Monday, June 04, 2007

Genetics is a social science

As students we used to spend a lot of time discussing whether social science is a science. Without the rigour, the controlled experiments, how could it ever be?



In my thirties I worked with scientists & medics & started to wonder - Is Science A Science?



In my 40s I started to grapple with trying to understand what the geneticists were up to. Read about the triumph of hard rigorous physics over fuzzy biologists



Then we got a bit of back tracking - of course we meant nature via nurture



Now they seem to have got a bit further, talking several genes interacting with environments



It will be correlation matrices, cluster analysis, Principal Components & hierarchical models next. Mosaic even



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