Two, Three or Multiple Cultures?

The Financial Times of 9 May 2009 pays hommage to CP Snow’s Rede Lecture, 50 years ago this May: "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution", and asks whether anything has changed.

In his lecture Snow warned of the growing rift between science on the one hand and the humanities on the other. In particular he deplored the scientific illiteracy of humanities scholars, who in Snow’s view were not only ignorant of science but also indifferent to their ignorance.

A quick glance at the faculty at the European Graduate School and the speakers at TED and the annual Nexus conference might show that instead of two there are now three cultures. At the European Graduate School, whose faculty it claims are the "visionaries and philosophers of the media world", one finds the usual suspects from the world of contemporary art, philosophy and critical theory. Few people will have heard of the Nexus Institute and its annual conference about such themes as the idea of Europe where old school intellectuals, the likes of Jürgen Habermas, Michael Ignatieff, are invited to read aloud a text they wrote in advance. The speakers at TED come from the world of science, technology and entertainment. Obviously the differences between these three institutions are a result of their respective objectives. Nonetheless it is interesting to note that there is very little overlap in the speakers they invite. You won’t find any philosophers or contemporary artists at TED and you won’t find any scientists among the speakers at EGS or Nexus.

CP Snow took the physical sciences as representative of science. But if one were to quiz a random sample of cognitive neuroscientists, molecular biologists or geologists, who I’m pretty sure would consider themselves to be on the side of science, about their knowledge of physics, I wonder whether the results would be significantly different from Snow’s humanities scholars.

What’s more, in my experience physicists, cognitive neuroscientists and psychologists are just as ignorant of economics, sociology and geology as earth scientists and cell biologists are of anthropology and linguistics. The world of science has shattered into a great many sub and sub-sub-disciplines with little interdisciplinary cross-talk.

Oddly, the only intellectual omnivores who read everything from contemporary philosophy to popular science, that I know are architects, or at least, those at the forefront of contemporary architecture, who study, studied or teach at the AA School of Architecture, the Bartlett, the Berlage Institute, Columbia University or the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA. (And of course my own students).

A few months ago researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory visualized the relationship between different scientific disciplines based on the clickstreams from online scientific publishers. The resulting map shows some clearly defined clusters. The methodology will probably have to be refined. For example I’m a bit puzzled by the two nodes for brain research and brain studies. But it is a fascinating study nonetheless.

Now a scientific discipline does not necessarily define a culture, nor does a cluster of disciplines. But at least these data reveal what would otherwise be mere speculation based on anecdotal evidence. Of course these data are limited to scientific journals and say nothing about popular science books. However my guess is that few scientists regularly browse any of the Trends, Current (Opinion), Annual Reviews etc. journals in disciplines outside their own. Maybe I should send out a questionnaire and publish the results...