During the Dark Ages, the progress of Western civilization virtually                  stopped. The knowledge gained by the scholars of the classical age was lost; for                  nearly 600 years, life was governed by superstitions and fears fueled by ignorance.                  In this outspoken and forthright book, Lee McIntyre argues that today we are in a                  new Dark Age--that we are as ignorant of the causes of human behavior as people                  centuries ago were of the causes of such natural phenomena as disease, famine, and                  eclipses. We are no further along in our understanding of what causes war, crime,                  and poverty--and how to end them--than our ancestors. We need, McIntyre says,                  another scientific revolution; we need the courage to apply a more rigorous                  methodology to human behavior, to go where the empirical evidence leads us--even if                  it threatens our cherished religious or political beliefs about human autonomy,                  race, class, and gender.Resistance to knowledge has always arisen against scientific                  advance. Today's academics--economists, psychologists, philosophers, and others in                  the social sciences--stand in the way of a science of human behavior just as clerics                  attempted to block the Copernican revolution in the 1600s. A scientific approach to                  social science would test hypotheses against the evidence rather than find and use                  evidence only to affirm a particular theory, as is often the practice in today's                  social sciences. Drawing lessons from Galileo's conflict with the Catholic church                  and current debates over the teaching of "creation science," McIntyre argues that                  what we need most to establish a science of human behavior is the scientific                  attitude--the willingness to hear what the evidence tells us even if it clashes with                  religious or political pieties--and the resolve to apply our findings to the                  creation of a better society.

Dark Ages: The Case for a Science of Human Behavior (Bradford Books) PDF

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