book review re "the two cultures"

[pynchonoid]

http://www.christiancentury.org/bookreviews.html

review of:
What Makes Us Think? A Neuroscientist and a
Philosopher Argue about Ethics, Human Nature, and the
Brain.
By Jean-Pierre Changeux and Paul Ricouer. Princeton
University Press, 336 pp., $45.00; paperback, $17.95.

"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. [...] "

I haven't read the book being reviewed in this
article, have read Wilson's book and Berry's response
to it, and recommend them both. 

-Doug



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