Well-crafted narratives by such researchers as Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, the late Stephen Jay Gould and many others are higher-order works of science that synthesize and coalesce primary sources into a unifying whole toward the purpose of testing a general theory or answering a grand question. Integrative science is hard science.

This article was originally published with the title The Really Hard Science.

4 Comments

1. 1. Matt123456 12:49 PM 2/22/08

   I think that the author might have misunderstood the meaning of "hard" in "hard science". It doesn't mean "hard" as in "difficult"; it means "hard" as in "objective" (kind of like "hard facts").

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2. 2. bdholtzman 11:55 AM 2/10/09

   To comment on the previous commenter: I had never heard that. That woudl imply that social sciences cannot be objective as being so far from the most obective "hard" siences, and most social scientists would beg to differ. I like the author's premise better.

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3. 3. economagic 07:47 PM 7/28/09

   I think that one of Mr. Shermer's points is that the common connotation of "hard" sciences, at least among some of their practitioners who wish to disparage the objectivity of the social sciences, is erroneous. See Kuhn, of course, and also Steven Cohn, Reintroducing Macroeconomics (M. E. Sharpe, 2007). As an economist myself, I have to say that many classical-tradition economists have an exaggerated opinion of their objectivity.

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4. 4. thelogician 01:15 PM 7/12/10

   Readership of popular science books decreases exponentially in the number of equations contained in the manuscript. Don't cheapen real science to this. Original research papers are rare, whereas popular science books are not. You social scientists should be able to understand that.

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