Some history of science studies are groundbreaking because they examine a previously neglected topic. Others are innovative in their use of new archival material. Still others use well-known sources to tell a new story about subjects previously tackled by scholars. Henry M. Cowles’s The Scientific Method: An Evolution of Thinking from Darwin to Dewey falls into the last category. His novel account provides a big-picture look at the development of the scientific method across the natural, medical, and social sciences in both Britain and the US during the 19th century.
Cowles argues that Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory birthed an entirely new concept of the scientific method that shaped the thinking of biologists, anthropologists, neurologists, philosophers, psychologists, and educators in the late 19th century. He begins by stating flatly on the first page that “there is no such thing as the scientific method, and there never was.” While that may seem to be an unpromising start for a book examining the history of the scientific method, Cowles’s intention is to identify the history of the scientific method as a powerful myth.
According to The Scientific Method, a significant development in that history took place in the early 19th century, when philosophers and scientists such as John Stuart Mill, William Whewell, and John Herschel increasingly emphasized the role of hypothesis in the scientific method and rejected the notion that it could only lead to wild speculation. Darwin picked up on the importance of hypothesis, but he broke with the earlier figures by placing it within an evolutionary framework. For Darwin, Cowles argues, both species and theories evolved through a process of trial and error.
The testing of hypotheses was an integral part of the competition between scientific theories. Cowles shows how Darwin’s theory of pangenesis, put forward in his The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (1868), was not an aberration. It was reminiscent of Darwin’s unpublished early theorizing (1836–44) about evolution. Darwin believed that an integral part of the scientific method was formulating bold ideas that helped explain a variety of phenomena.
British figures from various disciplines subsequently embraced the notion that science and nature used the same method; they applied it explicitly to an understanding of how science evolved. For example, in his account of mental evolution, Herbert Spencer sought to construct a reflexive natural history of the mind that would include science as an object of study. Science itself became a tool used by the adaptive mind to cope with a constantly evolving world. Neurologists like William Benjamin Carpenter and John Hughlings Jackson and anthropologists like Edward Burnett Tylor explored the ramifications of the concept of the scientific method for their respective disciplines.
Halfway through the book, Cowles shifts his focus to the US to follow the development of Darwin’s insight in the field of evolutionary psychology. He begins by depicting the meetings of the Metaphysical Club, an informal discussion group of philosophers that met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during the 1870s, and uses them to discuss the importance of hypothesis and the nature of science to American thought. (Curiously, Cowles does not compare the Metaphysical Club to its British counterpart, the Metaphysical Society, even though such a comparison would serve as a way to transport his readers across the Atlantic.) The section examines philosophers and psychologists such as Charles Peirce, William James, Edward Thorndike, G. Stanley Hall, Ernest Lindley, and John Dewey.
As Cowles argues on page 185, studies of animal intelligence in comparative psychology “expanded outward to new minds and turned inward in new ways simultaneously, seeking the source of their scientific thinking in observable animal behaviors.” Psychologists began to study children in the hope that they would reveal the developmental roots of human reasoning. After discussing John Dewey’s interest in experimentalism, Cowles concludes by outlining how the school of psychology Dewey founded, functionalism, became the dominant line of thought in the US by the end of the 19th century.
The Scientific Method is an absorbing read that illuminates the history of the natural and social sciences in Britain and the US. It features nuanced readings of important scientific figures from a new perspective. Well-argued, accessible, and based on extensive research, Cowles’s hypothesis about the transformation of the scientific method by evolutionary theory should win the struggle for existence in Darwin’s “tangled bank” of scholarship on 19th-century science.
Bernard Lightman is distinguished research professor of humanities at York University in Toronto.