thoughts

To what extent can the scientific method be successfully applied to humans?  Give specific examples of your answer and refer to the TED talk of Steven Pinker.

I have to admit this TED talk by Steven Pinker, contradicted a lot of what I believe was true about why humans have singular and different behaviours between each other. He supports the idea that what actually shapes our emotions, reactions and our ways of behaving is not the environment we have been raised in, but instead, our genetics. At first, I was quite unsure of this but then he pointed out some ideas and examples in support of his theory that I found interesting :

• Anthropology tells us that there are hundreds of behaviours in common between all the human cultures.
• Neurobiology studies measuring the distribution of grey matters in family-related people and unrelated-family people show that the there are a lot more similarities in the brain structure and distribution of grey matter between family related subjects than unrelated subjects.
•  He brings up then, an example of two twins divided at birth, explaining how (after having been living separately from each other all their life) they show so many similarities in terms of behaviour, hobbies, fashion choices and tastes, as well as other aspects. He links this example with another one that presents a pair of adoptive twins showing the same behaviours and attitudes between each other but very different from the ones of their adoptive parents, with who they have been living all their life.

Steven Pinker really thinks that the sciences of human nature such as behavioural genetics, evolutionary psychology and neuroscience will lead to a better understanding of human nature. He supports the fact that, these natural sciences applied to the human mind, can explain a lot of what we only see happening at the moment in the years to come.

In any case, I think that a scientific approach to human science can be effective only until a certain point.
Let’s take as example a person who is unsatisfied with the election of the new first minister of his/her country. Our purpose is to understand why this person is unsatisfied with the result, using the scientific method. First of all, we observe this person before and after the day of the proclamation of the winner. Based on what observed, a hypothesis is formulated. After the hypothesis formulation, a test is carried to evaluate and measure the subject’s reactions to different opinions and statement said by the neo president about various topics, starting from education until immigration. Based on the intensity of the subject’s reactions, a conclusion is formulated explaining the reason behind of her discontentment. This final conclusion can confirm the initial hypothesis or instead deny the first presupposition.

In this method there are a lot of factors that can not be controlled at all:

• the subject may dislike the winning candidate not because of his ideas but instead for his appearance and his way of speaking or presenting himself.
• the subject’s reactions to different statements can be influenced by thousands of reasons. These reactions are products of different reasonings combined, therefore they can not be classified and labelled just as one.
• Subject’s social and cultural background.

What Steven Pinker explained in his speech I think is a big generalisation of human behaviours. He is grouping cultures, races and societies not considering the individual will. In human sciences, every case is a world apart (contrary to natural sciences where finding common features between phenomena helps formulate a hypothesis to explain them) and even if similarities can be found, generalisations really cover and distract from the point of understanding human action. Anyway, I believe that generalisations need to be made in order to try to explain patterns among behaviour and cultures. In this case, the scientific method could turn to be helpful to understand the bigger picture but I think it can not be applied to singular humans because of their unpredictability that stop the scientific method to be effective since it presuppositions cannot be made.

As a conclusion , Steven Pinker quotes Anton Chekhov “Man will become batter when you show him what he is like”. I am not sure I agree with this: Is showing to the man what he is really like a way for him to improve and progress? And if so, what will this progress consist in?

Mathematics, as it is usually described, is used by everyone in big and small actions every day. Also, it is common to hear people saying “Math regulates the world” or “ It’s Math!” as broad expressions. All of this made me reflect on the reliability of these phrases, analyzing examples of why math is actually used in real life and why it is not. Evaluating different possibilities to obtain a specific result is one of the requirements to better understand the mathematics logic. In a mathematical problem, several methods can be used to obtain the same result, using for example logarithms instead of geometric sequences or probability, could all led to a common result. Applied to the real world, being able to interpret a problem, watching it from different points of view, could help you to identify the most convenient way to achieve your goal. We can take as an example an argument between two friends. Being aware of the reasons why the argument started, not only from one side but also from the other, would make see the problem from both prospective, making realize the two friends aspects they did not consider from just their personal opinion. Thus, this mathematical skill is helpful in interpreting social relationship and dynamics. Another possible reason why mathematics can be used in every day is to find in its use of axioms. In order to work, mathematics needs basic logic reasonings agreed by everyone to be commonly understood. To resolve complex problems it’s fundamental to have these axioms if not, every mathematician could create its own math. In real life, we can compare axioms to social values. If in a culture it is not socially acceptable a romantic relationship between close members of the family, this social “rule” regulates how romantic relationships work in that population ( just an example). This is because people need rules to work as a society, to live in harmony and without them, chaos would be been what rules, as an anarchy, where singular individuals behave as they think they should.

On the other side, many are the reasons why math could not and should not be used in everyday life. The first thing that comes to everybody’s mind is the effective use and utility of mathematics in regulating and controlling our daily life (unless you are a physic or en engineering). I think that math cannot be used in real life because there are too many variables in human being’s behaviour that cannot be objectively examined and evaluated by numbers. As an example in TOK’s class, we had been watching a video about the use of an algorithm in evaluating with 90% percentage of accuracy how much time will a couple stay together. This algorithm is based on assigning plus or fewer points to the ideas and opinions expressed in a conversation between two partners, creating a graph meant to show the trend of the conversation and to give an evaluation given by a formula. I feel very sceptical about this method because at the end it all comes back to the objectivity of the scientist who is grading the emotions and reactions of the speakers. How can a stranger evaluate the weight and the importance of expressions on a person  ? I think it is not an accurate and objective way to analyze emotions. Is there a fair way to analyze emotions?
Mathematics is a useful tool but, from my perspective, it is not universally applicable to everything, specifically not to human beings. Humans are not fully predictable and their mentality differentiates from individual to individual because of their own singular experiences that lead to impossibly categorize them and work them out as a calculus.