Just a quick rant to say how really annoyed I was at one line of argument in Henry Gee's mostly bloody excellent book Deep Time (Fourth Estate, London, 2000 - so don't ever say I don't give plugs. And yes you probably can buy it from bloody Amazon)
It is a really good book. It tells it like it is. Fun anecdotes, proper science, you even get an account of the doings and undoings of Danish palaeontologists A wonderful antidote - nuts! I've just seen a huge opilionid walking across my living-room floor and I need to identify it now - that took half-an-hour and I think it is a Leiobunum maybe L. blackwalli but who on earth could tell and I'm not at all sure - anyway Gee's book is an antidote, or maybe even a prophylactic to all sorts of nonsense about evolution from gay genes to aquatic apes. It's good.
And the man's a fan, which can't be bad. A real-live beanie-wearing (even if he doesn't know it) wide-eyed old-style sensawunda fan.
But he over-eggs his pudding. He is such a fan of cladistics (an alliance of good sense and bad Greek which is, without doubt, the right way to do large-scale phylogeny - in fact it is the way the best taxonomists always did do it even when they thought they weren't) that he allows nothing else (and doesn't allow cladistics to say anything about descent) In particular he is against any story-telling, any narrative, any explanation, any argument about adaptation, any of "what some scientists, favourably disposed to such things, call 'scenarios' and what other scientists, less well-disposed, call 'just-so stories'. " (pp.95-96)
Most of what he says makes sense. But some of this is old-fashioned physics-envy, some of it is the desire to paint all science into the corner of falsifiable hypotheses. We need to tell stories. We need narrative to understand - in a real sense understanding is narrative.
If you can't explain something in simple language, you probably don't know it. Would a database of facts that no-one had ever read, thought about or given names to be "knowledge"? Of course not. People know through words and ideas, connected together into intelligible narrative. that's what human knowledge is, stories we tell ourselves. To rule out all narrative, all scenario-building, all explanation, all story-telling, is to rule out the possibility of knowing.