Over the pasttwo days I've been arguing that multiple avenues of insight are critical in historical scholarship. That's a general assertion; check out this bloggingheads.tv exchange between Carl Zimmer and paleontologist Niel Shubin. Carl points out that though Neil is a paleontologist focused on Deep Time, his laboratory is a conventional wet environment where a fair amount of developmental genetic research occurs. Uniformitarianism strikes again! The present is a window onto the past....