Wow, it didn't even cross my mind that the quote was a "bash" on social sciences. My title picked on sociology because it seemed like a clearer case, but the qu

Wow, it didn't even cross my mind that the quote was a "bash" on social sciences. My title picked on sociology because it seemed like a clearer case, but the quote lumps evolution among the "ambiguous sciences" as well. I very much agree. I also think that evolution is much more beautiful than anything I've seen in Maths so far. I found it interesting, because it's the first time I internalized that ambiguity prevents long chains of arguments, because fuzziness is multiplicative (so to say). As a corollary, if social behavior was not ambiguous, sociology would be potentially just as deep as physics. The quote actually has very little to do with the rest of the book. It was merely a prelude to their discussion on the evolution of societies, which is one of the Major Transitions. The last remark is cool too, "it may be that no operative theories are possible in the social sciences", because it applies to biology as well. We do have some operative theories on evolution, but there's absolutely no guarantee that every phenomena has a simple holistic explanation. As far as I'm concerned, we still don't have a proof that evolution (Darwin's axiom) could lead to complex structures. We just have a lot of very convincing hand-waving.