What Has Preservation Bias Done for You, Lately?
Perhaps we should demand more from our realities
I recently came across the concept of preservation bias, which immediately captured my imagination.
Strictly speaking, preservation bias is a scientific concept about fossils. Fossils exist because certain conditions that favor long-term preservation have been met, such as environments that are wet and low on oxygen, and/or where organisms had hard parts, like bones.
We can only ever directly study what remains—what nature sees fit to preserve in some form. Hence, fossils of dinosaurs, aquatic creatures, hard-shelled insects, and hominids abound. Whatever is gone (the soft and exposed stuff, apart from rare snippets of recovered DNA) remains unknowable, leaving us either to guess or to stumble around in the dark.
So: That which is preserved, that which survives, gets noticed. As for the rest? We don’t know what we cannot know.
What if the vast bulk of reality—past and present—lies outside of that which is preserved? What if the preserved world is a fraction of all there is? Perhaps our senses are deprived of discovering all the rest—all that was lost eons ago or is lost to us now for any number of reasons, say, censorship or collective amnesia.
What about all those story ideas you had at one time, did not write down, and now they have vanished? All that creative energy—not preserved. Transmuted, perhaps, but still, not preserved in its original form.
Our perceptions, according to the philosopher Immanuel Kant, “aren’t things in the world; rather they are versions of those things that we construct in our minds by shaping them in space and time. When we imagine the world as being identical to our conception of it…our reason becomes faulty, and science responds with paradox.”1
Preservation bias is a reminder of our penchant for constructing reality even or especially when parts are missing. While fossils are real, they are not the living thing they represent; they are remnants of lost creatures, tantalizing teases. The light from long-vanished stars is real, but that light is not the gaseous star itself. That’s the paradox.
Preserved things can beguile us with the romance of discovery. A box of old, handwritten letters discovered in an attic is an exciting find that brings its correspondents to life. And yet, these words scrawled on pages are mere ghosts of the human emotions and agency that animated the people who wrote the letters in the first place.
We make as much of this as we can; big, juicy stories are often born from the preserved bits, like old letters, even though what is preserved is an echo of lives, not the lives themselves.
Often, we must be content with just that much, for that is all there is.
When New York’s glorious Penn Station was demolished in the early 1960s, all that remained were subterranean tunnels, tracks, and platforms. The soaring columns and arches were destroyed, preserved only on celluloid and in photos.
And here’s where preservation bias takes on a sinister cast, for it is often deeply distorting. For instance, the surviving idea of old Penn Station is, I suspect, even grander than the building itself. Many still harbor deep regret and aggravation over this loss, egged on by the way memory itself functions as preservation bias: The memories are all that remains.
Less benign still are the omissions facilitated by the distortionate nature of preservation bias. I read about a museum curator who mused that, based on their collection of clothing and other materials, one might assume that there were no left-handed people in the world until recently, as none of the museum’s objects reflect left-handed usage. Had none been preserved? Or had the curators simply overlooked them? In which case, preservation bias is a force of omission, which is quite a different thing from dodo bird bones preserved beneath the soil.
From there, it’s a short hop, skip, and jump to all the women artists, and artists of color, and artists raised in colonized cultures, whose artistic production was not preserved because it was not valued.
Preservation bias is a deeply exclusionary force that operates on a systemic level—and always has. But it is also, potentially, deeply personal.
The suppression of deeply traumatic experiences is, perhaps, a form of preservation bias. The brain seeks to bury threats to well-being while preserving more benign memories and sensations.
I’m still wondering how preservation bias affects writers and other creatives.
· Is the act of artistic creation itself a way of tapping into aspects of the not-preserved world? The lost world?
· To what extent are our imaginations shaped by—constrained by?—the preservation biases we inherit at the micro-level (e.g., family trauma) and macro-level (e.g., culturally suppressive forces)?
· As artists, do we owe it to ourselves to push past the liminal boundaries of preservation bias—all the “given” knowns about what remains to be studied and explored—and seek to reanimate the organisms that gave rise to the fossils?
I don’t have many answers. But I sure do have a lot of questions. And if questions are like fossils, then I guess we need to keep digging for answers.
William Egginton. The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality. Pantheon/Penguin Random House 2023
Amy, thank you for such a thought-provoking piece. As to writers, it strikes me how much of creative writing is lost because of the preservation biases of cultural gatekeepers. For every book that survives the minefields of publishers' requirements thousands are lost to the world and never see the light of day. Imagine how many writers give up or give out, and their absence leaves us poorer in insight, deprived of what was but didn't survive.
You packed this piece with much to think about. Very provocative.