![]() ![]() Statisticians have quantified the appropriate penalty for various theories based on the number of variables they involve, but the more theoretical modes of quantitative science have yet to catch up. And it's highly parsimonious - Ockham would love it! But the theory which says "nutrition, exercise, and a collection of more than 100 genes predict both height and weight" is highly unparsimonious, even though we know it's better than its competitor theory. The theory which states "height determines weight" can do a reasonable job of providing evidence that seems to support that theory. ![]() Theories which it would soundly eliminate are usually questionable for other reasons, while useful theories might be discarded for a lack of parsimony relative to their over-simplified competitors. Thus, the utility of Occam's Razor is highly questionable. How many apppropriately complex theories of development were excised in favor of those advocating four or five tidy "stages" of cognitive development? The entire field is lucky to have survived the ridiculous nature-vs-nurture debate, a false dichotomy itself grounded in the pursuit of parsimony. Likewise, Occam's Razor cut deep and wide through developmental psychology. For several decades experimental psychology was dominated by an approach known as radical behaviorism, in which concepts related to "thinking" and "mind" were quarantined from mainstream journals. Yet similar methods have led to particularly disastrous results in psychology. A theoretical cousin of Occam's razor, maximum parsimony, has been quite useful for understanding evolutionary relatedness. Of course, some disciplines have injured themselves with Occam's razor more than others. Unless you're a biophysicist, the mechanisms at your preferred level of analysis are likely to be incredibly heterogenous and complex, even at their simplest. Thus life appears to result from a cascading "complexifying" process - an understanding of organisms at the macroscale will be anything but simple.ģ) Third, we know that the even the simplest rules of life (click the button at the upper left, labelled "Enjoy Life") can give rise to intractable complexity. If parsimony applies anywhere, it is not here.Ģ) Second, evolution doesn't design organisms as an engineer might - instead, organisms carry their evolutionary history along with them, advantages and disadvantages alike (your appendix is the price you pay for all your inherited immunity to disease). The continuing use of parsimony in modern science is an atavistic practice equivalent to a cardiologist resorting to bloodletting when heart medication doesn't work.Īnd it is in the life sciences where Occam's razor cuts most sharply in the wrong direction, for at least three reasons.ġ) First, life itself is a fascinating example of nature's penchant for complexity. It is literally a historical artifact: William of Ockham employed this principle in his own 13th century work on divine omnipotence and other topics "resistant" to scientific methods. Occam's Razor is actually a vestigial remnant of medieval science. It seems safe to assume that the fundamental laws of reality will be even more complex, if we can even discover them. At the time of writing, this has culminated in M-Theory, positing no less than 10 dimensions of space and the existence of unobservably small "strings" as the fundamental building block of reality. The history of physics is like a trip down the rabbit hole: the elegance and simplicity of Newtonian physics has been incrementally replaced by more and more complex theories. Nowhere is this more apparent than in physics, the science attempting to uncover the fundamental laws giving rise to reality. Simple theories have many advantages: they are often falsifiable or motivate various predictions, and can be easily communicated as well as widely understood.īut there are numerous reasons to suspect that this simple "theory of theories" is itself fundamentally misguided. evolution debate (is natural selection or divine creation the more parsimonious theory?) and in at least one reductio ad absurdum argument against religion. Theories with the fewest assumptions are often preferred to those positing more, a heuristic often called "Occam's razor." This kind of argument has been used on both sides of the creationism vs. ![]()
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