Components of Historical Reconstruction

• History requires:
• Records of events
• Passage of time (change)
• No change, no history, no time; therefore no record no history
• Written vs unwritten "prehistory"
• Implications and preservational bias
• components of universe = matter, energy, space, time
• phases of matter = plasma, gas, liquid, solid
• Evidence for biotic history:
• 1. Fossils
• body fossils
• trace fossils
• 2. Present biosphere
• "It was also clear that...the present distribution of animals is necessarily due to their past distribution...." Alfred Russel Wallace, 1905 (developed theory of natural selection independant of Charles Darwin)
• Inheritance and ancestry
• Continuum of time--a linked sequence--essentially irreproducible
• Characteristics of scientific and historic studies:
• science--predictive and postdictive, verifiable
• history--postdictive, not verifiable
• Interpretation of history based on analogy, experience, and expectation
• Uniformitarianism--multidirectional constancy of process
• Past is the key to the present
• Past is key to the future
• Present is key to the future
• Present is key to the past
• Actualism--Only the present is the key to either the past or the future
• History gives special perspective on present, time, magnitude, and probability
• Only true constant in the universe is change