Thanks for the interesting post. Although it's true that the social scientific vision of the world too often fails to account for dynamics, there is a small and growing group of us - bona fide social scientists - who are applying these tools and ideas to the hoary old chestnuts of our fields.

I'm a graduate student in sociology at the University of Michigan and have the pleasure to be affiliated with a group here called the Center for the Study of Complex Systems, that seeks to collapse some of the artificial barriers between fields and get scientists of all stripes - physical, natural, social, etc - to engage meaningfully with the ideas of each other's fields.

We're small in number, but hopefully growing. What's sad is that some of the growing offshoots of other fields - econophysics springs to mind - really threaten to eat our lunch. That these ideas haven't taken off harder or faster within fields such as economics and sociology may not just be the result of the usual slow change within the academy but instead a symptom of a larger problem of protectionism and a tendency to look backwards instead of forwards that tends to plague these fields.

The result of this head-in-the-sand take on methodological change is that sociology is rapidly becoming a discipline that all too often is about theorists instead of theory - and this is really only a prescription for irrelevance.