral to the physical and operating infrastructure of the modern world

Innovations that enabled the Industrial Revolution and its successive waves of expanded material output

Innovations extending life, to use Leslie Berlin’s term

Innovations that allowed real-time communication beyond the range of a single human voice

Innovations in the physical movement of people and goods.

Organizational breakthroughs that provide the software for people working and living together in increasingly efficient and modern ways

Finally, and less prominently than we might have found in 1950 or 1920—and less prominently than I initially expected—we have innovations in killing,

Any collection of 50 breakthroughs must exclude 50,000 more.

We learn, finally, why technology breeds optimism, which may be the most significant part of this exercise.

Popular culture often lionizes the stars of discovery and invention

For our era, the major problems that technology has helped cause, and that faster innovation may or may not correct, are environmental, demographic, and socioeconomic.

people who have thought deeply about innovation’s sources and effects, like our panelists, were aware of the harm it has done along with the good.

“Does innovation raise the wealth of the planet? I believe it does,” John Doerr, who has helped launch Google, Amazon, and other giants of today’s technology, said. “But technology left to its own devices widens rather than narrows the gap between the rich and the poor.”

Are today’s statesmen an improvement over those of our grandparents’ era? Today’s level of public debate? Music, architecture, literature, the fine arts—these and other manifestations of world culture continually change, without necessarily improving. Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, versus whoever is the best-selling author in Moscow right now?

The argument that a slowdown might happen, and that it would be harmful if it did, takes three main forms.

Some societies have closed themselves off and stopped inventing altogether:

By failing to move forward, they inevitably moved backward relative to their rivals and to the environmental and economic threats they faced. If the social and intellectual climate for innovation sours, what has happened before can happen again.

visible slowdown in the pace of solutions that technology offers to fundamental problems.

a slowdown in, say, crop yields or travel time is part of a general pattern of what economists call diminishing marginal returns. The easy improvements are, quite naturally, the first to be made; whatever comes later is slower and harder.

America’s history as a nation happens to coincide with a rare moment in technological history now nearing its end. “There was virtually no economic growth before 1750,” he writes in a recent paper.

“We can be concerned about the last 1 percent of an environment for innovation, but that is because we take everything else for granted,” Leslie Berlin told me.

This reduction in cost, he says, means that the next decade should be a time of “amazing advances in understanding the genetic basis of disease, with especially powerful implications for cancer.”

the very concept of an end to innovation defied everything they understood about human inquiry. “If you look just at the 20th century, the odds against there being any improvement in living standards are enormous,”

“Two catastrophic world wars, the Cold War, the Depression, the rise of totalitarianism—it’s been one disaster after another, a sequence that could have been enough to sink us back into barbarism. And yet this past half century has been the fastest-ever time of technological growth. I see no reason why that should be slowing down.”

“I am a technological evolutionist,” he said. “I view the universe as a phase-space of things that are possible, and we’re doing a random walk among them. Eventually we are going to fill the space of everything that is possible.”

Medieval science was guided by "logical consistency."

The logical empiricist's conception of scientific progress was thus a continuous one; more comprehensive theory replaced compatible, older theory

Hempel also believed that science evolved in a continuous manner. New theory did not contradict past theory: "theory does not simply refute the earlier empirical generalizations in its field; rather, it shows that within a certain limited range defined by qualifying conditions, the generalizations hold true in fairly close approximation." [21]

movement combined induction, based on empiricism, and deduction in the form of logic

e notion of scientific realism held by Newton led to the evolutionary view of the progress of science

he entities and processes of theory were believed to exist in nature, and science should discover those entities and processes

Particularly disturbing discoveries were made in the area of atomic physics. For instance, Heisenberg's indeterminacy (25)principle, according to historian of science Cecil Schneer, yielded the conclusion that "the world of nature is indeterminate.

"even the fundamental principle of causality fail[ed] ."

was not until the second half of the twentieth century that the preservers of the evolutionary idea of scientific progress, the logical empiricists, were seriously challenged

revolutionary model of scientific change and examined the role of the scientific community in preventing and then accepting change. Kuhn's conception of scientific change occurring through revolutions undermined the traditional scientific goal, finding "truth" in nature

Textbooks inform scientists-to-be about this common body of knowledge and understanding.

for the world is too huge and complex to be explored randomly.

a scientist knows what facts are relevant and can build on past research

Normal science, as defined by Kuhn, is cumulative. New knowledge fills a gap of ignorance

ne standard product of the scientific enterprise is missing. Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none."

ntain a mechanism that uncovers anomaly, inconsistencies within the paradigm.

eventually, details arise that are inconsistent with the current paradigm

hese inconsistencies are eventually resolved or are ignored.

y concern a topic of central importance, a crisis occurs and normal science comes to a hal

that the scientists re-examine the foundations of their science that they had been taking for granted

it resolves the crisis better than the others, it offers promise for future research, and it is more aesthetic than its competitors. The reasons for converting to a new paradigm are never completely rational.

Unlike evolutionary science, in which new knowledge fills a gap of ignorance, in Kuhn's model new knowledge replaces incompatible knowledge.

In a sense, we have circled back to the ancient and medieval practice of separating scientific theory from physical reality; both medieval scientists and Kuhn would agree that no theory corresponds to reality and therefore any number of theories might equally well explain a natural phenomenon. [36] Neither twentieth-century atomic theorists nor medieval astronomers are able to claim that their theories accurately describe physical phenomena. The inability to return to scientific realism suggests a tripartite division of the history of science, with a period of scientific realism fitting between two periods in which there is no insistence that theory correspond to reality. Although both scientific realism and the evolutionary idea of scientific progress appeal to common sense, both existed for only a few hundred years.

The White House told reporters on Thursday that, despite the imminent passage of NSA reform, they still believe Edward Snowden still belongs in prison (presumably for life, given his potential charges), while at the same time, brazenly taking credit for the USA Freedom Act passing, saying that “historians” would consider it part of Obama’s “legacy.”

even those in Congress who were campaigning for stronger NSA reform than the bill that passed the Senate are afraid to directly credit Snowden and, in many cases, still condemn him. Some cling to the erroneous belief that Snowden should come back to the US if he’s really a whistleblower because he could “tell his story to a jury.”

Without Edward Snowden, there would be no debate about the mass surveillance of Americans by the NSA. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals would not have ruled such surveillance illegal, tech companies would not encrypt our phone calls and text messages, and Congress certainly would not have passed the USA Freedom Act - no matter how meager its reforms actually are

Most people successfully avoided reading until about 300 years ago. It was about then that Western European priests and princes decided that everyone should be taught to read. These literacy-loving types tried various schemes to make common folks literate; the most effective of these, however, was naked coercion. By the nineteenth century, churches and states all over Europe and North America were forcing parents to send their kids to school to learn to read

So it happened that by the early twentieth century most people in Western Europe and North America could read. They had no choice in the matter. They still don’t.

Why don’t most people like to read? The answer is surprisingly simple: humans weren’t evolved to read. Note that we have no reading organs: our eyes and brains were made for watching, not for decoding tiny symbols on mulch sheets. To prepare our eyes and brains for reading, we must rewire them. This process takes years of hard work to accomplish, and some people never accomplish it all. Moreover, even after you’ve learned to read, you probably won’t find reading to be very much fun. It consumes all of your attention, requires active thought, and makes your eyes hurt. For most people, then, reading is naturally hard and, therefore, something to be avoided if at all possible.

we have misidentified the “problem” facing us: it is not the much-bemoaned reading gap, but rather a seldom-mentioned knowledge gap. Though it is immodest to say, we readers genuinely know more than those who do not read. Thus we are usually able to make better-informed decisions than non-readers can.

If we lived in an aristocracy of readers, this maldistribution of knowledge might be acceptable. But we don’t; rather, we live in a democracy (if we are lucky). In a democracy, the people – readers and non-readers alike – decide. Thus we would like all citizens to be knowledgeable so that they can make well-informed decisions about our common affairs. This has been a central goal of the Reading Class since the literacy-loving Enlightenment.

If we in the Reading Class want to teach the the reading-averse public more effectively than we have in the past, we must rid ourselves of our reading fetish and admit that we’ve been falling down on the job. Once we take this painful step, then a number of interesting options for closing the knowledge gap become available. The most promising of these options is using audio and video to share what we know with the public at large.

We have to laboriously learn to read, but we are born with the ability to watch and listen. We don’t find reading terribly pleasant, but we do find watching and listening generally enjoyable.

The results of this “natural experiment” are in: people would much rather watch/listen than read. This is why Americans sit in front of the television for three hours a day, while they read for only a tiny fraction of that time.

Our task, then, is to give them something serious to watch and listen to, something that conveys the richness and complexity of our written work in pictures and sounds. The good news is that we can easily do this.

Today any lecturer can produce and distribute high quality audio and video programs. Most scholars have the equipment on their desks (that is, a PC). The software is dead simple and inexpensive. And the shows themselves can be distributed the world over on the Internet for almost nothing.

I’ve done it. Here are two examples. The first is New Books in History, an author-interview podcast featuring historians with new books. Aside from the computer, the total hardware and software start-up costs were roughly $300. It took me no time to learn the software thanks to some handy on-line tutorials available on Lynda.com. Today New Books in History has a large international audience.

The “new books” podcasts are not about serious books; they are about the ideas trapped in those serious, and seriously un-read, books. Books imprison ideas; the “new books” podcasts set them free.)

In response, many evangelicals created what amounts to a “parallel culture,” nurtured by church, Sunday school, summer camps and colleges, as well as publishing houses, broadcasting networks, music festivals and counseling groups.

But in fact their rejection of knowledge amounts to what the evangelical historian Mark A. Noll, in his 1994 book, “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind,” described as an “intellectual disaster.” He called on evangelicals to repent for their neglect of the mind, decrying the abandonment of the intellectual heritage of the Protestant Reformation. “The scandal of the evangelical mind,” he wrote, “is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”

Scholars like Dr. Collins and Mr. Noll, and publications like Books & Culture, Sojourners and The Christian Century, offer an alternative to the self-anointed leaders. They recognize that the Bible does not condemn evolution and says next to nothing about gay marriage. They understand that Christian theology can incorporate Darwin’s insights and flourish in a pluralistic society.

In an effort to counter the Common Core push for detextualized skill-based instruction and assessment that has further marginalized social studies education, the NCSS is promoting what it calls “College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework,”

through its choice of partners, its rigid adherence to Common Core lesson guidelines, and the sample material it is promoting, the NCSS has virtually abandoned not just meaningful social studies education, but education for democracy and citizenship as well.

My biggest problem with the C3 Framework as presented in this new document on instruction is its attempt to adopt a fundamentally flawed Common Core approach to social studies and history based on the close reading of text without exploring historical context

how Common Core as it is being implemented will mean the end of history.

In the C3 Framework inquiry approach, students start in Dimension 1 by “developing questions and planning inquiries,” however the inquiry is really already “planned” because material they use is pre-selected. It is also not clear what their questions will be based on since they do not necessarily have any background on the subject. In Dimension 3 students evaluate sources using evidence, but again, devoid of historical context. Dimension 4 is supposed to be C3’s chief addition to Common Core. In Dimension 4 students are supposed to plan activities and become involved in civic life, although of course their options have again already been pre-prescribed.

In Dimension 2, as they read the text, which sixth graders and many eighth graders will find difficult, students discuss “How was citizenship revolutionary in 1776?” The question requires them to assume that colonists had already formulated a concept of citizenship, which I do not believe they had, a concept of nation, which they definitely did not, and an understanding that somehow what they were doing was “revolutionary,” which was still being debated.

Some of the organizations involved in writing the C3 Frameworks have positions so politically skewed to the right that NCSS should be embarrassed about including them in the project. In this category I include Gilder Lehrman, The Bill of Rights Institute, and The Center for Economic Education and Entrepreneurship (CEEE).

Conspicuously missing from the group of contributors is the Zinn Education Project which would have provided a radically different point of view.

What we have in the C3 Framework is standard teaching at best but a lot of poor teaching and propaganda as well.

Instead of challenging Common Core, the NCSS begs to be included. Instead of presenting multiple perspectives, it sells advertising in the form of lessons to its corporate and foundation sponsors. But worst in their own terms, in a time of mass protest against police brutality by high school and college students across the United States, active citizenship in a democratic society is stripped of meaning and becomes little more than idle discussion and telling student to vote when they are eighteen.

Students will be able to substitute a tech sequence and local test for one of the history exams, however the Regents did not present, design, or even describe what the tech alternative will look like. Although it will be implemented immediately, the Regents left all the details completely up to local initiative.

Under the proposal, students can substitute career-focused courses in subjects such as carpentry, advertising or hospitality management rather than one of two history Regents exams that are now required

In June 2010 the Regents eliminated 5th and 8th grade social studies, history, and geography assessments so teachers and schools could concentrate on preparing students for high-stakes Common Core standardized reading and math assessments.

As a result, social studies is no longer taught in the elementary school grades

Merryl Tisch, Chancellor of the State Board of Regents, described the change as an effort to "back-fill opportunities for students with different interests, with different opportunities, with different choice."

Mace describes his students as the "common core kids, inundated with common core, but they do not know the history of the United States." The cardinal rule of public education in the 21st Century seems to be that which gets tested is important and that which does not is dropped.

"By making state social studies exams optional, we have come to a point where our nation's own history has been marginalized in the classroom and, with it, the means to understand ourselves and the world around us. America's heritage is being eliminated as a requirement for graduation.

I am biased. I am a historian, a former social studies teacher, and I help to prepare the next generation of social studies teachers.

But these decisions by the Regents are politically motivated, lower graduation standards, and are outright dangerous.

The city is under a lot of pressure to support the revised and lower academic standards because in the next few weeks it is required to present plans to the state for turning around as many as 250 schools that are labeled as "failing."

Debate over the importance of teaching history and social studies is definitely not new. During World War I, many Americans worried that new immigrants did not understand and value the history and government of the United States so new high school classes and tests that developed into the current classes and tests were put in place.

The need to educate immigrants and to understand global issues like ISIS and Ebola remain pressing, but I guess not for New York State high school students. Right now, it looks like social studies advocates have lost the battle and we are finally witnessing the end of history.

even genuine scientists are human and as such susceptible to the allure of offering up new paradigms (as the historian of science Thomas Kuhn put it)

paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould insisted that his conception of “punctuated equilibria” (a kind of Marxist biology that blurred the lines between evolution and revolution), which he developed along with fellow paleontologist Niles Eldredge, upended the traditional Darwinian understanding of how natural selection works.

This notion doesn’t constitute a fundamental departure from plain old evolution by natural selection; it simply italicizes that sometimes the process is comparatively rapid, other times slower.

In addition, they have long had a peculiar perspective on evolution, because of the limitations of the fossil record

Darwin was a pioneering geologist as well as the greatest of all biologists, and his insights were backgrounded by the key concept of uniformitarianism, as advocated by Charles Lyell, his friend and mentor

previously regnant paradigm among geologists had been “catastrophism

fossil record was therefore seen as reflecting the creation and extinction of new species by an array of dramatic and “unnatural” dei ex machina.

Of late, however, uniformitarianism has been on a losing streak. Catastrophism is back, with a bang . . . or a flood, or a burst of extraterrestrial radiation, or an onslaught of unpleasant, previously submerged chemicals

This emphasis on catastrophes is the first of a triad of novelties on which “A New History of Life” is based. The second involves an enhanced role for some common but insufficiently appreciated inorganic molecules, notably carbon dioxide, oxygen and hydrogen sulfide.

Life didn’t so much unfold smoothly over hundreds of millions of years as lurch chaotically in response to diverse crises and opportunities: too much oxygen, too little carbon dioxide, too little oxygen, too much carbon dioxide, too hot, too cold

So far, so good, except that in their eagerness to emphasize what is new and different, the authors teeter on the verge of the same trap as Gould: exaggerating the novelty of their own ideas.

Things begin to unravel when it comes to the third leg of Messrs. Ward and Kirschvink’s purported paradigmatic novelty: a supposed role for ecosystems—rain forests, deserts, rivers, coral reefs, deep-sea vents—as units of evolutionary change

“While the history of life may be populated by species,” they write, “it has been the evolution of ecosystems that has been the most influential factor in arriving at the modern-day assemblage of life. . . . [W]e know that on occasion in the deep past entirely new ecosystems appear, populated by new kinds of life.” True enough, but it is those “new kinds of life,” not whole ecosystems, upon which natural selection acts.

One of the most common popular misconceptions about evolution is that it proceeds “for the good of the species.”

The problem is that smaller, nimbler units are far more likely to reproduce differentially than are larger, clumsier, more heterogeneous ones. Insofar as ecosystems are consequential for evolution—and doubtless they are—it is because, like occasional catastrophes, they provide the immediate environment within which something not-so-new is acted out.

This is natural selection doing its same-old, same-old thing: acting by a statistically potent process of variation combined with selective retention and differential reproduction, a process that necessarily operates within the particular ecosystem that a given lineage occupies.

Why is it essential to save history and libraries? The best answer to that question comes from Benjamin Franklin. He was asked to design a curriculum for the school that became the University of Pennsylvania. He proposed that at least half the time, in each year, the future students should study history Nothing else could match history when it came to creating a useful citizen.  Without a grasp of history, Franklin maintained,  we will only repeat the blunders of the past.