Science One of the more interesting, and certainly topical presentations at the recent meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine in Denver was a symposium on barefoot running. It was led by Irene Davis and Daniel Lieberman, both advocates for barefoot running and top scientists in this field. Lieberman in particular is something of a 'legend' in the field, and two years ago, he gave the prestigious keynote address at the ACSM meeting.
Since then, the area has moved on, thankfully. Most recently, Lieberman's group did some fascinating work on the barefoot running concept in runners accustomed to shoes or running barefoot, and that's the focus of this post, along with some thoughts on the concepts underlying barefoot running. A lot of the time, I'll play devil's advocate, because I believe in Lieberman's findings, and the theory behind barefoot running is sound. But there are some "loopholes", and I'll end with those.
There are two arguments yoked together here. One argument has to do with the goals of science: Chomsky pushes explanation over prediction, and never mind prediction's occasional intrinsic value (in the case of climate change or asteroid strikes or inflation rates), and its generic value as a check of a theory's correctness. (C dislikes prediction, I think, because he associates it with "statistical language models", which in his long-held view are incapable of describing syntactic structure, much less explaining
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