Links of interest: Human Nature and War, Solitary Confinement, Schroedinger's Cat, Garage Science, Caterpillars Being Awesome, and More

At The New York Times, Nicholas Cristakis argues that the social sciences need a radical overhaul to thrive intellectually and otherwise. He advocates new and more interdisciplinary fields within the social science and a willingness to explore new topics and declare certain findings as established fact. While the overall argument is a good one, it is a noticeable bias that he particularly favors fields that are as much in the natural sciences as in the social sciences. In addition, when arguing that social scientists should move past further explorations of established findings, he argues:

    "In contrast [to the natural sciences], the social sciences have stagnated. They offer essentially the same set of academic departments and disciplines that they have for nearly 100 years: sociology, economics, anthropology, psychology and political science. This is not only boring but also counterproductive, constraining engagement with the scientific cutting edge and stifling the creation of new and useful knowledge. Such inertia reflects an unnecessary insecurity and conservatism, and helps explain why the social sciences don’t enjoy the same prestige as the natural sciences.

    One reason citizens, politicians and university donors sometimes lack confidence in the social sciences is that social scientists too often miss the chance to declare victory and move on to new frontiers. Like natural scientists, they should be able to say, “We have figured this topic out to a reasonable degree of certainty, and we are now moving our attention to more exciting areas.” But they do not.

    I’m not suggesting that social scientists stop teaching and investigating classic topics like monopoly power, racial profiling and health inequality. But everyone knows that monopoly power is bad for markets, that people are racially biased and that illness is unequally distributed by social class. There are diminishing returns from the continuing study of many such topics. And repeatedly observing these phenomena does not help us fix them.

    So social scientists should devote a small palace guard to settled subjects and redeploy most of their forces to new fields like social neuroscience, behavioral economics, evolutionary psychology and social epigenetics, most of which, not coincidentally, lie at the intersection of the natural and social sciences. Behavioral economics, for example, has used psychology to radically reshape classical economics."

 

One might argue that no, not everyone knows or acknowledges these findings in classic topics, and moreover, further research might lend much more knowledge about the how and why that go beyond simply confirming that these distributions and effects are present. Nevertheless, the editorial makes a number of excellent points, including about the need to make social science lab experience a standard part of undergraduate education.

Also from The New York Times, a rather less compelling argument: Why Men Need Women. Essentially, men with sisters and daughters are more compassionate and generous. As the comments point out, the article seems ready to assume that women are biologically destined to be kind and nurturing and that their influence on men relates to this inherent trait, and not on social organization or a personal reason to identify with marginalized groups. For example, I have heard many commentators admit that they were passionately against Title IX (gender equality in school sports) right up until the moment they had a daughter. Is this shift, for example, really about becoming more nurturing when one has a daughter or about a sudden awareness that societal issues really can affect you personally?

At Nautilus, Stuart Firestein wrote Certainly Not!: Philosophy: Good science requires cultivating doubt and finding pleasure in mystery.  Interesting quote: "Negative Capability is just as important to the scientist, who should always find him- or herself in a state of 'uncertainty without irritability.'”

At io9, 10 Urban Legends about Famous Scientists.

At Wired, Human Nature May Not Be So Warlike After All.  Interesting quote: "The findings contradict the notion 'that humans have an evolved tendency to form coalitions to kill members of neighboring groups,' wrote anthropologists Douglas Fry and Patrik Soderberg in their July 18 Science paper. 'The vast majority of us assume that war is ancient, that it’s part and parcel of human nature,' said Fry. 'These types of perceptions have very strong influences on what goes on in current-day society.'”

Also at Wired, The Horrible Psychology of Solitary Confinement, a look at the science advocating against the shockingly widespread use of solitary confinement in the U.S.

At Popular Science, a cool and cheap PCR machine. 

At nanowerk, progress toward's Schroedinger's cat: studying quantum superpositions for large objects, i.e., objects in two states at once (!).

And in the categories of Cool Animal Stuff and Cool Math, caterpillar swarms can move faster than any individual caterpillar in the swarm. Here's why.