Canadian Journal of Zoology

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T H E NATIONAL RESEARCH C O ~ N C I L O F CANADA

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Volume 58

Number 2

February 1980

REVIEW / SYNTHESE
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The blunting of Occam's Razor, or to hell with parsimony1

M . J . DUNBAR
Marine Sciences Centre, McGill Unicersity, 3620 University Street, Montreal, P . Q . , Canada H3A 2B2

Received July 5, 1979 DUNBAR, M. J. 1980. The blunting of Occam's Razor, or to hell with parsimony. Can. J. Zool. 58: 123-128. The Principle of Parsimony, and the apparently related matter of the supposed inadmissibility of untestable hypotheses, are examined in the light of certain examples taken from the history of science. It is urged that many important new ideas would not have occurred had their authors not disregarded both principles entirely. Illustrations are drawn from the manner in which 18th century biologists dealt with the problem of organizing a rapidly growing body of knowledge, from the history of the type concept in zoology, and from the 18th and 19thcentury controversies on the history of the earth and on biogeography. DUNBAR, M. J . 1980. The blunting of Occam's Razor, or to hell with parsimony. Can. J . Zool. 58: 123-128. Le Principe de parcimonie, ainsi que le probleme connexe de I'inadmissibilite d'hypotheses inverifiables font I'objet d'un examen a la lumiere d'exemples tires de I'histoire des sciences. Plusieurs idees nouvelles d'importance auraient echappe a leurs auteurs, si ceux-ci n'avaient ignore complttement les deux principes. A titre d'exemples, on peut citer la maniere dont les biologistes du 18e siecle ont reagi au probleme de la mise en ordre de leurs nombreuses connaissances nouvelles, I'histoire du concept du type en zoologie, ainsi que les controverses aux 18e et 19e siecles sur I'histoire de la terre et sur la biogeographie. [Traduit par le journal]

The principle of parsimony, which calls for scholars of all sorts not to involve more entities or causes in a hypothesis than are necessary to "explain" the phenomena observed, goes back in the history of science at least as far as Aristotle, who stated that (to quote G. Burniston Brown (1950)) "God and Nature never operate superfluously, but always with the least effort." The principle came to be fastened on William Ockham, who lived in the 14th century, and it has been known since that time as "Ockham's [Occam's] Razor." Ockham was a somewhat quarrelsome divine who took the side of the Nominalists against the Realists in that great
'Fry Medallist Address, Canadian Society of Zoologists, Annual Meeting. 1979. Laval University.

medieval controversy. The Nominalists considered that logic deals only with words invented by humanity, and that therefore such word games as the Syllogism can tell us nothing about Nature. Brown (1950) says of the parsimony principle that "the judgement that all the processes of Nature are capable of simple formulation is one that might be made at the end of our enquiries, when our knowledge is complete (if it ever is), but not at the beginning, when we know very little." He also suggests that it has appealed more to physical scientists, who deal with relatively simple systems, than to biological scientists, whose field of study is so extraordinarily complex; and that it is useful because it simplifies our problems to deal with a few variables at a time, or one train of thought at a time.

0008-4301/80/020123-06$01.00/0 @ 1980 National Research Council of Canada/Conseil national de recherches du Canada

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This is associated, as I hope to show here, with the level of organization with which each scientist is concerned; what to the ecologist (synecologist), for instance, appears to be the simplest hypothesis imaginable, is to the man working at the physiological or biochemical level totally inadmissible, useless, or meaningless. Related to Occam's Razor is another shibboleth, the inadmissibility~ofuntestable hypotheses. Why should we not welcome untestable hypotheses? Charles Darwin could never have written the Origin of Species had he believed that untestable hypotheses were anathema, or forbidden. Even today, much of the Darwinian theory remains essentially untestable. We accept Darwinism not on the basis of logic, but because an overwhelming number of observations can be most satisfactorily "explained" by that theory. It is reasonable now, but it certainly was not reasonable to most people in 1859. (And of course that word "reasonable" is both the right word and the wrong word to use in this respect. "To use words at all is to skate on very thin ice.") I hope to make an argument for the view that the most useful concepts in science have been those that blatantly violated the principle of parsimony and that of the inadmissibility of untestable hypotheses. Occam's Razor has bothered me for years, and I am grateful for precisely this sort of opportunity to explore it a little; the more so because one of the best introductions to the problem is to be found in the work of Fred Fry. On the occasion of Dr. Fry's formal retirement from the Department of Zoology at the University of Toronto, a number of his colleagues and former students organized a symposium, with Fry as chief guest, on the subject of what was called the "Fry Paradigm" (Kerr and Lawrie 1976). The first time I read the contributed papers and the discussion, I had difficulty discovering what the Paradigm was, I think mainly because all the participants were familiar with the concept and did not spell it out in simple terms for those outside the fold. But by perseverence I became interested, as always happens when one discovers new ideas that touch on one's own. What I got out of the symposium publication was this. From a life-long study in physiology and ecology, and in particular the study of temperature effects and tolerances, Fred Fry reached a classification of environmental factors which involved a hierarchy of levels of investigation and of causation. This in turn led to a hierarchical approach (rather than a theory) which demonstrated that what one learned at one hierarchical level of organization would not necessarily teach us anything about the next level

above. One of the papers of the series (Kerr 1976) gave a particularly charming and instructive illustration, using an etching by Maurice Escher showing water doing impossible things. To quote from Kerr:
The hydrodynamic model provided by Escher ... is not one without intrinsic interest in these times of energy crisis. But alas, Escher's general conclusion is forbidden by the laws of thermodynamics. Notice, however, that the artist's conclusion was cleverly attained by exactly the processes that I have been discussing: seemingly correct combinations of selected internal properties that result in an unacceptable emergent conclusion. Technically speaking, the artist's tactics differ slightly from the methods of ecological modelling in the sense that Escher has taken a subtle liberty with the laws of perspective in the process of mapping a system that is proposed to exist in a 3-space onto the model constraints of 2-space. But this difference, I argue, is trivial. Ecological analysis inevitably involves mapping from an n-dimensional reality to a greatly simplified representation; the only real distinction, therefore, concerns the emergent laws that may be violated during the process of simplification. I trust the point is taken that in Robert Rosen's words, "observation and theory at the higher organizational level necessarily precedes effective synthesis at the lower organizational level" (Rosen 1969).

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This was expressed by Fry in these terms: "... there is no general way of going from autecology to synecology. There is a way of coming back to autecology from synecology, but you cannot go the other way" (Kerr 1976). It was said many years ago, when ecology was developing into a selfconscious branch of biology, that ecology was nothing else but physiology studied in the field. Needless to sav. this was the view not of the new ecologists but of;he entrenched physiologists. It is now well recognized that in fact ecology deals with nature at a totally different level of organization from that of physiology. To those physiologists the approach taken by the ecologists was inadmissible and, worse, unnecessary. It was a violation of the parsimony principle, by bringing in concepts of interorganism relationships, which, in the last analysis, were reducible to physiological terms, and which did not increase our understanding of nature. There may still be physiologists who believe that. The impossibility of achieving a synthesis at a higher organizational level from observations or measurements at lower levels has occurred to a few men in the past, but it has never attracted much attention. There is a deeply ingrained scientific habit of taking the problem to pieces, studying the pieces, and then trying to put them all together again. We should know better: Medawar (1967) quotes George Campbell (Philosophy of Rhetoric, 1776) to the effect that, in inductive generalization,

Can. J. Zool. Downloaded from www.nrcresearchpress.com by MCGILL UNIVERSITY on 03/10/13 For personal use only.
F I G . 1. The Waterfall by Maurice C . Escher. Reproduced b y permission of the Escher Foundation, Haags Gerneenternuseurn, The Hague, Holland.

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there "may be in every step, and commonly is, less certainty than in the preceding; but in no instance whatever can there be more." More recently (in fact this very year of 1979), Carl Walters of the University of British Columbia, in discussing the use of simulation modelling in ecology (personal communication), remarked that synthesizing from data at the lower levels cannot be done. The modelling technique, used properly, reverses the process; it states a hypothesis (model) at the top level, or whatever level is required, and that model is tested by measurements indicated to be made at lower levels. If the measurements do not agree with the model prediction, then the model is changed to fit until a better conceptual framework of the total natural pattern is achieved. The relevant points here are that the principle of parsimony plays no part in the process whatever, and that the method of investigation is from the higher organization to the lower, not the other way round. After all, at the simplest taxonomical level this is apparent; no amount of studying the hummingbirds or the finches is going to tell us that the same class, Aves, also contains ostriches, albatrosses, and eagles. The history of science is full of examples of the bland disregard for Occam's Razor, many of which have turned out to be extremely fruitful in the longer run. Darwin assured us that in working out his theory of natural selection he proceeded on proper Baconian principles of collecting large numbers of observations ("facts") and fitting them into his final model. But in fact we know that the model (hypothesis) of natural selection had occurred to him quite early in his career. He had achieved his results; it only remained to find out how to reach them. Was this the proper use of Occam's Razor? I propose to use, in this discussion, three specific examples: the type concept in zoology; Charles Lyell and the central heat theory in early geophysics; and the biogeographical theories of Buffon and de Candolle, as opposed to those of Darwin and Wallace. One of the most obvious developments in the history of zoology was the response (or responses) of postrenaissance naturalists to the rapid growth of the numbers of animals entering their ken, the response to the sheer pressure of new descriptions. This response in the 18th century took three important and different forms: the transcendental zoology of the Naturphilosophen, led by Goethe, Oken, Sainte-Hilaire and others; the functional anatomical school of Daubenton and Cuvier; and the evolutionists, of which the first were Buffon and

Lamarck (also the Linnean classification, which was relevant to all three of the others). The first believed that all animals, vertebrate and invertebrate, could be reduced in concept to one master template, or archetype, upon which the Creator had built all animal forms. The second school taught that the structure of animals was dictated, in some unstated manner (presumably divine), by the functional needs of the species or genus. The third favoured a developmental relation between animals of different degrees of complexity, from the simplest to the most highly organized, the development taking place over long periods of time. The third view is the one we accept today, most of us, but they all have one important thing in common. They were the result of guessing at a really impressive level of adventure. In this they had nothing to do with the principle of parsimony; they were extravagantly wild. Perhaps Occam's Razor applies only to small-scale laboratory experiments, and fairly simple experiments at that. All three guesses, incidentally, were entirely untestable hypotheses. Charles Lyell, perhaps the most important geologist of the first half of the 19th century, and the matter of the central heat theory have been investigated very recently by Lawrence (1978). Elie de Beaumont, in France, produced in 1828 (published 1829) a theory of the history of the earth based on the physical speculations of Fourier, who had represented the earth as beginning as an incandescent mass which had been cooling slowly ever since its origin. Elie de Beaumont's history included 12 orogenic periods initiated by collapse of the cooled crust in response to the continued cooling of the core. These caused massive ridgings of the crust, due to contraction, and the history of the earth was thus episodic, marked by sudden events on aglobal scale. In 1830, the year after Elie de Beaumont's work appeared, Lyell published the first volume of his Principles of Geology, setting forth his history of the earth along much more conservative lines, and in keeping with the principle of uniformity that had been promulgated some time earlier; past events in the history of the earth were to be interpreted in terms of present observed processes, without saltatory changes. Of the two theories, clearly that of Lyell was the one which, in the light of contemporary knowledge, sailed closer to the Ockham line. Lyell himself wrote: "In our ignorance of the source and nature of volcanic fire, it seems more consistent with philosophical caution to assume that there is no instability in this part of the terrestrial system" (quoted from Lawrence

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(1978)). And yet it turns out, in the light of modern geophysics, that Elie de Beaumont was right. Another defeat for parsimony. A. P. de Candolle, Swiss phytogeographer and botanist, published his Gkographie Botanique in 1820. In it he built on what was then known as "Buffon's Law," but which has now been forgotten, according to which different areas have different species, even though they may have very similar climates and other physical conditions. Wallace and Darwin revived this observation later. Buffon was an evolutionist, and his Law implied that biogeography has to be a historical and evolutionary science. The cause in the differences between, for instance, the faunas and floras of the tropical regions of the world, on this view, were to be found in the separation of common stocks by geographical changes, rather than in dispersal in the Darwinian sense; for Buffon the oceanic and other barriers were insurmountable for most species, and Buffon claimed, among other things, that South America and Africa were once connected and later separated by the appearance of the Atlantic (Buffon 1766). Candolle was interested in the common elements in the floras of different continents as well as in their differences. He treated cosmopolitan species as exceptions (Nelson 1978), and to explain them called on "geological causes that no longer exist today" (Candolle 1820). For both Buffon and Candolle, geography was unstable, in one way or another (but neither proposed the extensive land bridge structures that Wallace did later). Darwin did not accept either land bridges or tectonic movement or change; for him geography was stable, and patterns of distribution were explained, where necessary, by dispersal alone, by various methods. There were other workers in this 19th century who were not so sure of this stability. Sclater, in 1858, considered the most important problem was to find out the "primary ontological divisions of the earth's surface" (Nelson 1978), a problem that was dropped, except for the suggestions of Matthew and of Wegener in 1915 and 1912 respectively, for over a century. Now we have plate tectonics, which has explained a lot of knotty biogeographical problems, and which is clearly close to what was in the minds of Buffon and of Candolle. Candolle died in 1841; Nelson (1978) writes: "Had he lived, he might have reminded Darwin and Wallace that there were still things not yet known: that the study ofhabitations had not yet fully ripened; that means of dispersal do not explain everything." Nelson also comments that biogeog-

raphy is coming back to the concepts of Candolle: "In that eventuality, the Darwin-Wallace era of biogeography not only might draw to a close, but might prove something of a misadventure in the development of science." Again, it was the more conservative (Darwinian) view, not demanding "more entities than are necessary," that was wrong; the more adventurous nonparsimonious view was right. We have accepted the principle of parsimony because we have always used the progression from the simpler to the more complex in our method of research, following the teaching of Bacon and Descartes. The lesson to be learned is that, at least in ecological research and very likely in all scientific endeavour, one has to think globally and at the highest appropriate organizational level from the start, in order to reach real understanding by the shortest route. The example of Newton and Einstein I leave to your own imaginations. In ecology the principle is clear. As was pointed out by Lotka many years ago, ecosystems appear to accomplish nothing in particular other than the churning over of energy (as we all do as individuals), but they rrolur, they grow. The gene level is only one level in the evolutionary mechanism, and a low one at that. In the history of evoIutiunary theory one talked first of individuals evolving. individual species: then of populations, or "demes." or "groups.'" In future. 1 hcipe the near future, we will talk of evolution at the ecosystem level (Dunbar 1960, 1972). and of ecosystems as evolving units. If it proves impossible to demonstrate Darwinian selection between ecosystems, which may or may not happen, then it may well be that we abandon Darwinian selection at that level and go on without it. This possibility, indeed, is suggested by paleoecological study, which is likely to prove as fruitful to ecosystem evolution as paleontology as such proved to classical evolution. If we stick to Darwinian thinking alone, it is not easy to conceive why, at the very beginning of life on earth, the first primal living stuff diversified at all; and indeed Darwin himself, after years of mental struggle, firially decided to drop the origin of life out of the Ori~in of Species. which may be significant in the present context. What is the advantage to a humble chernosyntheticor photosynthetic organism to split off other farms which will compete with it? The advantage is to the ecosystem that evolves, and in doing so diversifies itself into increasing numbers of species and of niches. But in order to start to think along these lines it is essential to abandon all subservience to the Razor of Ockham and to have the

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courage to construct outrageously untestable hypotheses. Their testing will come later.
BEAUMONT, E . D E . 1829-1830. Recherches sur quelques-unes des RCvolutions de la surface du globe. Anal. Sci. Nat. 18: 5-25,284-416; 19: 5-99, 177-240. G. L. L., DE. 1766. Histoire naturelle. Vol. XIV. BUFFON, Paris. pp. 316-317. G. B. 1950. Science: its method and its philosophy. BROWN, George Allen & Unwin, London. CANDOLLE, A. P., DE.1820. Geographie botanique. Strasbourg and Paris. M. J. 1960. The evolution of stability in marine DUNBAR, ecosystems; natural selection at the level of the ecosystem. Am. Nat. 94: 129-136. -1972. The ecosystem as unit of natural selection. In Growth by intussusception; ecological essays in honor of G.

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Evelyn Hutchinson. Edited by E. S . Deevey. Trans. Conn. Acad. Arts Sci. 44: 113-130. and the Fry paradigm. J. KERR, S. R., 1976. Ecological analysi~ Fish. Res. Board Can. 33: 329-332. KERR, S. R., and A. H. LAWRIE. (Editors). 1976. Natura naturans: a symposium on the Fry paradigm. J. Fish. Res. Board Can. 33: 297-345. P. 1978. Charles Lyell versus the theory of central LAWRENCE, heat: a reappraisal of Lyell's place in the history ofgeology. J. Hist. Biol. 11: 101-128. P. B. 1967. The art of the soluble. Penguin Books, MEDAWAR, Harmondsworth, England. G. 1978. From Candolle to Croizat: comments on the NELSON, history of biogeography. J. Hist. Biol. 11: 269-305. R. 1969. Hierarchical organization in automata theoretic ROSEN, models of biological systems. In Hierarchical structures. Edited by L. L. White, A. G. Wilson, and D. Wilson. American Elsevier Publ. Co., New York. pp. 179-199.