Green Mars (Mars Trilogy, #2)

by Kim Stanley Robinson

He needed a science of history, but unfortunately there was no such thing. History is Lamarckian, Arkady used to say, a notion that was ominously suggestive given the pseudospeciation caused by the unequal distribution of the gerontological treatments; but it was no real help. Psychology, sociology, anthropology, they were all suspect. The scientific method could not be applied to human beings in any way that yielded useful information. It was the fact-value problem stated in a different way; human reality could only be explained in terms of values. And values were very resistant to scientific analysis: Isolation of factors for study, falsifiable hypotheses, repeatable experiments—the entire apparatus as practiced in lab physics simply could not be brought to bear. Values drove history, which was whole, nonrepeatable, and contingent. It might be characterized as Lamarckian, or as a chaotic system, but even those were guesses, because what factors were they talking about, what aspects might be acquired by learning and passed on or cycling in some nonrepetitive but patterned way? No one could say.