SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY PERSPECTIVE
SCIENCE AND THE NATURE OF AWE Chasm between science, humanities persists because people value different ways of knowing RUDY BAUM, C&EN WASHINGTON tury, C. P. Snow's two cultures are alive and well. The chasm between the two cultures, between science and the humanities, or, perhaps more accurately, between scientific and nonscientific ways of knowing the world, is as deep as it was four decades ago when Snow first articulated his powerful metaphor. The prob-
tionism that is at the heart of scientific understanding is a cold and heartless intellectual construct that robs nature and humanity of their grandeur. And worse, that understanding a phenomenon mechanistically, especially understanding life mechanistically, amounts to sacrilege. The clash between these perhaps irreconcilable worldviews continues in two relatively recent books that I think scientists
lem, however, is not a failure of understanding that will be alleviated through education, as Snow and many succeeding commentators believed. The problem is far deeper and more intractable than that. Science continues to probe deeply into the inner workings of nature, continually and inexorably revealing the mechanisms by which things work—atoms, molecules, organisms including people, planets, stars, the universe. Science's handmaiden, technology, continues to alter the landscape of human existence with its nearly incomprehensible array of inventions and the products that spring from them. At the same time, articulate, thoughtful critics continue to insist that the reduc-
should be aware of. In 1998, Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson published "Consilience: The Unity ofKnowfedge," an ambitious philosophical essay that argues that all knowledge, from physics and chemistry to art and religion, is linked by a limited number of discoverable laws. Last year, essayist "Vfendell Berry published "Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition," which is largely, though not entirely a highly negative response to "Consilience." Many scientists I have talked to over the past few months are aware of "Consilience," though few have read it. Most are completely unaware of "Life Is a Miracle" and Wendell Berry Most express surprise that the "two cultures" debate con-
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tinues. I think that's probably common among scientists, who generally take for granted the central place their disciplines hold in modern intellectual endeavors. In fact, although IfindBerry's arguments entirely unconvincing, I suspect they strike a deep chord with many nonscientists. What many scientists bemoan as scientific illiteracy may be something far more disturbing: a distrust and fear of the scientific method and a conscious rejection of scientific understanding. Having read "Life Is a Miracle," I am not sanguine that there's anything we can do about it. SIR CHARLES PERCY SNOW defined the "two cultures" in the 1959 Rede Lecture at Cambridge University Snow was a prominentfigurein both the scientific and literary worlds in the U.K. Trained as a chemist at Leicester University College and Cambridge, he worked for a time doing spectroscopy in the Cavendish Laboratory
headed by Lord Rutherford. During World War 11, he worked in the UK. Civil Service recruiting and deploying scientists to support the war effort. He was also a highly successful and popular novelist, essayist, and critic. Snow's basic premise was straightforward. "There have been plenty ofdays when I have spent the working hours with scientists and then gone off at night with some literary colleagues," he told his audience in Cambridge. "It was through living among these groups ... through moving regularly from one to the other and back again that I got occupied with the problem of what, long before I put it on paper, I christened to myselfas the 'two cultures.' For constantly HTTP://PUBS. ACS.ORG/CEN
I felt I was moving among two groups— comparable in intelligence, identical in race, not grossly different in social origin, earning about the same incomes, who had almost ceased to communicate at all." Snow deplored this state of affairs, maintaining that both the scientific culture and what he called the "traditional" culture were impoverished through their ignorance of each other. There is little doubt, though, that in the Rede Lecture and in "The Two Cultures: A Second Look," an essay Snow published four years after the lecture, his greatest concern was with the lack of scientific understanding by the traditional culture. For example, he said: "It is obvious that ... as one moves through intellectual society from the physicists to the literary intellectuals, there are all kinds oftone of feeling on the way But I believe the pole oftotal incomprehension of science radiates its influence on all the rest. That total incomprehension gives... an unscientific flavor to the whole 'traditional' culture, and that unscientific flavor is often, much more than we admit, on the point of turning antiscientific." And later in the lecture, he said that the members of the traditional culture "are impoverished too.... They like to pretend that the traditional culture is the whole of 'culture,' as though the natural order didn't exist. As though the exploration of the natural order was ofno interest either in its own value or its consequences. As though the scientific edifice of the physical world was not, in its intellectual depth, complexity, and articulation, the most beautiful and wonderful collective work of the mind of man." Snow shared the innate optimism he attributed to the scientific culture. Advancing scientific knowledge and technological development would, he said, inevitably benefit humanity Ifes, of course, there were problems associated with the Industrial Revolution, he conceded, and with the pace ofscientific and technological change quickening, there would be furtherproblems. But he left no doubt that, in his mind, the industrial and scientific revolutions had benefited the vast majority of humans, and he was contemptuous ofthose members ofthe traditional culture who pined over the loss ofa "preindustrial Eden" that never existed.
social sciences. He writes that, from 1978 forward, "I have argued that the etiology of culture wends its way tortuously from the genes through the brain and senses to learning and social behavior. What we inherit are neurobiological traits that cause us to see the world in a particular way and to learn certain behaviors in preference to other behaviors. The genetically inherited traits are ... the propensity to invent and transmit certain kinds of these elements of memory in preference to others." C&EN reviewed "Consilience" when it was published (C&EN, Oct. 12,1998, page 64). Michael P. Doyle, a chemistry professor at the University of Arizona, Tucson, and vice president of Research Corporation, Tucson, wrote that, of all of Wilson's books, "Consilience" "may have the deepest and longest lasting impact on intellectual societies. {It} is rational and stimulating, and—because it takes readers to new levels of argument and understanding—it's enriching and sometimes mildly offensive." (Doyle's review can be found online by clicking on "Back Issues" on C&EN's home page, selecting 1998, and then selecting Oct. 12 to reach the table of contents for that issue.) It would serve no purpose for me to reprise Doyle's excellent review in this essay Rather, I want to focus on two broad elements of "Consilience," one stylistic, EDWARD 0. WILSON is a towering figure one substantive. in modern science. He is the Pellegrino First the stylistic point: In addition to his University Research Professor & Honorary gifts as a scientist, Wilson is an enormously Curator in Entomology of the Museum of talented writer. He writes with grace, preComparative Zoology at Harvard Univer- cision, and style. In "Consilience," which, sity His list ofhonors and awards is lengthy make no mistake, is a very challenging He has written two Pulitzer Prize-wmning book, he nevertheless renders complex scibooks, "On Human Nature" in 1978 and entific and metaphysical concepts clear to "The Ants" in 1990. He is the father of the the reader willing to stick with him. And controversial field of "sociobiology," the throughout, there are passages of real study of the biological basis of social behav- beauty with the power to inform and move ior, which, for humans, encompasses cul- at the same time. ture itself. Consilience is, according to Wilson, the TAKE THIS PASSAGE: "Today the greatunification of all knowledge. Wilson est divide within humanity is not between believes that "the ongoing fragmentation races, or religions, or even, as widely beof knowledge and resulting chaos in phi- lieved, between the literate and the illiterlosophy are not reflections of the real ate. It is the chasm that separates scientific world, but artifacts of scholarship." Con- from prescientific cultures. Without the silience among the natural sciences is instruments and accumulated knowledge of already well advanced. Wilson has led the the natural sciences—physics, chemistry, way toward extending consilience to the and biology—humans are trapped in a cogIn "The Two Cultures: A Second Look," Snow wrote: 'The scientific revolution is the only method by which most people can gain the primal things (years of life, freedom from hunger, survival for children)— the primal things which we take for granted and which have in reality come to us through having had our own scientific revolution not so long ago." He went on to write: "Curiously enough, there are many who would call themselves liberals and yet who are antipathetic to this change. Almost as though sleepwalking they drift into an attitude which, to the poor of the world, is a denial of all human hope. This attitude, which misinterprets both the present and the future, seems to be connected with a similar misinterpretation of the past." Snow presents demographic evidence about the lives of agricultural laborers in 17th- and 18th-century England and France to argue that the vast majority of such people lived short, brutal lives characterized by hunger, famine, disease, and suffering. He concludes, 'There is a mass of other evidence,frommany kinds of provenance, all pointing in the same direction. In the light ofit, no one should feel it seriously possible to talk about a preindustrial Eden, from which our ancestors were, by the wicked machinations of applied science, brutally expelled."
What many scientists bemoan may be something far more disturbing: a distrust and fear of the scientific method and a conscious rejection of scientific understanding. HTTP://PUBS.ACS.ORG/CEN
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SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY nitive prison. They are like intelligent fish ences on one side from the humanities and born in a deep shadowed pool. Wonder- humanistic social sciences on the other. ing and restless, longing to reach out, they Granted, for most scholars the two think about the world outside. They invent domains, commonly called the scientific ingenious speculations and myths about and literary cultures, still have a look ofperthe origin of the confining waters, of the manence about them. From Apollonian law sun and the sky and the stars above, and the to Dionysian spirit, prose to poetry left cormeaning of their own existence. But they tical hemisphere toright,the line between are wrong, always wrong, because the world the two domains can be ADAPTED FROM SCIENCE is too remote from ordinary experience to easily crossed back and forth, but no one be merely imagined.,, That passage stopped me in my tracks knows how to when Ifirstread it. I was awed by the gor- translate the geous metaphor, the deep, shadowed pool tongue and the resdess beautiful fish. Wilson is a renowned scientist, but he is and has always been an outdoorsman, afieldbiologist at heart. Like him, IVe spent many days on forest and mountain paths, and IVe spent hours next to pools like this. They are among the most beautiful spots in a forest. I could imagine being one of those fish. I did not interpret Wilson's metaphor negatively This cognitive prison, though AWESOME confining, was in its own way idyllic. Large subunit The substantive point I want to of ribosome. make is that "Consilience," as its subtitle suggests, is Wilson's effort to extend of one inthe program of sociobiology beyond the to that ofthe social sciences to encompass all of human other. Should we knowledge. By definition, accomplishing even try? I believe so, his goal would be to build a bridge between and for the best ofreasons: The goal is both the two cultures, and Wilson explicitly important and attainable. The time has acknowledges this in "Consilience." He come to reassess the boundary" writes: Wilson goes on to outline the misunder'The natural sciences have constructed standings and conflicts engendered by the a webwork of causal explanation that runs continued division between the two culall the way from quantum physics to the tures, specifically citing Snow And he writes: "There is only one way to unite the great brain sciences and evolutionary biology. There are gaps in this fabric of unknown branches of learning and end the culture wars. It is to view the boundary between the scientific and literary cultures not as a territorial line but as a broad and mostly unexplored terrain awaiting cooperative entry from both sides. The misunderstandings arise from ignorance of the terrain, not from a fundabreadth, and many of the strands com- mental difference in mentality The two posing it are as delicate as spider's silk. cultures share the following challenge. We Predictive syntheses, the ultimate goal of know that virtually all of human behavior science, are still in an early stage, and is transmitted by culture. We also know especially so in biology Yet I think it fair that biology has an important effect on the to say that enough is known to justify con- origin of culture and its transmission. The fidence in the principle of universal question remaining is how biology and culrational consilience across all the natural ture interact, and in particular how they interact across all societies to create the sciences. 'The explanatory networknow touches commonalities ofhuman nature. What, in the edge ofculture itself. It has reached the final analysis, joins the deep, mosdy genetic boundary that separates the natural sci- history of the species as a whole to the
The two cultures are separated by a fundamental difference of mentality that is rooted in how we appreciate beauty and experience awe.
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more recent cultural histories of its farflung societies? That, in my opinion, is the nub of the relationship between the two cultures. It can be stated as a problem to be solved, the central problem of the social sciences and the humanities, and simultaneously one of the great remaining problems of the natural sciences." To this empiricist, on first reading, this program for bridging the two cultures is straightforward. Ambitious, of course, for "Consilience" is nothing if not ambitious, but Wilson's proposal seems reasonable and, in time and with effort, could result in unifying human knowledge. But read more closely, and you see that Wilson has slipped a syllogism into his apparently well-reasoned argument, which turns on the sentence, "The misunderstandings arise from ignorance of the terrain, not a fundamental difference in mentality" From this assertion, which I think is incorrect, Wilson is able to propose an endeavor to be conducted entirely on the terms of the scientific culture. Wilson is not, in fact, proposing a program to bridge the two cultures, but, rather, one that demolishes the barriers that separate them and appropriates to the scientific culture all of human knowledge. The two cultures are not separated by misunderstandings arising from ignorance of the terrain between them. They are separated by a fundamental difference of mentality, a difference, I think, that is rooted in how we appreciate beauty and experience awe. WENDELL BERRY is an American archetype: outsider, social philosopher and critic, disgruntled observer of humans and their place in the world. These individuals—and for contemporaries of Berry, I think of Ralph Nader and Jeremy Rifkin—find much to despair about human moral fiber, consumerism, technology, science, the environment, and the state of modern literature. In fact, they don't have much use for modernity, convinced, as C. P. Snow definitely was not, that much was better in the world before the Industrial Revolution or even the Enlightenment. "Life Is a Miracle" is an explicit condemnation of modern scientific discovery It demonstrates clearly that Wilson's approach to achieving consilience won't bridge the two cultures, and it does so, interHTTP://PUBS.ACS.ORG/CEN
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