Wednesday 18 September 2013

A Note on Natural Science and Social Science

Doting dads have small bollocks. That was the news story preoccupying the news cycle for half a day last week. You may recall it appeared to "scientifically" prove a correlation between the size of a man's balls and whether he's a doting dad or not. Small balls = good dads. Giant bawbags - bad dads. Of course, it did nothing of the sort. How it got through peer review for a prestigious scientific journal when a simpleton like me drove a cart and horses through their sampling beggars belief. This isn't to say there is no correlation, it's just that they have not proved it because they failed to rule out all kinds of factors that might have a bearing on their result. If one was being uncharitable, you might say they found the result they were looking for. But I am going to be generous and say their error arose from social scientific illiteracy.

Usefully, the comment left underneath the original post summed up this problem perfectly. It read:
It might be that the reason that neuroscientists can do sociology, but the sociologists cannot do neuroscience could be the same reason why fighter pilots can ride bicycles, but cyclists can't fly fighter aircraft.

You would be surprised at the amount of work that neuroscientists have done on the effects of estrogen/androgen neuronal sculpting during brain development.

Still, stick to what you know and keep cycling.
Smuggery is never an attractive feature, but it's fatal when hitched to stupidity. Small wonder our correspondent hit the anonymity button. In short, this is anti-scientific bupkis pretending to be super serious science. Their position, if it can be dignified as such, opposes natural science to social science. There is no understanding of the scientific division of labour, of the various specialisms it contains and the limits of those methods. A chemist, for example, would not lecture a biologist on the workings of the cardio-vascular system. But that isn't to say chemists and biologists wouldn't find cause to occasionally collaborate on a problem of mutual interest. The two disciplines have overlapping areas of concern and can fruitfully work together to generate new scientific knowledge.

Like natural sciences, social science has its own intellectual division of labour. 'Social science' is more than just sociology. And like chemistry and biology, its disciplines can on their own and in collaboration with one another provide knowledge about the social world that is completely different to that produced by natural sciences. As I noted in reply to our blockhead, our neuroscientists can slice and dice some grey matter on a slide and gawp at it down a microscope. But however hard you look you will not find there the structure of Roman legions, the key to marketing beauty products or the production process for the internal combustion engine.

There have been many attempts to directly apply natural scientific methods to the domain of social analysis many times over the last two centuries, and without fail they have come unstuck. The behaviour of people as individuals and collectives is its own province. But that isn't to say social science and natural science can't collaborate. For example, no social scientist collaborating with our testicle-measuring team would have let their bad science go forward for publishing without testing social variables and providing robust sampling. But because they didn't, an opportunity to advance the understanding of the complex interface between the biological body and society was missed.

In short, natural science vs social science is pointless and a recipe for bad knowledge. But recognising separate domains of analysis, research practice and their limits, that way lies the path to collaborative wisdom.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

How nice it is for you to attempt to attack an article, that was based on bollocks.

You apparently don't give a damn about neuronal sculpting in neurodevelopment and the role of steroidal and non-steroidal hormones on brain function.

So fine, ignore all he very nice work that is going on in exploring how brains actually work and smugly take the piss out of their sampling procedure.

You are a closed-minded, unimaginative, politically motivated fool, but you are happy to be in a herd of closed-minded, unimaginative, politically motivated fools, so you will never have to bother reading outside your '200 year-old' field; just why do you need to know about sexual selection, evolutionary biology, neurochemistry and neuroendocrinology?

So I will just treat you with scorn and judge you blinkered, small minded view of humanity with contempt.

Stephen Flaunden said...

My 1976 version of the Concise Oxford Dictionary doesn't recognise 'bupkis'. Please enlighten me.

Phil said...

What's the point in replying to an idiot like anonymous when s/he's clearly not read the post, or at least the second-to-last paragraph.

However, the point is a wealth of literature exists that describes, models and explains social dynamics without the need to import "perspectives" from biological science. In fact, it is well established that "environmental condition" - i.e. society - impacts brain functions at the physical level. So there is work that needs to be done to explore this further - but that has to be a damn sight more rigorous than the bollocks our friend here is defending.

Phil said...

It's very similar to baloney, Flaundon.

Anonymous said...

Neurochemists are interested in how the brain works and how the brain develops. Given the recent developments in understanding how hormones modulate brain function, that hormones modulate short term and long term behaviour and that evolutionary biologists suggest that testosterone/dihydrotestosterone may drive sexual behaviour strategies, then the study is quite reasonable.
The response from the Sociolologists; Vroomfondelism.
I understand, the shrinks were pissed off when Viagra reached the market and removed their most profitable patient pool.
You could have done quite a nice comparison between the way the Natural and Social scientists approach he vexed questions of motivation and free will or how he two groups design experiments and recruit subjects. However, you didn't, you went directly into abuse and defended your 'turf'.
Now you might just get some inkling of why scientists who work on brain have so little to do with Sociologists; too much bile and bias.
Sociology with socialism indeed.

Phil said...

"Given the recent developments in understanding how hormones modulate brain function, that hormones modulate short term and long term behaviour and that evolutionary biologists suggest that testosterone/dihydrotestosterone may drive sexual behaviour strategies, then the study is quite reasonable."

At last, we might be getting somewhere.

This could form the basis of a testable, workable hypothesis that might illuminate social behaviour. How you would go about testing requires an engagement with the wealth of social scientific literature on the topic (that you cannot tell the difference between sociology and social science is not surprising, by the way). Then such a study might have something useful to say.

If, however, it does not it is bad science. Why? Because it neglects the efficacy of social relations and the efforts of generations of scholarship to make sense of them.

So, as they say, stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

Phil said...

"Natural science vs social science is pointless and a recipe for bad knowledge. But recognising separate domains of analysis, research practice and their limits, that way lies the path to collaborative wisdom."

Just in case you missed it first time round.

Anonymous said...

"that you cannot tell the difference between sociology and social science is not surprising, by the way"

I never suggested they were the same.

Sociology is generally described as the study of human social behavior and the surrounding social systems. Sociology is one of the social sciences, but not all social sciences are sociology.

Neurologists attempt to understand how a generic, and individual brain functions. The rise in Autism, which was described as hypermasculinization ,by Hans Asperger in the 40's, testosterone effects in utero (especially the work of Baron-Cohen) and all recent work of homosexuality have generated much interest in estrogen/androgen effects on empathy.
One of the major problems has been the ability to be able to monitor the sizes of very small regions in the brain. The last decade has seen an improvement in voxel size and temporal resolution, potentially, allowing statistically significant resolution of small areas of the brain, like the ventral tegmental, to be resolved.
This is one of the first such studies to look at normal variation and correlate it to testosterone levels. It will not be the last. A large number of imaging techniques are rapidly maturing and the rising levels of Autism, with its deficits in empathy, mean that human emotional drive/rewards systems will soon be examined in detail.

Still, you will continue to sneer at the neurologists, biophysicists and neuroendocrinologists experimental design and analysis. You will do well to keep away from us, we have enough arrogant bastards in neurology and we have no need to import unqualified arrogant bastards.
Fuck your 'collaborative wisdom' and go back to designing questionnaires and throwing numbers into stats packages.


Phil said...

You conflated sociology and social science. That's your lousy argumentation, so deal with it.

And yes, I will continue to poke holes because when you make absurd claims on the basis of inadequate sampling, that isn't science - regardless of the numbers of scanners or other nifty tech you use.

If you can't get the basic numbers right your claims are suspect. And no amount of trying to look down your nose at what you know are cast iron objections will change that.

Anonymous said...

"If you can't get the basic numbers right your claims are suspect. And no amount of trying to look down your nose at what you know are cast iron objections will change that."

So we are doing the science wrong.

You are too stupid to understand how ignorant you are. Lucky choice for our respective fields that you chose to devote questionnaire analysis and the Labour Party.

Phil said...

Keep the comedy coming.

Your rant started because I questioned the applicability of the testicles study. My objection was that that the correlation "discovered" was suspect because the sampling was too narrow, hence any claims at this stage were spurious. In my opinion it was a mistake for the team behind the work to put their work forward for publication, and even more erroneous for PNAS to publish it. Quite clearly their research was at the 'working paper' stage.

Now, you're right, I don't know a great deal about neuroscience. Because I know the limits of my competence I will not pronounce on the technicalities of work that is being undertaken. But where we differ is your arrogance refuses to recognise your ignorance. Neuroscientists are of course free to try and reduce social explanation to biological functions, but most do not because they also recognise the limits of their disciplinary competence. If they do then they can expect robust challenge to their arguments, especially where existing models of social explanation are perfectly adequate. Such is one of the ways science is advanced.

This is the argument I've been making all along which, for some reason, you cannot grasp. Perhaps pride is blinding you to the fact that a lowly sociologist has bested you in argument?