Borrowed knowledge

"What happens to scientific knowledge when researchers outside the natural sciences bring elements of the latest trend across disciplinary boundaries for their own purposes? Researchers in fields from anthropology to family therapy and traffic planning employ the concepts, methods, and results of chaos theory to harness the disciplinary prestige of the natural sciences, to motivate methodological change or conceptual reorganization within their home disciplines, and to justify public policies and aesthetic judgments. Using the recent explosion in the use (and abuse) of chaos theory, Borrowed…