Volume 1, Number 8 · December 12, 1963
The Scientific Imagination
By Gertrude Himmelfarb
Evolution
by Ruth Moore and the Editors of Life
Time Inc., 192 pp., $3.95
The Evolution of Man
by G.H.R. von Koenigswald
Ann Arbor Science, 148 pp., Paperbacks, $1.95 (paper)
The Intelligence of Louis Agassiz: A Specimen Book of Scientific Writings
by Guy Davenport
Beacon Press, 237 pp., $5.00
Darwiniana
by Asa Gray ed. A. Hunter Dupree
Harvard, 327 pp., $5.00
Darwin for Today
ed. by Stanley Edgar Hyman
Viking Press, 435 pp., $7.50
The Tangled Bank: Darwin, Marx, Frazier, Freud as Imaginative Writers
by Stanley Edgar Hyman
Atheneum, 492 pp., $10.00
A recent issue of the Times Literary Supplement has excited considerable attention because of a long article by C.P. Snow, a rebuttal to the critics of Two Cultures. The article is dignified, reasonable, and entirely predictable, essentially a pièce justificative, adding nothing new to the controversy or to the original essay apart from the substitution of DNA for the Second Law of Thermodynamics as a test of scientific literacy. The rest of the issue, however, is more noteworthy. Entitled 'The Art of Science,' it may be taken as a subtle rebuke to Sir Charles and a corrective to the popular image of the Two Cultures—a scientific culture that is essentially rational, logical, and evidential, and a literary culture that is essentially intuitive, emotive, and imaginative. What the TLS is now suggesting is that the scientific enterprise itself is, at its best, a kind of art, and that the two cultures have more in common than is generally thought.
Review, 4190 words
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