Are there 'laws' of social science. . . . . or is this just science-envy?

Many in the social sciences try to formulate all sorts of 'laws' of society, culture, and the like.  For decades, social sciences (including much of anthropology) have tried to make generalizations, implicitly or otherwise, of this sort.  My old graduate school professor, Leslie White, a terrifically thoughtful and interesting scholar, tried mightily to liken culture and its change ('evolution') to a force for the use and dispersion of energy--in a way, to make it a branch of chemistry or physics.  Sure, humans are made of chemicals and must follow laws of physics, energy, and so on.  But I think it didn't catch on or get us anywhere, certainly not as more than a vague generalization, after the fact. But White, as did other anthropologists, characterized a hierarchy, a kind of inevitable parade, of world cultures--from hunter-gatherers, to early agriculturalists, on to nation-states.

The burden, or scourge, of science envy?
Sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists and others have tried their damnedest to 'legalize' their field, to make it respectably precise, quantitative, and law-like.  That is, having the kind of bedrock basis, a set of universal dynamic premises, as are found in physics or chemistry--or even biology.

Ever since I was a graduate student in anthropology (but coming from a math and science background), I have thought that this was a kind of pretense, a bad case of physics-envy.  In the decades since then, I  have seen this take various forms and technophilifications.  Simple descriptions and informal attempts at generalization about world cultures, as in the above sort of hierarchy, have seemed to me forced.

There are those who, under various terms like post-modernism, argue against this sort of thing, often noting that what is written is, or perhaps necessarily is to be understood in the eye and careerism of the writer.  Their idea has been something akin to suggesting that we should accept the difference and not try to force things, indeed, instead to read social 'science' (or, for some, any science) as a social structure, to 'deconstruct' the explanations and behavior of scientists to show what they are really up to, vis-à-vis what they say they are doing.  They are not like physics and chemistry, and should learn to live with that fact!

Well, a riposte by social science can include assertions that people are, after all, physical beings and that their cultures are their ways of living in the physical as well as social world, the latter of course also being 'physical' and therefore there must be some regularities, limits, or 'laws' of social life.

So are there, or must there be, rules, constraints, causes, or regularities, ineluctable truths that are formal enough to be called 'laws' when it comes to behaviors, societies, and cultures?  Maybe it is just not as mature as the classical 'hard' sciences.  How can we know the answer--what kind of evidence could we bring to bear?  Or should social science professors' careers and activities be judged in different terms?

If social-science fields don't have legitimate analogs to the laws of the physical sciences, then what are the causes of the societal regularities that we observe, from language to courtesies and so on, that clearly lubricate human life if not, indeed, being fundamental to it?  Can they have no 'cause'?   Can the 'causes' be unique to each circumstance--and if so, is that in itself a 'law', and if so,  how does the law work or get enforced?

These are not new questions.  For the past two or more centuries (or, maybe, going back at least to Plato and Aristotle et al.) these sorts of questions have been asked.  Surely life, of individuals and above all of societies, in humans and other species, has orderly patterns!  Do these not reflect 'causes' of some sort?  If so, are they in some way 'universal' in their nature even if locally ad hoc in their results?

Can there be a real 'science' of society?  This has nothing to do with whether there should be departments with such names in universities!  Human society is, after all, built on layers of pretense.  But if no such science is possible, how is it that societies, chaotic in many ways, do have regularities!  These include social and family relations, property rules, boundaries, governments, status and wealth stratification, wars, borders and on and on.  Every society has at least some form of these attributes.

If social sciences are not really 'sciences' in the sense of physics and chemistry, which are based on rather simple universals, then what are they based on?

The questions are not new. They were written about by the ancients.  But I think that, other than various kinds of bureaucratic aspects of academic life, the questions are still largely unanswered.  Perhaps they are not yet well-posed questions--perhaps social and cultural causation needs some other kind of approach than imitation of physics.  But if that.....what?

We can see the beast....but it's been us!

The unfathomable horrors of what the 'Islamists' are doing these days can hardly be exaggerated.  It is completely legitimate, from the usual mainstream perspective at least, to denigrate the perpetrators in the clearest possible way, as simply absolute evil.  But a deeper understanding raises sobering questions.

It's 'us' pointing at 'them' at the moment, and some aspects of what's going on reflect religious beliefs: Islam vs Christianity, Judaism, or the secular western 'faith'.  If we could really believe that we were fundamentally better than they are we could feel justified in denigrating their wholly misguided beliefs, and try to persuade them to come over to our True beliefs about morally, or even theologically acceptable behavior.

Unfortunately, the truth is not so simple.  Nor is it about what 'God' wants.  The scientific atheists (Marxist) slaughtered their dissenters or sent them to freeze in labor camps by the multiple millions. It was the nominally Christian (and even Socialist) Nazis who gassed their targets by the millions. And guess who's bombing schools in Palestine these days?

Can we in the US feel superior?  Well, we have the highest per capita jailed population, and what about slavery and structural racism?  Well, what about the Asians?  Let's see, the rape of Nanking, Mao's Cultural Revolution, the rapine Huns.....

Charlie Hebdo is just a current example that draws sympathy, enrages, and makes one wonder about humans.  Haven't we learned?  I'd turn it around and ask: has anything even really changed?

Christians have made each other victims, of course.  Read John Fox's Book of Martyrs from England in the 1500's (or read about the more well-known Inquisition).  But humans are equal opportunity slaughterers. Think of the crusades and back-and-forth Islamic-Christian marauding episodes.  Or the Church's early systematic 'caretaking' of the Native Americans almost from the day Columbus first got his sneakers wet in the New World, not to mention its finding justification for slavery (an idea going back to those wonderful classic Greeks, and of course previously in history).  Well, you know the story.

Depiction of Spanish atrocities committed in the conquest of Cuba in Bartolomé de Las Casas's "Brevisima relación de la destrucción de las Indias", 1552.   The rendering was by the Flemish Protestantartist Theodor de Bry. Public Domain. 

But this post was triggered not just by the smoking headlines of the day, but because I was reading about that often idealized gentle, meditative Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Emperor in the second century AD.  In one instance, some--guess who?--Christians had been captured by the Romans and were being tortured: if they didn't renounce their faith, they were beheaded (sound familiar?) or fed to the animals in a colosseum.  And this was unrelated to the routine slavery of the time. Hmmm...I'd have to think about whether anyone could conceive of a reason that, say, lynching was better than beheading.

It is disheartening, even in our rightful outrage at the daily news from the black-flag front, to see that contemporary horrors are not just awful, they're not even new!  And, indeed, part of our own Western heritage.

Is there any science here?  If not, why not?
We try to run an interesting, variable blog, mainly about science and also its role in society.  So the horrors on the Daily Blat are not as irrelevant as they might seem:  If we give so much credence, and resources, to science, supposedly to make life better, less stressful, healthier and longer, why haven't we moved off the dime in so many of these fundamental areas that one could call simple decency--areas that don't even need much scientific investment to document?

Physics, chemistry and math are the queens of science.  Biology may be catching up, but that would seem today mainly to be to the extent we are applying molecular reductionism (everything in terms of DNA, etc). That may be physics worship or it may be good; time will tell, but of course applied biology can claim many major successes. The reductionism of these fields gives them a kind of objective, or formalistic, rigor.  Controlled samples or studies, with powerful or even precise instrumentation are possible to measure and evaluate data, and to form testable credible theory about the material world.

But a lot of important things in life seem so indirect, relative to molecules, that one would think there could also be, at least in principle,  comparably effective social and behavioral sciences that did more than lust after expensive, flashy reductionist equipment (DNA sequencing, fMRI imaging, super-computing, etc.) and the like.  Imaging and other technologies certainly have made much of the physical sciences possible by enabling us to 'see' things our organic powers, our eyes, nose, ears, etc.,  could not detect.  But the social sciences?  How effective or relevant is that lust to the problems being addressed?

The cycling and recycling of social science problems seems striking.  We have plentiful explanations for things behavioral and cultural, and many of them sound so plausible.  We have formal theories structured as if they were like physics and chemistry: Marxism and related purportedly materialist theories of economics, cultural evolution, and behavior, and 'theories' of education, which are legion yet the actual result has been sliding for decades.  We have libraries-full of less quantitively or testably rigorous, more word-waving 'theories' by psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, economists and the like.  But the flow of history and, one might say, its repeated disasters, shows, to me, that we as yet don't in fact have nothing very rigorous, despite a legacy going back to Plato and the Greek philosophers.

We spend a lot of money on the behavioral and social sciences with 'success' ranging from very good for very focal types of traits, to none at all when it comes to what are the major sociocultural phenomena like war, equity, and many others.  We have journal after journal, shelves full of books of social 'theory', including some (going back at least to Herbert Spencer) that purport to tie physical theory to biology to society, and Marx and Darwin are often invoked, along with ideas like the second law of thermodynamics and so on.  Marx wanted a social theory as rigorous as physics, and materialist, too, but in which there would be an inevitable, equitable end to the process.  Spencer had an end in mind, too, but one with a stable inequality of elites and the rest.  Not exactly compatible!

And this doesn't include social theories derived from this or that world religion.  Likewise, of course, we go through psychological and economic theories as fast as our cats go through kibbles, and we've got rather little to show for it that could seriously claim respect as science in the sense of real understanding of the phenomena.  When everyone needs a therapist, and therapists are life-long commitments, something's missing.

Karl Marx and Herbert Spencer, condemned to face each other for eternity at Highgate Cemetery in London (photos: A Buchanan)

Either that, or these higher-levels of organized traits simply don't follow 'laws' the way the physical phenomena do.  But that seems implausible since we're made of physical stuff, and such a view would take us back to the age-old mind-matter duality, endless debate about free will, consciousness, soul, and all the rest back through the ages.  And while this itemization is limited to western culture, there isn't anything more clearly 'true' in the modern East, nor in the cultures elsewhere or before ours.

Those with vested interests in their fMRI machines, super-computer modeling, or therapy practices will likely howl 'Foul!' It's hard not to believe that in the past there were a far smaller percentage of people with various behavioral problems needing chemical suppression or endless 'therapy' than there is today.  But if there were, and things are indeed changing for the worse, this further makes the point.  Why aren't mental health problems declining, after so much research?

You can defend the social sciences if you want, but in my personal view their System is, like the biomedical one, a large vested interest that keeps students off the street for a few years, provides comfy lives for professors, fodder for the news media and lots of jobs in the therapy and self-help industries (including think-tanks for economics and politics).....but has not turned daily life, even in the more privileged societies, into Nirvana.

One can say that those interests just like things to stay the way they are, or argue that while their particular perspective can't predict every specific any more than a physicist can predict every molecule's position, generic, say, Darwinian competition-is-everything views are simply true. Such assertions--axioms, really--are then just accepted and treated as if they're 'explanations'. If you take such a view, then we actually do understand everything!  But even if these axioms--Darwinian competition, e.g.--were true, they have become such platitudes that they haven't proven themselves in any serious sense, because if they had we would not have multiple competing views on the same subjects.  Despite debates on the margins, there is, after all, only one real chemistry, or physics, even if there are unsolved aspects of those fields.

The more serious point is this:  we have institutionalized research in the 'soft' as well as 'hard' sciences.  But a cold look at much of what we spend funding on, year after year without demanding actual major results, would suggest that we should be addressing the lack of real results as perhaps the more real or at least more societally important problem these fields should be addressing--and with the threat of less or no future funding if something profoundly better doesn't result.  In a sense, engineering works in the physical sciences because we can build bridges without knowing all the factors involved in precise detail.  But social engineering doesn't work that way.

After all, if we are going to spend lots of money on minorities (like professors, for example), we would be better to take an engineering approach to problems like 'orphan' (rare) diseases, which are focused and in a sense molecular, and where actual results could be hoped for.  The point would be to shift funds from wasteful, stodgy areas that aren't going very far.  Even if working on topics like orphan diseases is costly, there are no other paths to the required knowledge other than research with documentable results.  Shifting funding in that direction would temporarily upset various interests, but would instead provide employment dollar to areas and people who could make a real difference, and hence would not undermine the economy overall.

At the same time, what would it take for there to be a better kind of social science, the product of which would make a difference to human society, so we no longer had to read about murders and beheadings?

Inherit the wind?

The famous 1955 play about the Scopes trial, Inherit the Wind, is based on a quote from the Bible that warns that if you make trouble in your own house all you'll inherit will be the wind -- "He who brings trouble on his family will inherit only wind, and the fool will be servant to the wise."

The Scopes trial was nominally about teaching evolution in schools, but it's not well understood that a main part of the underlying issues was not just stupid biblical literalism or bigotry, but objection (yes, by the prosecuting attorney -- and biblical literalist -- William Jennings Bryan) to the justification based on notions of genetic determinism for racism and inequality.  I've discussed this elsewhere.

One of the most delicate issues in genetics has for more than a century had to do with intelligence.  There are two camps, those who think IQ (whatever it is, something we need not debate here!) is largely 'genetic' and unchangeable, and those who think it is malleable and responsive to environments.  As usual, the argument is largely political (for good reasons) but also ideological rather than scientific.

The brain is a complex organ that develops rapidly as countless genes are expressed in different tissues, in a highly orchestrated dance of interactions.  So IQ, if it's any sort of brain function, must be 'genetic' in the sense that the brain is a product of genetic interactions.  More socially important is that all these countless genes and their regulatory DNA sequences are subject to variation among individuals, and that must have some effects on the resulting IQ (again, let's not quibble here about whether experts actually know how to define or measure IQ).  Family correlations show evidence of this genetic variation, whether or not the amount of heritability is being correctly estimated, and whether or not the genetic effects do or don't determine the person's achieved IQ (e.g., depending on environment, schooling, etc.).

The most fiery aspect of the debate is whether specific genes can be identified that cause or predict IQ.  It's bad enough to assume that certain people or groups of people we might not like have low IQ and nothing can be done about it, but even worse if one can identify the responsible genes, because then something can be done about it, and the eugenics era proved that that something was dreadful.  There was a lot of pain but all our society inherited from it was wind, nothing of substance.

Intelligence and its genetics are involved in all sorts of social science discussions because they affect many aspects of society including investments to address systematic inequality and so on.  Some argue that we should not waste money on those with low-IQ genes, others that at least we should help those people raise their achieved-intelligence.

These are social and political issues, and yesterday we discussed the problems with the social sciences, so self-described, in terms of whether or how they are actually 'scientific,' or have failed to produce useful results, or whether the experts in this field know more than anybody else -- or can predict the future better than a chimp (untrained at that).  We criticized the persistent funding of go-hardlyanywhere research in those fields, as we've done for genetics, our own field.

A recent paper by Douglas Wahlsten sheds light on these issues.  This is a paper showing from the actual scientific literature how clearly and substantially we have so far failed to identify genes with useful contribution to normal behavior.  Nobody doubts the clear evidence for major mutations in genes that can cause serious, clinically relevant behavior problems, and many of these involve mental impairment.  However, even the understanding of many serious psychiatric disorders has eluded serious advancement based on genetics, genome mapping and the like.  Schizophrenia and autism are two cases Wahlsten mentions.  These traits are clearly familial and seem 'genetic' but GWAS have basically identified a plethora of different genes that make individually minor contributions, and no blockbuster single-genes.  Even MZ (genetically identical, monozygotic) twins do not have dramatically high concordance.

These are apparently polygenic traits, affected by genes to be sure, but generally not by major, common genetic variants.  Among the best indicators of this are the paucity of really replicable gene-specific findings for these traits.  That means the original finding could be false, or the effect so weak or low in frequency that it simply doesn't recur in different samples.

Wahlsten specifically goes after IQ genetic arguments.  In essence he shows from the data that even huge samples would identify genes whose effects are less, or much less, than 1 point on the IQ scale (which is scaled to have mean of 100).  And these are elusive if they exist--most effects may be even smaller.  More than that, the effect seems almost inevitably not to be an inherent one but depends on the variation in genes elsewhere in each individual's genome.  Even the total of things found by some of these tests would not account for even 1% of the variation in IQ among the subjects.

Yet the hunt for genes for intelligence goes on, in the face of these clear patterns.  Even though intelligence is essentially and clearly polygenic.  There are few if any smoking gun genes, for the normal range.  Even the genes whose variation is known to cause clinically serious impairment typically do not show up as 'hits' in genomewide mapping studies.  Predictive power based on genotype is thus very weak indeed.

Yet behavioral genetics motors on, with the implicit or explicit promise of prediction based on genotype, a potentially dangerous kind of determinism that history has shown can be badly abused by powers that be.  We keep pouring funds into this, as well.

We are not arguing that IQ whatever its reality is not 'genetic', but that it is generally not useful to evaluate people based on the geneIQ but on their actual performance.  And because the more that is learned about the development and workings of the brain the more is learned about its plasticity, it's clear that intelligence can't be understood without due attention to the considerable environmental influences on the trait.

Pulling the plug on this kind of fruitless genomics, which is growing despite these kinds of facts basically across the board, would save resources for things where that kind of science can really make a difference, and be less potentially contentious.  What to do as a society about variation in intelligence is a thorny problem, and we don't have any answers.  Sadly, as we discussed yesterday, the experts don't have any answers either.  But if they stir the pot of our society, hopefully all they'll inherit will be the wind of their pronouncements.