Narrative and “anti-narrative” in science: How scientists tell stories, and don’t

Synopsis

Narratives are common to all branches of science, not only to the humanities. Scientists tell stories about how the things we study work, develop, and evolve, and about how we come to be interested in them. Here I add a third domain (Secularity) to Gould's two "non-overlapping magisteria" of Science and Religion, and I review previous work on the parallels in elements between story-telling in literature and science. The stories of each domain have different criteria for judging them valid or useful. In science, especially historical sciences such as biology and geology, particular scientific methods and approaches both structure and test our narratives. Relying on the narrative assumptions of how certain processes, such as natural selection, are supposed to work is treacherous unless they are tested by appropriate historical patterns, such as phylogeny, and rooted in the process of natural mechanisms. The structure of scientific explanation seen in peer-reviewed papers and grant proposals obscures true narrative within a formulaic sequence of "question, methods, materials" and so on that is quite different from the classic narrative of folk-tales and novels, producing an "anti-narrative" that must be "un-learned" before it can be communicated to non-scientists. By adopting some of the techniques of classic story-telling, scientists can become more effective in making our ideas clear, educating the public, and even attracting funding.