my response to Massimo Pigliucci's essay "Chess, psychoanalysis, evolutionary psychology and the nature of pseudoscience"

Essay is here: Chess, psychoanalysis, evolutionary psychology and the nature of pseudoscience

my response:

I think it's disingenuous to lump sociobiologists in the same boat with Freudian psychologists. Sociobiology is grounded in the natural sciences--in biology, genetics, chemistry and physics. Freudian psychology is not. Just because you are unable to imagine an easy way to gather experimental evidence for a given scientific theory does not disqualify it as a valid hypothesis. I personally cannot imagine experiments that could be used to validate theories of General Relativity, but that doesn't discredit the fundamental scientific nature of the theory. Scientists are still working on devising new experiements to test Relativity half-a-century after this theory was proposed.

You've used this line of argument before. In your essay, "Do you believe in human nature?", you wrote:

"Our genetic makeup certainly poses limits to what we can and cannot do, but how ample those limits are is currently largely beyond the scope of human biology, partly because we cannot do the right experiments that would settle the matter (it is both impractical and unethical to breed human beings and raise them under controlled environmental conditions, which is what we do with other animals and with plants when we wish to study gene-environment interactions)."

But you inability to imagine ethical experiments only reflects on your own limits of imagination, not on the scientific validity of these lines of inquiry. I have more confidence in mankind's collective resourcefulness in devising fruitful experiments than in one philosopher's doubt.