Skip the hard bits! (The Two Cultures)

I've been reading Mathew Cobb's biography of Francis Crick and a sentence in the Prologue caught my eye.

Cricks' scientific writings and ideas are described in a way that should be easy for the general reader to understand, but if you find yourself struggling, follow Crick's advice to readers of his own books and skip the hard bits.

I meet regularly with a group of retired professors to discuss a wide range of topics. Yesterday we talked about misinformation and how to deal with it but the discussion brought out the differences between dealing with misinformation in the humanities and in medicine or the natural sciences. This led to a diversion that focused on The Two Cultures.

I learned that most of my colleagues are unfamiliar with the concept of the two cultures, especially those who come from humanities departments.

The two cultures concept was an idea popularized by C.P. Snow in a lecture he gave in 1959 and later on in his book The Two Cultures. Snow is referring to the divide between the way people steeped in the humanities think about things and the way people who are scientifically literate think. (He focused most of his attention on lovers of literature as his stand-in for all of the humanities.)

The problem is best known from Snow's anecdote about being at a "gathering" of educated people. (Most often characterized as a cocktail party.) Here's how he described it in the original lecture (Snow, 1959) when he's referring to literary intellectuals.¹

As with the tone-deaf, they don't know what they miss. They give a pitying chuckle at the news of scientists who have never read a major work of English literature. They dismiss them as ignorant specialists. Yet their own ignorance and their own specialisation is just as startling. A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?

I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question—such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read?—not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.

What has this got to do with Mathew Cobb's words in the prologue?

Imagine you are reading a book on history, politics, or a biography of Charles Dickens and you were told that even though this was written for the general reader you might find some parts difficult to understand so you should just skip those hard parts!

That's the two cultures!

I'm also reminded of something Stephen Jay Gould wrote in the Preface to Wonderful Life. He didn't ask his readers to skip the hard parts; instead, he asked them to do the work required to understand them so they can appreciate the beauty of science.

The concepts of science, in all their richness and ambiguity, can be presented without any compromise, without any simplification counting as distortion, in language accessible to all intelligent people. Words, of course, must be varied, if only to eliminate a jargon and phraseology that would mystify anyone outside the priesthood, but conceptual depth should not vary at all between professional publication and general exposition. I hope that this book can be read with profit both in seminars for graduate students and—if the movie stinks and you forgot your sleeping pills—on the businessman's special to Tokyo.

Of course, these high-minded hopes and conceits from yours truly also demand some work in return. The beauty of the Burgess Shale story lies in its details, and the details are anatomical. Oh, you could skip the anatomy and still get the general message (Lord knows I repeat it enough times in my enthusiasm)—but please don't, for you will then never understand either the fierce beauty or the intense excitement of the Burgess drama.

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1. He notes that in popular culture the term "intellectual" is most often reserved to those who are extremely knowledgeable about art, literature, poetry, and music but rarely to those who are scientists.

Snow, C.P. (1959) The Two Cultures (The Rede Lecture). doi: [PDF]