Discussion Group Report

C. P. Snow first articulated a powerful metaphor of human culture four decades ago. This is discussed in an article called "Science and the Nature of Awe" by Rudy Baum in the June 4, 2001, issue of C & E N. Snow said mankind is divided into two cultures, according to their ways of knowing the world: the scientific and the nonscientific. The problem of the difference in their orientations will not be alleviated, he said, by education. It is far deeper and more intractable than that.

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 reductionism 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 life mechanistically amounts to sacrilege. The clash between these world views continues in two recent essays, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, by Edward O. Wilson and Life Is a Miracle: an Essay Against Modern Superstition, by Wendell Berry. The latter is largely a highly negative response to Consilience.

Baum says most scientists he talks to in recent years express surprise that the "two cultures" debate continues; they probably generally take for granted the central place their disciplines hold in modern intellectual endeavors. But he suspects Berry's arguments against reductionism 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.

Snow deplored this state of affairs, maintaining that both the scientific culture and what he called the "traditional" culture were impoverished by their ignorance of each other. His greatest concern was with the lack of scientific understanding by the traditional culture. The unscientific flavor is often, much more than we admit, on the point of turning antiscientific. Members of the traditional culture, he said, "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 of no 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."

Advancing scientific knowledge and technological development would, he said, inevitably benefit humanity. He was contemptuous of those members of the traditional culture who pined over the loss of a "preindustrial Eden" that never existed. "The scientific revolution," he proffered, "is the only method by which most people can gain the primal things (years of life, freedom from hunger, survival for children)...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."

He 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. Much other evidence from many kinds of provenance all point in the same direction. 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. "Consilience," according to Wilson, is the unification of all knowledge. Wilson says, "Today the greatest divide within humanity is not between races, or religions, or even, as widely believed, between the literate and the illiterate. It is the chasm that separates scientific from prescientific cultures. Without the instruments and accumulated knowledge of the natural sciences--physics, chemistry, and biology--humans are trapped in a cognitive prison. They are like intelligent fish born in a deep shadowed pool.

"Wondering and restless, longing to reach out, they think about the world outside. They invent ingenious speculations and myths about the origin of the confining waters, of the sun and the sky and the stars above, and the meaning of their own existence. But they are wrong, always wrong, because the world is too remote from the ordinary experience to be merely imagined...

"There is only one way to unite the great branches of learning and end the culture wars. It is to view the boundary between the scientific and literary (nonscientific) 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 fundamental difference in mentality... The question remaining is how biology and culture interact...and in particular how they interact across all societies to create the commonalities of human nature."

Baum feels this assertion by Wilson is incorrect because it proposes an endeavor to be conducted entirely on the terms of the scientific culture. It is a program not 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. He states, "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...that is rooted in how we appreciate beauty and experience awe."

"What can be explained?" asks Berry. "I don't think creatures can be explained. I don't think lives can be explained. What we know about creatures and lives must be pictured or told or sung or danced. And I don't think pictures or stories or dances can be explained. The arts are indispensable precisely because they are so nearly antithetical to explanation.

"Wilson, in his quest for consilience, wants to know why people tell stories and sing songs and dance dances," claims Baum. "Berry, in his contempt for reductionist analysis and the social and economic structures he believes it buttresses, tells Wilson to keep his mitts off that which is sacred."

Baum describes the team of chemists who obtained the first high-resolution crystal structure of the large subunit of the ribosome, the fantastic agglomeration of RNA and proteins that translates messenger RNA into proteins. This wondrous molecular machine assembles the molecules that make up all living organisms. The process is utterly fundamental to life. Analysis of the conserved nucleotides of the ribosome's active site shows that the structure evolved before life split into phylogenetic kingdoms. "This feat of human understanding isn't magic," says Baum. "It doesn't require a story. It will never inspire a song. It's just true and at the same time beautiful....Why isn't the beauty of the structure and function of the ribosome as worthy of awe as the beauty of an orchid or a child's face or a deep pool in a forest?"