Challenges for Science
The book ends by calling for a new kind of science of the social, one that recognizes the immense challenges posed by the sheer complexity of sociocultural phenomena and the fact that our evolved psychology is not well designed to grasp, let alone address, those challenges. Nevetheless, we live in a time when the potential rewards of transdisciplinary collaboration are richer than they have ever been before. This chapter describes some of the main hurdles to achieving that potential and discusses how these might be overcome. The very enterprise of social science is inherently unnatural, given our uniquely human evolved psychology, and this may explain why the study of the social has proven harder to get off the ground, in comparison with many other life sciences. The resulting lack of consensus on basic matters of epistemology and method has contributed to the creation of theoretical and methodological divisions in the social sciences in the alternate guises of the ‘two cultures problem’ and the ‘silo effect’. The solutions proposed here advocate new forms of problem-centred transdisciplinary research based on the kinds of cross-cultural collaborative programmes described in detail throughout the book.