With regard to the mathematical modeling (and as I’ve said elsewhere), one need not regard mathematics as such as a sin (rather, it’s a certain sort of mathematics and its rhetorical employment) to appreciate the post-positivist and scientistic “penchant for quantities” and the “fetish for measurement” that infect the natural and social sciences, symptomatic evidence for which is seen in the overweening preference for game theory, cost-benefit calculations, and Bayesian probability estimates (its paradigm of statistical inference serving as the epitome of empirical argument). In Fact and Method: Explanation, Confirmation and Reality in the Natural and Social Sciences (1987), Richard Miller cites Bayesian reasoning as the latest incarnation of positivist fantasy, “an excess of formalism in which truisms about likelihood (plausibility, simplicity, and so forth) are given one-sided readings and abstract results are developed at too far a remove from the problems to be solved.” Miller avers this latest round of falling head over heels for formalism is caused by “the triumph and prestige of the physical sciences, or ingrained ways of thinking in a highly monetary society, or both…”

Much of this is an endeavor to formalize inductive reasoning so as to place it on par with its deductive counterpart, thereby according it the “rigor” and “robustness” that makes everyone’s eyes glaze over. As Gilbert Harman and Sanjeev Kulkarni remind us: “It is a category mistake to treat deduction and induction as two versions of the same category, because deduction and induction are of very different categories. Deductive arguments are abstract structures of propositions. Inductive reasoning is a process of change in view. There are deductive arguments in the sense of reasoning about deductions. There is inductive reasoning, but it is a category mistake to speak of inductive logic.”

The avowedly neo-classical economist and economic historian Deidre McCloskey has documented the virtues and vices of the employment of mathematics in economics but while some in the profession may be listening, those in law and economics remain blissfully ignorant (as they apparently are of Hausman and McPherson’s Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy, and Public Policy, 2006 ed.). Both McCloskey and Philip Mirowski would agree that it is no virtue to continue to commit the sins of economics, which “come,” in the words of the former, “from a pride in formalization, the making of great machines and monsters” (one of the latter’s books is aptly titled Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science, 2002). Hilary Putnam is on target: “This revolt against formalism is not a denial of the utility of formal models in certain contexts; but it manifests itself in a sustained critique of the idea that formal models, in particular, systems of symbolic logic, rule books of inductive logic, formalizations of scientific theories, etc.—describe a condition to which rational thought can or should aspire.” To paraphrase and quote again from Putnam, our conceptions of rationality cast a net far wider than all that can be scientized, logicized, mathematized, in short, formalized: “The horror of what cannot be methodized is nothing but method fetishism.”

But evolutionary explanations sound SO SCIENTIFIC (just ask Steven Pinker…who is an otherwise very bright, clever and charming fellow)! I agree with Jerry Fodor (at least on this topic) who thinks David J. Buller’s Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature (2005) did not go far enough in its critique of evolutionary psychology, but one wanders if those eager to resort to evolutionary explanations have attempted to read any critiques that might spoil their fawning enchantment with such nonsense. In other words, as Putnam has said, we need to remind ourselves again and again that “the ’scientific’ is NOT co-extensive with the ‘rational.’” In other words, the practice of science does not exemplify the quintessence of rationality or reason. Rather, it is but one embodiment or expression of such in one significant realm of intellectual inquiry and human affairs in general.

Evolutionary explanations are notoriously easy to create ex-post. But it’s rather difficult to test them in vivo. I find it very troubling that this kind of unverifiable explanation might be given any weight by policy-makers. I think in retrospect (though, I hope, much sooner than that) we will recognize that this style of argumentation has a lot in common with the “scientific” racialist, eugenicist, etc. enthusiasms of a century ago. The utterly undemocratic tenor of Nudge betokens nothing benign. I’m surprised you’re so credulous.