6 - Current Tensions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 August 2009
Summary
C. P. Snow would not have to alter the essential claims in his 1959 essay and would not have been surprised by the even broader gulf that exists between natural scientists and humanists. However, he might not have anticipated the strident rejection of evolutionary theory by advocates of creation ideology and a public less willing to regard the rationally based conclusions of natural scientists as the soundest bases for all decisions. The status hierarchy among the intellectual disciplines remains as it was fifty years ago generating a force field resembling our solar system in which the gravitational pull on each planet is proportional to its distance from the sun. In this analogy, physics is the sun and mathematics is its core. That is why a sculpture of Einstein, not Darwin, graces the grounds of the National Academy of Sciences building in Washington, DC. Chemistry and biology are the near planets and, in increasingly distant orbits, lie economics, linguistics, psychology, anthropology, sociology, and political science. Even though history and philosophy lie in appreciably more distant orbits, they are not completely free of this force field. Historians are celebrated if they weave their narratives around quantified events, such as the economic output of antebellum plantations, or posit a biological contribution to the variation in national economies. One scholar has suggested, despite slim evidence, that genetic factors were partially responsible for the emergence of the Industrial Revolution in England rather than Germany, China, or Japan.
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- The Three CulturesNatural Sciences, Social Sciences, and the Humanities in the 21st Century, pp. 245 - 276Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009