sociology as a science

The sciences of life have never been admired for quantitative exactitude … But it cannot be said that living things are at heart sloppy, fuzzy, inexact, and unscientific. How does an oceanic salmon find its way home to spawn on the very rivulet it left in Oregon three years earlier? How is a meter-long sequence of billions of nucleotide base-pairs reversibly coiled without entanglement into a nucleus no more than a few thousand base-pairs in diameter?… Such miracles bespeak of reproducible precision. But that precision is not the kind we know how to write equations about, not the kind we can measure to eight decimal places.

- arthur winfree