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IDEAS & TRENDS; For the Nobelists of Another Year, Some Big Mysteries of Science
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IDEAS & TRENDS; For the Nobelists of Another Year, Some Big Mysteries of Science
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Newspaper Article
IDEAS & TRENDS; For the Nobelists of Another Year, Some Big Mysteries of Science
1988
Overview
Scientists since the time of Linnaeus have given scientific names to and characterized to some degree about 1.4 million species of plants, animals and microorganisms. But the estimates of the actual number that exists range, according to the models employed, between 5 million to 30 million and more. In other words, we don't know to the nearest order of magnitude how many species of organisms there are on the planet. And furthermore, we don't know why there are that number of species and we don't really understand fully why there are more species in certain parts of the world such as the tropics. This is a critical problem because the habitat destruction around the world, particularly in the tropics, is reducing that diversity rapidly through species extinction. . . . That whole area is not covered by Nobels. It matters because the Nobels tend to call public attention in a dramatic fashion to outstanding scientific problems and attempts to solve them. So this, I believe, is a substantial shortcoming. - E. O. Wilson, biologist, Harvard University Beyond Piaget I don't believe that social psychology is really a science in the capital 'S' sense. I think it's part of anthropology and sociology, what I call cultural studies. What's left is the area that people like Freud and William James were very interested in -personality, will, consciousness, stuff like that. My own feeling is that is not so separate from literary studies. . . . According to a classic principle of economics, people are ''optimizers'' who constantly attempt to maximize economic gains. Many psychologists, however, don't believe people work in so tightly rational a manner. Is economics ready to be called a science, or does it occupy some lower realm?
Publisher
New York Times Company
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