On physics envy

"The social scientist is in a difficult, if not impossible position. On the one hand there is the temptation to see all of society as one's autobiography writ large, surely not the path to general truth. On the other, there is the attempt to be general and objective by pretending that one knows nothing about the experience of being human...How, then, can there be a social science? The answer, surely is to be less ambitious and stop trying to make sociology into a natural science though it is, indeed, the study of natural objects. There are some things in the world that we will never know and many that we will never know exactly...Biology is not physics, because organisms are such complex physical objects, and sociology is not biology, because human societies are made by self-conscious organisms. By pretending to be a kind of knowledge that it cannot achieve, social science can only engender the scorn of natural scientists and the cynicism of humanists."

Richard Lewontin, Alexander Agassiz Research Professor of Genetics at Harvard University.