John, I read this—and the responses—with great interest, as I do everything that gets published on Edge. As others have suggested, the site itself is the finest example of the phenomenon you describe in the essay. Kudos on both.

I think Nicholas Humphrey may have a point when he says that "you've already won." One brief piece of anecdotal evidence: I attended a dinner party last weekend that was populated entirely by people who had spent their undergraduate—and in some cases graduate—years in the trenches of post-modernist theory. These were all people, like me, who had sworn allegiance to Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault, Jameson, et al. in their early twenties. (A number were Semiotics majors with me at Brown.) Any science courses we'd taken in those days we took in order to archly deconstruct the underlying "paradigm of research", or expose one of any number of "centrisms" lurking behind the scientific text and its illusory claims of empirical truth.

What struck me over dinner, though, was how readily the conversation drifted—without me pushing it along—to precisely the realm that you describe in the New Humanists, largely focused around brain issues. None of these people had returned to grad school in neuroscience, mind you, but they were all clearly versed in, and fascinated by, the latest news from the brain sciences: they talked casually about neurotransmitters and "other-mindedness"; they leaned readily on evolutionary psychological explanations for the behavior they were discussing; they talked about the role of the "god spot" in the evolution of religious belief. There wasn't a scarequote or a relativist aside in the entire conversation. I couldn't help think that if any one of them had made a comparable argument ten or fifteen years ago they would have been heckled out of the room.

I don't think my dinner survey was anomalous. It seems to me that the most interesting work right now is work that tries to bridge the two worlds, that looks for connections rather than divisions. I think that's what Wilson was proposing in Consilience: not the annexing of the humanities by the sciences, but a kind of conceptual bridge-building. In fact, I would say that the most consilient work today has come from folks trained as cultural critics—books like Michael Pollan's Botany of Desire with its mix of Nietzsche and Dawkins, or Manuel De Landa's 1000 Years of Non-Linear History with its unique combination of Deleuze and chaos theory.

I suspect there are other bridges to build in the coming years, but the traffic along those bridges will have to be two-way for the interaction to pay off. Obviously, the post-modernists have made a lot of noise trashing the empirical claims of sciences, but if you tune out a lot of that bombast, there's quite a bit in the structuralist and post-structuralist tradition that resonates with new developments in the sciences. To name just a few: the underlying premise of deconstruction—that our systems of thought are fundamentally shaped and limited by the structure of language—resonates with many chapters of a book like The Language Instinct. (I tried to persuade Pinker of this when I interviewed him years ago for Feed.) The postmodern assumption of a "constructed reality" dovetails nicely with the idea of consciousness as a kind of artificial theater, and not a direct apprehension of things in themselves. Semiotics and structuralism both began with Levi-Strauss' research into universal mythology, which obviously has deep connections to the project of evolutionary psychology.

So it seems to me that there are a number of productive avenues that scientists can explore by visiting the world of the humanities—and not just vice versa. I hope more of that exploration can happen on Edge—there's really no better forum for it.

STEVEN JOHNSON, co-founder of Feed, a pioneering Web publication, is the author of Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. [more....]