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  • 3 - Mass Extinctions and Narratives of Recurrence

  • from II - Matters of Time
  • Edited by Mary S. Morgan, London School of Economics and Political Science, Kim M. Hajek, London School of Economics and Political Science, Dominic J. Berry, London School of Economics and Political Science
  • Book:
    Narrative Science
    Published online:
    16 September 2022
    Print publication:
    06 October 2022, pp 61-81
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  • Summary

    A narrative of recurrent causation, the Nemesis hypothesis, holds that the Sun has a companion star, Nemesis, whose orbit perturbs comets from the Oort cloud into earth-crossing orbits leading to mass extinction by impact with a nearly clocklike periodicity. Here I discuss the pursuit of the Nemesis hypothesis as the pursuit of narrative closure. Using a framework drawing on formalist analysis of narratives that distinguishes between the ordering of events in the narrative discourse (the syuzhet) and in their chronological sequence (the fabula), I describe the processes of reading and rereading the fossil and geologic records. The resulting analysis dissolves false dichotomies between nomothetic and idiographic, and catastrophic and uniformitarian approaches in the historical sciences. It also accommodates diverse philosophical views about the nature of epistemic access to the past.