> The questions that cultural anthropologists are asking cannot ethically be answered with science because there are too many variables to separate out a depend

> The questions that cultural anthropologists are asking cannot ethically be answered with science because there are too many variables to separate out a dependent and independent variable. This only holds if you have a really strict and useless definition of science. If I told you I had hardware and simulation software, and you fed it in a lot of historical information, and it then simulated the results that best fit with its best attempt to cross-validate it against more recent and better known events, we might reasonably say "yeah that sounds like a scientific approach, we are using different sets of data, even though lots of it is imperfect, to make inference by exploiting common human processes across time" But if I tell you that piece of hardware is the human brain, for some reason people change their view, it becomes 'qualitative' and 'non-scientific.' Which only really holds if you have a mystical view of the human brain which puts it in its own class as distinct from any other piece of computational machinery used in scientific inference.