Evolving paleontological views on deterministic and stochastic approaches

Abstract

Experienced workers in a field are unlikely to change their assessment of basic philosophical issues. Einstein for example never accepted the indeterminacy required by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, despite the urgings of Max Born and virtually all others. Similarly even earlier, some older workers had refused to accept the young Einstein's theories. Now if issues in physics are not open and shut, they are even less so in paleontology. Possibly it is useful to probe the underlying basic philosophical background to our discipline. The purpose of the present article is to indicate that the inductive, deterministic approaches which have been used almost exclusively in paleontology have stringent limitations. For some types of problems, deductive stochastic processes are more interesting. If we can make the distinction of ‘few’ versus ‘many,’ then it is quite easy to consider deterministic explanations for the individual cases (the movement of individual molecules) but to reserve stochastic explanations for the ensembles of events (the movement of molecules too numerous to count).