BEYOND THE TWILIGHT OF REASON
381
world had been made of antiparticles rather than particles, then their laws
would not be precisely the same as in the real world. In fact, much of
physics research these days is devoted to an understanding of symmetry–
breaking among these elementary particles.
When I started out, it never occurred to me that biology would make
such fantastic strides. To me, biology meant dissecting frogs or looking at
amoeba in a microscope. Today, biology is coming close to understand–
ing the mechanism of life itself. With the understanding of DNA and the
origin of memory and consciousness, we may understand at least me–
chanically how we and other living things work.
The alienation of the two cultures cannot be blamed entirely on the
non-scientists in our midst. Scientists tend to ignore what has no meaning
within science. The search for deeper meaning and for something beyond
is scoffed at by people whose philosophy is totally positivist. But it is as
important that scientists appreciate the search for deeper significance that
motivates most people, as it is for humanists to appreciate the deep
meaning of scientific exploration. I'm not saying that I want to believe in
something other than positivism, but that one ought to have a conception
of what lies beyond it. We must learn to communicate with each other
and convey the essence of our respective fields to one another, and in this
way this dichotomy, this rift between the two cultures may, we hope,
disappear.
Karen Burke:
Thank you.
E. O. Wilson:
I think the title for this conference, "Beyond the Twilight
of Reason," may have been chosen to address the growing disintegration
into overspecialization and the rise of what might be called a revival of
romanticism and a turning away from the ethos of scientific exploration.
We have chosen to explore the rather dismaying postmodernist posture,
which holds in its more extreme forms that objective truth is unobtain–
able, that science is just another form of discourse and that truth is what
the power structure ordains it to be. Not being a sociologist of science, I
can't evaluate the impact of the postmodernist trend, but I think that it
probably is an element in the dissolution of the principle of a common
ground of reasoning and intellectual advance as illustrated by, for instance,
the increasing disintegration of college and university curricula. For ex–
ample, there's been a drastic reduction in the number of universities and
colleges in the last thirty years requiring anything like a core curriculum;
science has been marginalized.
