From: Robert Sapolsky
Date: 4.23.02

A few thoughts on John Brockman's provocative piece:

How asymmetric is the divide between Snow's two cultures?

Despite the broad correctness of Snow's ideas about the two cultures, there has always been a certain amount of exchange across the divide. On the most superficial level, this has been fairly innocuous and merely decorative—sometimes a little pretentious, sometimes a little silly, but no big deal. For the scientist carpetbagging across the divide in this way, there is belief, perhaps, that one can't possibly be asking good questions in the lab if you're not spending your evenings thinking about late Beethoven string quartets. Or, perhaps, it is the obligatory Proust or Joyce quote stuck in the summary slide at a lecture, or giddy excursions into the mathematical underpinnings of Escher or Bach. And on the humanist side, this might take the often absurd appropriation of some scientific term as a metaphor to power one through that tenure decision—thus, quantum history, the Uncertainty Principle of poetry, molecular Shakespeare, etc.

On a more meaningful level, there is the recognition that information from the other side can not only inform what you are doing, but is essential. For example, from the science end of that relationship, it would be a neurobiologist, thinking about the effects of hormones on behavior, who feels obliged to also deal with the fact that those hormones and neurons occur in a social context, and that the social sciences have something useful to say about this. And conversely, there are, say, the criminologist who studies why such a disproportionate percentage of crime is carried out by young males who recognizes that biology might have something to do with it.

And then there is the level of the exchanges across the divide that are most akin to exchanges of gunfire. Perhaps the most extreme examples from the science end are ones that are imperialist, hegemonious—someday, your entire discipline will be a branch of our field. It was E.O. Wilson's claims about the social sciences ultimately being enwrapped in sociobiology that ruffled so many feathers back when.

But where the asymmetry comes in is in return fire coming from the humanities and social sciences. To my knowledge, there's not a lot of cases out there where someone in the humanities is attempting to subsume evolutionary biology into their discipline. The deconstructionist thrust, instead, is one of simply rejecting the validity of science, and its capacity to generate objective truths (amid the valid recognition that the producers of science are distinctly subjective humans). This is really quite different and, I suspect, unprecedented. This is not the threat of takeover from across the divide. This is instead the threat of leaping across the divide to push you into the sea.

Is this a dramatically unique time to think about these issues?

These are extremely exciting times, in terms of breakthroughs in science, their potential impact in areas outside of science, and the efforts of some people to think across the divide and create a third culture. Nonetheless, are we on the cusp of something extra special? Maybe not. Just to be a bit cynical, it has always struck me that the young at their proverbial barricades have an inflated sense of how all of history has converged to make this very moment one ripe with Now-ness and revolutionary potential. And that this inflation has something or other to do with losing their virginity, or perhaps with not losing it. And, at the other end, the tendency of so many older thinkers to inflate the extent to which all the social constructs they hold near and dear are spiralling at this particular time into a particularly unique entropy has a lot to do with the length of time it's been since that loss of virginity. And probably some emerging bowel problems thrown in as well. But that's being cynical.

Are scientists inherently optimistic?

This was one of the most interesting features of the essay. Scientists certainly are, in the sense that no matter how much you find out, there is always something which is now the most important new mystery to uncover. The generativity and forward looking nature of the enterprise is inherently optimistic. So the process is quite optimistic. However, the content can be anything but—if you spend your time as a scientist thinking about disease, extinction, ozone depletion, etc., optimism is a rare commodity. That gas-law type expansion of ignorance to fill up the available space can indeed constantly reinvent the sense of wonder and awe. But it can also constantly reinvent the sense of despair—for example, no matter how many diseases we cure, there will always be a leading cause of death, and an equivalent sense of urgency for science to vanquish it.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY is a biologist at Stanford and author of A Primate's Memoir. [more....]