What Makes Us Think? by Jean-Pierre Changeux and Paul Ricouer
It will be a long time until scientists and nonscientists will be able to share a worldview, Rudy Baum asserts in a recent article in Chemical and Engineering News. Baum was commenting on two books: Consilience, by Harvard's E. O. Wilson, the progenitor of sociobiology, and Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition, by social philosopher Wendell Berry. For Baum the chasm between Wilson's and Berry's viewpoints shows that the "two cultures" identified by British novelist and scientist C. P. Snow more than 40 years ago are as irreconcilable as ever.
Baum asks us to consider the possibility that "humanity is composed of two fundamentally different types of people. One experiences awe and asks the questions why and how. The other experiences awe and composes a story or a song or dances a dance around a fire." Wilson, in his quest for consilience, wants to know why people tell stories and sing songs and dance dances. 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.
My own sense is that those of us who live near this boundary should look hard for ways to bridge the gap. We need a bridge if we are to make our culture whole and to solve the burgeoning ethical issues involving both science and human welfare--genetically engineered foods, nuclear energy, human cloning et al.
