G. H. Hardy’s letter to science . He notes that: In a word, there is not the slightest foundation for the idea that a dominant character should show a tendency to spread over a whole population, or that a recessive should tend to die out. Reading a biography of Ramanujan a few years back I recall that Hardy was shocked about some of the naive and sloppy ideas espoused by the biologists of his day. For him, the Hardy-Weinberg Equation was so plainly obvious that he was reluctant to pursue the matter. The fact that scientists at the time were duped by what seem to be in hindsight (thanks in part to the Hardy-Weinberg Equation) supremely obvious fallacies should make us cautious about the ability of the public to digest the new bioscience with any level of clarity. We’ll know that psychology has really made it as a science capable of novel predictions when it stops making sense to our own intuitive understanding of human nature (The Theory Of Mind), graduating from the elaboration of the obvious to the exploration of the hidden structure of reality.
Posted by razib at 09:56 PM