Faces in the crowd

摘要

Not content with taking on cosmology and evolution, popular science writing has recently set its sights on the world of social science. Authors such as Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate), Jared Diamond (Collapse) and Philip Ball (Critical Mass) hail from different sciences but they have a similar message that is infuriating social scientists. Perhaps the most extreme of the bunch is Critical Mass, winner of the 2005 Aventis prize for popular science writing. Ball, who is a chemist by training, sets out to show "how much we can understand about human behaviour when we cease to try to predict and analyse the behaviour of individuals and instead look to the impact of hundreds, thousands or millions of individual human decisions". But for social scientists, the very notion of ceasing to analyse the behaviour of individuals is an affront based on defunct 19th-century social science. It is an idea whose time has come and gone.